i wrote a book
and threw it away
planted seed
and failed to weed
learned to play
and broke my fiddle
climbed a mountain
and laughed an echo
mixed the dough
and measured hunger
fought the wind
and ran for miles
counted stitches
and broke the needle
breathed in sky
and failed to fly
opened arms
and held you high
…
i think that’s what she said while trying to smile
and i never was one to argue with deliverance
even after tilt-shift became a normal point of view
i wanted to hold you
at least your hand
but paper thin skin
kept rising between us
none of us means to die
even when we want to
trying to smile at her own lost joke
fingers scrabbling at the corners
of a crooked mouth gone dry
like the wind i drank
to forget your sky
.
.
.
slide open twist
red slice inhale and
snow like stars on cars
the way you carried me
half moon trundled and
sleep-breath cloud
lifting both of us
from a day like any other
marked by tattoo
kiss on fevered forehead
sweet dreams tiptoe
door gently closing
.
.
.
Some days you have a story that isn’t yours to tell. The words add up and bobble around inside your head, bouncing off the boundaries you’ve put in place to keep them corralled. Silence fills the room like a big grey blanket. Everything is muffled, charged with static, covered over with the possibility of fog.
Today in one of those days, and all I can do is think about the ways we save each other in this life. The ways we save ourselves. The tiny little things that heal hearts, or sew them back together with crooked sampler stitches. Smiles and soup and hugs and listening. Being there.
Love is always messy and unchartered. And we are always finding our way together, bumping blindly along the path that stretches before us.
And the questions rise. How do you fit a whole life into a box?
The memories we have become a knot too complicated to untangle. We can only pull out a strand here and there and watch as it dangles. That day, that night, that violet neatly placed between the pages of a bible. Remember when? Heartache and happiness all mixed together in a jumble of once was. Love holding it all together like glue.
Suffice it to say that all we have is our story. Some of them are big and broken, some are smaller and demure. I am learning to cradle each one in the palm of my hand. Delicate petals dried and tucked away between pages that smell of time’s passing. Bits of hope gone dry and brittle, but saved, just the same.
Cherished.
And there it is, the dust of grace, gathered in the seam.
Some days you purse your lips and blow that dust back out into the world. Other days, you close the book back up again, ever-so-gently.
For safekeeping.
.
.
.
It was always there in the corner of her mind, and every room she’d ever been in: the power of words.
Some days she chose to ignore the sounds that rattled and clanged like locks and chains, and other days, the only thing she could do was listen. Every minute was a story, every hour a poem. And the nights, the nights were cacophony, which is why her dreams were always silent, like old movies.
Once she’d tried writing them down, every word she heard, every sigh that whispered, every sentence sailing past her extremely near-sighted eyes. But her hands were never fast enough, letters flew through them like birds and scattered across the ceiling in a murmuration of mockery.
Sometimes she caught an M on a finger or grabbed a Q by the tail, but they were never letters she could use, and she dropped them in a bowl that by now was overflowing with impatience, red and gold seeping out from a crack down the side. She wished she could hold them in somehow, or wait until she had enough for a story, but every time she tried with her glue and clumsy fingers, a question mark escaped, and she spent days looking for the answer.
When she got hungry, she tore pages from the books lining the walls of her house. It was never enough to fill her, and the only one left that hadn’t been tasted was the atlas.
One day she filled a bucket and started scrubbing. Her knees grew dark with ink and tiny commas kept catching in her fingernails. She didn’t stop until the floor ran black and the only thing she heard was her own breath.
She sat down then, and began to write.
the silent places you seek in the darkness
just before the sun comes up
on a summer night
spent
in the company of story
and all the words you wrote
were the echo of your sanity
falling from a perch on orion’s
back
onto pages thin as petal
and the whispers you carried
were your gravity
.
.
.
i never did find
those mittens
those blue knitted ones
that let my fingers peek out
i lost them in the coldest
of winters
the one that froze my heart
to a place now forgotten
but i still remember
those mittens
.
.
.
it was your dream and it shouldn’t
have been in my head but there it was
all memory and miniseries
claiming sleep in a gold rush
of measure
the audience laughed when i landed
and i thought perhaps i was dead
but you took my hand and lifted
til i stood three feet taller
than the mountain you sang
and could see each grey hair
on your head
in the hallway air-brushed footsteps
creaked out their endless
time-frame pattern
step here miss there hush now
tiptoe past the door of dragon
and the wind came howling
through the crack
in my window glass scar
left behind on a night when i dreamt
of forgetting and clambered to follow
the pale scratched trail
of prints in the snow beneath me
.
.
.
