I no longer pick up the phone to call you.
No longer expect you to walk in the room.
Eventually, the brain learns to expect
the absence, the ears learn to expect
the silence, the body grows accustomed
to the loss of your body and recalibrates
itself in space. But the heart, broken open,
is as full as it ever was.
Did I think it would be parched?
Now I know love as a wellspring,
a continual supply.
Never once has the heart felt empty.
There, every time I look, I find you.
Posts Tagged ‘love’
Almost Two Years After Your Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, grief, love, presence on July 15, 2023| 12 Comments »
Thirty Years Later, I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, love, step mother on July 8, 2023| 4 Comments »
for Shawnee, my step-daughter, on her 40th birthday
How generously she let me into her life.
How we sang songs about Cowboy Joe in the car
and read books out loud on the couch.
I remember falling on the floor laughing
about a silly joke that wasn’t really funny,
except it hit us just right in the right moment.
To this day we laugh about Chesterfield.
I remember river trips and watching her
snowboard in a straight line down
the black diamond run, her sure path
the only track through the powder.
There are gifts we never could expect—
like the way a girl can make a home in our hearts
and never leave, her life like a flower
that someone else planted, and yet
I have been lucky enough to be part
of the garden soil that helps her grow.
And my god, she is beautiful as she grows,
beautiful as with tender hands,
she plants new flowers of her own.
On My Father’s Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, death, father, love on July 6, 2023| 6 Comments »
He was a big man,
and I loved the way
he would carry me—
swoop me up
in his strong arms
and float me around
the room.
Now that he is gone,
I carry the weight
of his love—
the enormity—
only to realize
he is still
carrying me.
Walking Again in Rome, Georgia, at Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged georgia, loss, love, not knowing, south, walking on June 20, 2023| 7 Comments »
When the night is warm
and the magnolia blossoms
twine sweetness into the humid dark
and the summer-loud frogs
fill the night with strange song,
I notice you are not here.
I notice the silence
that walks beside me.
There is comfort in it,
the space where your body
might have been.
Perhaps the connection
is something I’ve fashioned
out of longing for connection.
Does that make it any less real?
I speak to you, ask you questions.
I don’t expect answers.
I get none.
All around me, the fireflies
charge the world
with their beautiful,
fleeting light.
Surprise Treasure
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged family, love, mother, perspective, trash, treasure on June 7, 2023| 8 Comments »
There was that year
when my mother
turned used ribbons,
thin paper plates
and gold-painted plastic grapes
into a celebration.
Our small family sat
around an old oak table
and made hats
from the strange collection.
How festive it was,
so much more than enough.
Fifty years later
I remember the joy
when we tied those plates
onto our heads.
They were scraps, trash—
the miraculous kind
that needs only love
to make it shine—
scraps like this day, like words,
like ribbons of memory.
One Missing You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, love, missing on June 6, 2023| 2 Comments »
in the chamber of the heart
lighting a golden candle
offering you a chair
Love Lessons
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged high school, iris, love, wildflower on May 22, 2023| 10 Comments »
There were thousands of wild iris
in the wide, damp meadow.
Forty years later I remember it, still,
the pale purple petals fluttering
in the morning breeze.
The spring air was cold;
my feet squished in the mud,
and I picked armfuls of iris,
each bloom the loveliest.
I picked and picked
as if dozens of iris could convey
how extravagantly I loved a boy.
Loved him beyond measure.
Loved him meadowfuls.
Whole mountainfuls.
It’s so human to long to express
the inexpressible.
Forty years later, I remember
the immensity of that love—
how it changed me, made space in me
for who I am today.
Love is, perhaps, rhizomic,
like iris, spreading where no one can see.
If you could look inside me now,
you’d find fields of iris, infinite acres.
I still long to pick dozens for my loves,
even hundreds, though now I also trust
how sometimes a single stem
says everything.
The Miracle of Becoming
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged becoming, love, moment, morel, mushroom on May 18, 2023| 15 Comments »
Add this to my list of small ecstasies.
—James Crews
It’s a small ecstasy when,
strolling through the field,
I see the mottled tip
of the blonde morel
pushing up through bent grass.
And another. And another.
They were not here yesterday,
but now I kneel on the earth
with my blade sharp and true
and slice through the strange
and rubbery stems
and hold the handful of treasure
to my nose and breathe in
the earthy, woodsy scent.
So curious to think how they go
from not being here to being here.
Like when I realize I love someone,
but can’t say precisely when love began.
A life is made of such moments—
this wonder that rises
at the miracle of becoming,
this sweet gift of passing through.
When Everything Is Field
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, Earth Day, field, love, nature on April 24, 2023| 13 Comments »
Again I fall in love with the field
as if for the first time—the first time
I ever saw a pair of geese land there
then waddle through tall dry grass;
the first time I ever watched it transform
from drab ocher to brilliant green;
the first time I ever felt its spaciousness—
how it becomes a basin for light.
Every day I fall in love again with the field,
many times a day. Every day, I marvel
there are new ways to fall in love.
Once, I didn’t know how intimate it was,
this relationship to the land.
Now I know it as the truest thing.
Inevitable, this love affair with color,
texture, change, scent, the sound
of grass moving against grass.
Inevitable, the love that rises
out of dew, out of frost, out of vastness,
out of wholeness, out of loss,
and reteaches me what it is to love, to be loved.
Beyond Beautiful
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged augusta kantra, love, woman on March 30, 2023| 6 Comments »
for Augusta
She is the hot rod engine,
the fuel, the transmission.
She is the race itself.
She is the door,
the picker of locks,
the opening swing, the courage
to step through the frame.
She’s the path. The steepest road.
The gentle country lane.
The quiet when the sun goes down.
The warmth when it rises gain.
She is the still of shavasana,
the leap in the merry heart.
She is the immeasurable dark,
the faithful moon,
a kite, a riotous wind.
She’s candle and constellation,
bonfire, firefly, comet that crashes the sky.
She is sky. She is faint scent of rain.
The sweet of satsuma,
the double bloom of camellia,
the nothing you can’t quite touch.
She is the key that opens your thoughts,
the song that grows your soul.
She’s the beacon at the bay,
the pelican deep dive,
the ever present tide of the seas.
She’s the luck that makes itself,
the wildflower that blooms
wherever its seeded,
the prayer that slips itself into your heart
in exactly the moment you need it.