for Vivian on her 17th birthday
I don’t understand how it is that loving you
asks both everything and nothing from me.
Every day since your birth I have nourished
this love with time, with touch, with words,
and loved you the way I was loved—knowing
there is nothing you could do or be that
could make me stop loving you. I thought
I was making a refuge for you, but
every day since your birth, the love
you’ve given back to me has become
my sanctuary, a place I show up exactly as I am,
with bad breath, with tired arms, with a faulty
memory and dirt in my fingernails and trust
you will love me, too. Every day we build together
the nest of love. Once we wove in fairy houses
and reading books and making up secret handshakes.
Now we weave in cinema and long road trips and
floating on the pond. And trust is the glue
that holds the nest together, even as
it changes every day. It surprises me
the nest of love is less a place and more
a spaciousness inside—not somewhere we go,
more something we are, so even when
we’re not together, the refuge is always within us,
a love that asks nothing and everything,
a home that grows as we both continue to grow.