The air is crisp, and speaks to me
of sunlight sparkling through the trees
a bright wine on the other side
of the sun, when I shall be older
and today’s new life will be
that season’s grandfather leaves
floating down to rustle among brothers
and sweep down the hills—
becoming soil, becoming life
soaking into root veins & reborn;
one year’s crisp cool evening calls to the next,
one orbit or one hundred beyond.

She is
the laughter in their sincere joy
the comfort to their childhood pains;
the hand that guides their crooked lines
the confidante and counselor;
she is their sense of beauty,
the definition for their words,
her sternness is their first morality,
her sorrow their first glimpse of death.
She is their simple sense of home
their peace in dark and flashing rain;
she is the garden they will recall,
once mighty oaks, to feel again
the splendor of an honest love
poured out on their unfurling forms.
And in the years before and all around
she is more than they will ever learn:
enduring, persevering, in moments
overwhelmed but steeling on;
for the happiness, the nurtured growth,
for the benefit of those she bore in pain:
she is, with a meaning forged in time 
that she can never fully grasp, beloved
in hearts that will endure beyond—
Mom.

Sometimes when I fail

I like to play back the film
backwards & see myself
rise to triumph from defeat
sprinting heels-first from tragedy.

The price of daughters

I had to go outside
to make sure the Earth was still there.
It was; it is;
it reminded me of you,
small mirror:
my smile on your face
my flash in your eyes
my defiance in your fists
my shortcomings in your flaws
known and unknown
—I feel heavy in my skin
like a mountain in the crust.






July 2020

Cavelight

Honestly I can’t imagine
though I can repeat
how caves form, over one
hundred million years—
can not fathom the Earth
in its infancy, leaving a pocket
for rocks to grow in, while
overhead no dinosaurs roamed.
I cannot even be amazed
because such galactic time scales
do not fit, mean nothing
in the electric light, seen
by eyes that saw above, grass
and tree-furred mountains
that all came after this.
Don’t touch the rock; but I did
just trying to grasp bewilderment
and in the end, said, it’s pretty
but too old to mean anything
to me, even though I want it to.
And like starlight, which is
mostly just as old, I take it all
despite trying not to, for granted.












July 12