I like walking the house at night,
my husband asleep
beside my absent shape.
I would use the word secret,
but it makes him restless,
as though he were a child and I
used the word tomorrow;
as though he were dying
and I used the word
tomorrow. I walk the house
I built before we married,
water plants I’ve tended longer
than our bed. The weeping fig
and I sift confidence.
I vow to write for morning,
for tomorrow, for the man
who will wake and rise,
walking the house alone
with coffee and windows
full of light, surveying trees
and telling birds his own eternal
mysteries, of which I am not
jealous.
for Claudia at 5 hours old There were two kinds of mornings the day you were born. We had the other. We whispered about you in bedrooms and then we talked in kitchens. We did laundry, folded sheets thinking about your hands, how they would be so small. We paired sock with sock and then…
Look in the mirror. Practice saying you’re beautiful. You must say this out loud – you must say this one thousand times until your face believes you. You must say this and see the glorious and wounded contours of the human frame, your broken nose and hooded eyes, creased skin, your crooked teeth, you must…
Soap bubbles the size of silent whales float and founder from the wand of the prophet. Over and under, rippling in the swells of air, they roll and surge, at play until the pop that pulls them like a sentence back inside the lead. The prophet writes again: in each smooth behemoth a plea for…
Nine chickadees hunch in the packed snow of a tire track picking spilled seed. They look so suddenly earthbound, as if they are what scatters from the sack, blind in January sun, sharp scribbled feet stuck in the drift, so many careless darts – I laugh and laugh. Love comes to this: forgetting our wings,…
Three, today, is the happy morning number of soggy robins in the closest tree, new blooms on damp petunias, cups of tea I’ll drink as I thumb Genesis, again, to keep on learning how creation’s never through. On the third day God made ocean and dry land, vegetation, plants and trees – mad synthesis of…
Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs, slipping her hands beneath the white feathers, biddies murmuring in prayer. The warm globes felt like hers, the same way the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck did not surprise her, the same way the knife had missed her toe – of course it had – when…
