I love you like a North Dakota sky--

long, blue, and everywhere

Try to write when you are happy.

Ask yourself, How do you write

windshields with blues skies on

long car rides, window rolled down, wind in hands;

your bedroom ceiling at golden hour,

light from your window bent into a striped

rainbow of sea-green, yellow and coral;

your niece cackling, lobbing a blue balloon

to your sister, who holds baby Sawyer;

your white cat purring, folding into your side

a thousand times like an origami crane;

the trees bursting with red-pink and white blooms

that quickly appeared in the last few weeks.

What if

(like the peace you have now)

you didn’t notice these things

til the car was parked,

the sun had set,

your niece and nephew had grown,

you had found yourself alone,

and the petals

had left the branches

piece by piece?

I always think of you.
I think of the color green:
the tint of old photos,
the lively dancing of your eyes,
your turtleneck in your
official schoolteacher portrait--
of summer--
the grass under my feet
as I run around the yard
so big to little me
and your wrinkled hand keeping me from running too far--
your curtains hanging in your dining room
when the sunlight peeked through them--
the cushions of the dining room chair
where you sat and talked and ate and
made funny faces
sometimes with curlers still in your hair--
the stems and leaves of wildflowers
that Grandpa picked for you
sitting in a coffee tin on the microwave--
the clover planted in empty ice cream pails
in the living room
and you telling me I was lucky
because I'd found one with four leaves--
the grassy **** blanket on the fold-out
bed in the living room where you
sometimes napped--
the bitter tea you drank
for your weak heart--
and the markings on the cannula tube
snaking up
to the oxygen mask
covering your smiles---
your laughing green eyes
on your last day.

Why is the color of death black?
The color of night
of inside a cave
of your mother’s womb
of behind your eyelids.
The color of no color.
For some, it’s white–
of crumbling columns of ash
of salted soil where nothing grows
of days when the sun shines
too bright to see
when you look out your window and
can’t see your mailbox
when you leave home and
drive through clouds of snow
blowing across the highway
of snow dusting the air from
the backs of semis
of ice buried under snow
and you see the fields and trees,
the world shrouded in white
and wonder if
you’ll be buried here too.

The hardest part of letting go
is finding something else to hang onto.
Your hands are empty,
And they fight you,
wanting to curl back onto themselves.
So you open them wider
Here, you can see the sky
in the spaces between each finger
and the cold air lingers on your skin
like an invitation

All of your life, you told them,
you had to learn softness;
how do you make scars smooth again?
Some wounds won’t heal,
because you can’t stop touching them.
The blood on your hands is your own.  
But you wash them now
and let the wounds close like a book
that should have ended long ago.
Look
see?  you tell them,
Palms open and flat like paper.
So, here  
the story starts once more.

Don’t give up.
Planting the seed
is always the hardest.
Without beginnings,
there would be no harvest.