The house smells wonderful,
Golden and buttery as this morning’s delicious sunrise on our front porch,
And your eyes twinkle as I venture a first bite.
“Pretty good, right?”
It’s a quesadilla and it’s perfect,
exactly to my preference.
Warmly brown and crisp on the outside,
Cold sour cream mingling with too much hot melty cheese and chicken and all the fixins.
A real knock out as far as quesadillas go.

I smile with my eyes and happily munch,
not especially hungry but I know you are.
You spoke this into existence,
A master of your own love language.
In many ways, I am fed.

.

Ingratitude does not become us;
I eat of your hand and rejoice the offering
As my brain whispers:
“My love, please leave me to myself.”

These days I am as two ships passing,
So rare an hour is it to shake my own hand,
Cull my own thoughts,
Breathe my silent breath unaccompanied.

Spinning sugar and spinning wheels are my god-given gifts.
I use the first to coat my tongue.
The second hangs in the air between us.

“Better than good,” I say,
Moving to rest,
To dream my silly dreams,
To paint my silly heart across the mercurial landscape of shared memory.

I am my best when I end my days like a spoiled Pomeranian:
Seated on a cushion
Worrying a bone.

.

The mysterious clicking and clacking of the HVAC tip taps merrily to the rush and whir of the electric heat.
The impression of a kiss still lingers on my cheek
In the quiet.

The house smells wonderful,
Golden and buttery as this morning’s delicious sunrise on our front porch.
It is a miracle to build a structure with your bare hands that bends without breaking,
and supports your weight without shaking.

I would like to take myself very seriously.

I’d like to be a painterly writer,
Like Nabokov,
Or a wry storyteller like Jenny Lewis.

Comparison, especially to this degree,
Is the thief of joy I hear,
And I am but me.

A professor once scolded me during a practicum session,
“This is not a dog-and-pony show.”

But she’s wrong.
It is.
It’s all nonsense and I get to be the ring master.
What could be more joyful than that?

Maybe Nabokov is a creep
Maybe Jenny Lewis is a Hollywood mirage,
And maybe I’m just a silly little goose
Who puts thoughts on paper
As if I deserve it just as much.

I like to imagine Mary Oliver and David Berman
Strolling side-by-side,
Palms grazing the plumes of yarrow feathering the byways of Poet Heaven.

They died less than 8 months apart, lymphoma and mental illness respectively.

The inhabitants moon over Death incessantly there in Poet Heaven,
But you already knew that.
You know poetry.

I like to imagine Mary Oliver and David Berman drinking strawberry daiquiris and smoking in companionable silence,
Enjoying their unlikelihood in the sweet midday glow of Central Park.
Still dead of course,
Unnoticed among the rabble.
What is poetry without the living? We yearn for blood and contrast.

Buying some art from a guy who is also selling bootleg DVDs;
Throwing birdseed to the crosseyed pigeons;
Smoking cigarettes and letting the soft animals of their bodies love what they love,
Free from consequence and commodification,
Free from the every day clamor of the train station.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this, he might say.
But it did, she might reply,
Which is all you can give sometimes when you’re a steward of the truth.

I am soft
And my heart is strong.

There is joy here, I tell you.

These are mournful times, I guess.
They say this isn’t a time for poets.
They say it loudly and often.

———

I walk the dog and unfocus my thoughts
Until it is only the dog and the sky and the street
And the houses and the pulling of the leash
And picking up the dog ****
And the feel of the dry dead leaves under my boots.

There is joy here, I tell you.
You don’t believe me.

It’s okay, I understand.
My grassy body has been devoured, too,
and my sweet breath stolen by the stink of the times.
I dare not speak of the rot for fear it will contaminate our sacred air.
Foolish, I know, to hang a curtain and call it a shield.

Still, I am soft
And my heart is strong.

———

I find myself staring out the window more than I used to,
Memorizing the backyard.

There’s an owl who lives in the towering evergreen right outside the nursery,
(A good omen, probably. I haven’t heard otherwise.)
That tree is said to have been a Christmas tree way back when,
now standing sentinel,
guarding the child who sleeps in its shade.

I purposely do not clean the handprint above the lightswitch in the hallway.
Its hand long gone,
A baker, her family said. The hand that planted our tree.

There is joy here, I tell you.
A weapon of defiance.
This isn’t a time for poets, they say.
They say it loudly and often.

And still, I am soft
And my heart is strong.
I sharpen my pen
And wait for the battles to come.

Right now,
legs out on the couch
One floor beneath my sleeping spouse
I am a tiny mouse
Right now.

Right now
blanket-covered cold
I am heated under folds
Fabric-covered, naked soul
I am a raw ceramic bowl
Right now.

Tomorrow I’ll be ******* tired
Tonight I’m wound with frank desire
Coals around my very core
Close the door
Have some more  
Tomorrow ill work on the how
Tonight is for
Right now.

You were born on a Wednesday.
It was snowing, I think.
I nearly died, and you too,
My blood pressure screaming as your heart rate bobbed and weaved,
A reaction to the terrible ordeal of being born.

The night I learned you were a girl
I lay in bed alone and asked you about yourself.
What is your name?
Beatrice,
you said.
Bee.
A name all your own, belonging to only you.
Beatrice the First:
Shakespeare’s snap dragon heroine;
Dante’s ethereal guide.
Traveler and pollinator;
Wings and a stinger.

Daddy was scared but I didn’t know until later.
He made jokes and played “Something’s Rattling, Cowpoke” by Ben Gibbard on the Bluetooth and held my right leg when it was time to push.

And suddenly there you were.
More alive than the Holy Spirit on Sunday morning,
Bigger than poetry
Bright as a technicolor daydream
And so substantial.
We did it. We made it.

The Tibetans believe that we are all wandering souls.
That crazy movie, Enter the Void, I think about it all the time.

We choose.

Did you choose me?
A willful, chronically sleep-deprived, anxious mess?
How did you know it would work out?
How did you know that my life would not start until, with an audience of doctors and nurses and your family, you were laid in my arms that cold night?
I have such doubts but this I know:
I will choose you every moment of every day and  still
it will not be enough to repay you for giving me the gift of yourself.