That love is complicated
is no surprise—
consider the human heart
pumps blood to almost
seventy-five trillion cells,
and if we were to stretch
out our blood vessel system,
it would extend over
sixty thousand miles.
Of course, things
get tangled and messy.
And perhaps, love is also
not so complicated.
Perhaps it’s as easy
as waking up in the night
and feeling the darkness hold us.
As effortless as sipping
sweet licorice tea
and letting it warm the body.
As inclusive as the lily’s white perfume
that touches the whole room.
Yes, perhaps loving is as instinctive
as the human heart that beats
over a hundred thousand times a day—
not because we ask it to,
not because we try,
but because that’s what
it was made to do.
Posts Tagged ‘love’
Made to Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, love, paradox on April 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Belonging
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, love on March 24, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Forgive me, please, when I,
thrilling in how much I love you,
believe you belong to me—
like a book or shirt or a ring.
Writing that short list,
it now seems strange
I believe I own anything.
I know well the unstitching of loss.
Let me learn to love you loosely
the way I love morning,
the way I love song,
the way I love hawks on the wing.
Let me love you the way
I love poems, startled
and grateful each time I find
it is I who belongs to them.
How to Say Thank You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bouquet, flowers, gratefulness, gratitude, love, thank you on March 17, 2021| 2 Comments »
I want to bring to the doorstep of your heart
a giant bouquet of soft-petalled words,
a lavish bouquet of gratitudes
grown from seed in which each bloom
remembers each time
I watered it, encouraged it,
pulled the weeds from around its stem.
I want to have amended the soil
in which these appreciations grew
with the mycelium of devotion,
the dark compost of love.
It matters, the ways we say thank you.
Those two words disappear from the air
in less than a second,
so is it any wonder, when you
with your love have changed me forever,
that I want to bring you
a whole garden of gratefulnesses
no, a whole field of eternal thank yous
in which every flower is astonishingly open
and the perfume fills
every room in your heart.
Hearing Aid
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, communion, ear, hearing, heart, love on March 15, 2021| 4 Comments »
I slipped my ear
into your pocket
close to your heart.
It wanted to be near
the steady thump
of those chambers,
a rhythm more reassuring
than any lullaby.
My ear likes it there
against your chest,
likes the warm hum
of your voice floating
over it, your words
indistinct through the cloth.
Forgive this eavesdropping
on the pulse of you,
but it is the only news
that interests my ear today
while the rest of me
works far away.
Yes, the only thing
my ear wants to hear
is the red song of you
like a faithful drum beating
here, here, here.
The Song Speaks
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, longing, loss, love, song on March 4, 2021| 4 Comments »
Lyrics from “Golden Slumbers” by Paul McCartney and John Lennon
I love when my lyric
slips into your thoughts,
when I float from your lips
for hours. Once there was a way
to get back homeward.
Sometimes I even believe
my own lines.
Once there was a way
to get back home.
Sometimes when you sing me,
I have faith in home.
Please pretty darling do not cry.
And yet you do cry
and make me want to forget
I am a song about longing,
a song of loss.
I want to be the song of finding,
song of arriving together,
song of coming home.
I want to be the song
that lies down to sleep
beside your heart each night.
I will sing a lullaby.
I want to be the song
that that makes you breakfast.
The song that dances with you
in the living room.
The song that always stays.
One Memoir
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, love, thoughts, time, truth on February 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »
these beautiful thoughts
old pages turned yellow
every word still true
Derailleur of the Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arguing, bicycle, communication, love on February 16, 2021| 2 Comments »
Because our conversation
feels like riding a bike uphill,
I think of gears. I think
of how easy it is to shift
lower, how a simple flick
of the thumb makes the impossible
possible. Where are the gears
for love? There must be better
ways to use our teeth
than biting words. There must
be a series of notched wheels
in the heart that allow us
to move forward with less force,
some mechanism to make
the chain hop from one sprocket
to another, changing the way
we engage. I want to find that gadget,
those gears, the ones that help us
hear each other, the ones
that help us say what must be said,
the simple tools that allow us
to move forward at all.
And Mean It, Too
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, love, neutrino, science on February 15, 2021| 5 Comments »
In every second, one hundred trillion neutrinos
pass through the body: One hundred trillion
subatomic particles move through us
as if we were sieves, no, as if we were nets
with holes so big that whole islands
travel through without us noticing.
It thrills me to think of the self so porous,
so leaky. Imagine if thoughts, too,
could clear us with so little friction,
so little effect. How many hopes and hurts
just today have I let stick? Imagine
them breezing through the aorta, imagine
them gliding through the brain, slipping through
the core of us, finding no purchase, no anchor.
Imagine the miracle that in any given moment
we don’t fall through our chair, our bed, the floor.
Imagine, permeable as we are, we still coalesce
enough to look at another, to see each other as whole.
We still manage to pick up the mesh of a phone,
succeed in moving our holey lips,
and hundreds of trillions of neutrinos later,
with total certainty, manage to promise a solid I love you.
Imagine, with these pervious hands
we might carry each other, might cradle
each other, might welcome each other home.
Dessert
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chocolate, cooking, daughter, dessert, love, parenting on February 14, 2021| 1 Comment »
Tonight it is cocoa powder, flour, sugar and vanilla that bring me and my daughter together. The kitchen our mixing bowl, time our whisk. The more we’re together the more we laugh. How easily distinct ingredients become a whole. Easy as following a recipe for chocolate cake, we slip into the familiar banter, the joyful two-step, the sweetness we’ve been distilling since she could first hold her own spoon. In the air, hum of the oven preheating, sound of us teasing, clang of the whisk against the glass bowl. The cake, it’s basically a delicious artifact, a testament to this scent of intimacy, like chocolate cake, only much, much richer. |
What We’re Doing Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, meaning of life, purpose on February 14, 2021| 2 Comments »
This is why we are here—
not merely to survive
but to fall in love
with the white-breasted hawk
and the rainbow fish,
with the lonely sidewalk
and the shadows of ourselves,
fall in love with the hands
of the woman wearing yellow
and the girl who loves chocolate
and the boy who loves cars
and the man who makes us want to be
a better version of ourself.
We are here to fall into unmanageable love—
to love beyond reason, beyond
fact, beyond certainty. We are here
to lose all our ideas about love
and know it as the next choice
we make, the next word
we say, the next invitation
we offer ourselves.
We are here to love
the world and each other
the way whales love water,
the way blue loves a peacock,
the way night blooming jasmine
loves night.