When the dust has cleared from the sky,
I can almost decipher the outlines
of my childhood in the blue—the way
I believed that clouds and leaf piles
would be soft, could hold me.
I do not know by what pulse
a line becomes a circle, which is
to say, I do not know how long the heart
must beat before it becomes whole.
I can only watch, as Love wakes late,
with sleep upon his freckled face,
and wonders how to make a constellation
of his dreams. After all, no one needs
to say anymore that Love abides from sorrow—
that Love is the wake. That Love is cherry wine
and paperbacks and the sound of a tree falling–
as though Love is just the salons in Midnight in Paris,
as though Love is just another name for Nostalgia.
There are blocks of streets and crosswalks
between this and wherever it is I might have been.
I see the possibilities dance in ballrooms
with champagne glasses, and royal laughter,
and toasts which say both more and less than what they mean.
I want to know how to keep time like this,
how to perform the careful dance of suspense
and impatience, how to greet Sorrow when he shows up,
empty-handed, at the door.
Autumn is coming and I cannot seem to shake
a certain shiver. All the damp, apologetic evenings,
all the solitudes yet to be born out. The geese
have scattered across the map like snow
and all that remains is sound on sound.
If it is darkest before dawn, so too is it brightest
before dusk.
There is so much carnage in the cacophony
of each day. Not all deaths can be memorialized,
or thought of. As a child I watched
the ladybugs, dead, or dying, in the windowsill.
How we all continued, still,
to make our coffee, and go about our work,
how we all forgot to learn what to say.