Sometimes, for no reason, I remember
a car ride with my mother, driving
the old frontage road from school to home,
and I don’t remember what we spoke of,
don’t remember which car we were in,
don’t remember how old I was,
I remember only the way a bow of light
seemed to connect the sun
to the hood of our car, as if we were being
led forward by light itself, and
I, who knew so little of life, felt so deeply
and sweetly tethered to beauty.
Decades later, I still recall that awe,
but now I focus more on the woman
who sat in the driver’s seat, consider
how luminous she is, consider
the radiant bow that links her life to mine,
how even hundreds of miles away
she leads me with her light.
*
Posts Tagged ‘time’
Years Later, the Awe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, light, memory, mother, time on September 27, 2023| 4 Comments »
Fullness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, thisness, time on September 22, 2023| 12 Comments »
for Brad and James
Around the old barnwood table,
we drink coffee and tea and talk
about fathers and hawk migrations,
holding hands and peacock feathers,
and if there is somewhere a clock
that ticks, I don’t hear it—as if
everything’s stopped—
the Monarchs ever winging
above the butterfly bush and
the mounds of rudbeckia
ever opening into exuberant gold
and the hydrangea forever blushing
into pale pink tips and the deep
green woods ever balanced
at the edge of fall.
I know they don’t last,
these honey-slow hours,
but somehow they do,
as if already it’s years from now
and we are still sitting
around the old barnwood table,
nowhere else to be,
our laughter still rising,
the flowers still blooming,
our mugs still warm in our hands.
One Fast Track
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, hiking, mountain, time on August 5, 2023| 6 Comments »
glissading down scree fields
each step forward is five steps—
wishing this for your heart
What Has Changed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, healing, time on June 28, 2023| 8 Comments »
There was a time I knew in days
how long it had been since you died.
There was a time when every Saturday
signified another week, when the fourteenth
marked another month. I don’t know when
I stopped counting, when the days and weeks
and months no longer felt like mules
tethered to the post of that day,
each of them carrying the terrible weight
of your loss. Now the moments are more like birds.
I fly on them. The memory of you flies with me.
One at the Party with Longtime Friends
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, time on June 11, 2023| 7 Comments »
from cherry trees
planted decades ago
the sweetest fruit
One Beginning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beginning, growing, power, time on May 29, 2023| 7 Comments »
so spindly
these seedlings
that will soon feed hundreds
Timeless
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged opposition, paradox, time on April 29, 2023| 15 Comments »
after Ruth Stone, “Train Ride”
There are not enough hours to walk by the river,
not enough hours to work and make soup
and dream and sit and do nothing at all.
Is it true there is not enough time?
There is time for every word
you have written, every petunia you’ve planted,
for every path you have walked,
for every lover you’ve kissed
and kissed and kissed there is enough time.
No. Not enough. Not enough time for reading
the tall stack of books on the desk.
Not enough time for making the pie crust
from scratch. Not enough time for wandering
in the forest with the soft green hanging moss
until you, too, remember you are a tree.
And yet you have read tall stacks of books.
Many, many tall stacks.
You have made cherry pies and rhubarb pies
and pumpkin pies from scratch.
You have wandered for hours through dappled glades
and draped your hair with moss.
There is enough time for everything you have ever done
and for every moment spent doing nothing at all.
How is it you feel such lack?
Here is the moment. Open it.
One Late-Night Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, friendship, time on April 26, 2023| 2 Comments »
as if we had eternity
we spend it together
this hour
Unscheduled
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bunny, busy-ness, time, wonder on March 29, 2023| 3 Comments »
No matter the day is already planned
to the minute. No matter how pressing
the deadline, the must do, the should.
It takes only a second to look out the window
and see the brown bunny in the brown grass.
It takes only a second to fall in love
with the twitchy nose, the nervous eyes,
the lumpy shape of bunny.
How quickly the known world cants toward awe
when wonder slips in—wonder forged
not from epiphany or greatness
but from the barest instant of meeting what is real.
What the Heart Would Keep of Today
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, grief, meter, mothers, sorrow, time on March 25, 2023| 1 Comment »
for Naomi
Into this time capsule
of our conversation
I add a shovel and two trees,
a candle (of course),
a black and white button,
a closing door,
an inner knocking,
a cat box, tears,
wise words from a monk,
what isn’t here,
a dissolving dream,
long ribbon of laughter,
a letter that survived
four years of weather,
books we’ll never read,
the great hole inside,
sorrow that will be with us
until we die, and …
and whoever finds this capsule
couldn’t possibly guess
how this strange collection
nourished two friends.
It just looks like a shovel
and some other strange things—
but for an hour,
oh friend, we had wings.