I’m thinking of silence, how when it opens,
it changes the room with its fragrance.
How frost can make a garden
of a window overnight.
Old friendship—sometimes
even when we forget to water it,
persists like mint.
Fear, of course, is knapweed-ish,
tap-rooted, invasive. Almost impossible
to eradicate its petals of panic,
petals of dread.
Sometimes a name can bloom
on the tongue when the syllables
stem from someone we love.
And when we’re very still, the moment itself
seems to bloom, like a peony
revealing layer after tender layer,
charging the air with sweetness.
Now flower. Here flower.
The moon, that giant cream perennial,
reminds us nightly how we, too,
are called to grow our light
toward the dark.
And uncertainty, it comes to us
in giant bouquets, each bloom a question
that doesn’t want to be answered,
it wants only for us to hold it in our arms
like the gift it is.
