It was all good on paper.
The ink was set and dry.
But the writing in between the words
the ink did yet belie.

Perhaps if you had sent a picture
so that I could look you in the eye;
A thousand words to know you true,
read between your face’s lines

Then with your heart laid open,
from my heart you could not shy.
Instead these words unspoken
And one caged and endless cry.

She said
“I think I don’t have the capacity for love”
I said
“Don’t think on love but feel it”

She said
“I feel love not inside of me”
I said
“How strange that I can see it”

She said
“How is this so? That you can see what I can’t feel?”
I said
“Because it shows, it’s evident, it’s real.
I see it clearly on your face,
I see it in your grin.
I see it when you look at friends,
in the creases of your eyes
the upticked corners of your smile,
I see it in your dimples,
in the flashes of your brow,
I see it in your forehead,
lines of laughter redrawn often.
I see it where you least expect
when your features knit, your heart, it softens”

She said
“Is this love? My visage? Why would I carry feelings here?”
I said
“Indeed I do not know, but the evidence is clear.
Perhaps this is where love hides itself-
is stored and then revealed.
Perhaps our wrinkles hold our hearts
to be kept and then unsealed.
Don’t think too hard, on love my dear
it will happen by and by,
the wrinkles in your face will grow
love to hold, love to show.”

She looked at me with knotted brow,
a stern concerted face;
evaluating what to say
to better voice her case,
and then her lips flicked, just a touch,
a crisp new pleat appeared,
and with a smile, she confessed
“I do love you my dear”

I am the smallest thing you’ve ever seen,
a fingernail, a pencil tip, a hardened uncooked bean,
the grime upon a bar, a hobo’s pocket lint,
the crumble of a cork, the peelings of a stick,
the dust left in a tea can after you have quenched your thirst,
a bubble in a maelstrom, just waiting to be burst,
a blank answer on a test, not even half a guess,
it shames me to admit that I am all these things and less,
but then you hold my hand, a gentle reprimand,
and I know it isn’t true,
I begin to grow (anew)

Once my heart took flight,
Darted high into the sky,
Flew too close to the sun
and doubted it could ever fly

My heart crashed into the sea,
it slipped beneath the waves,
sank deep into the blue abyss
and waited to be saved

Soon it saw a lantern light
bobbing to and fro,
my heart jumped a little
and rushed up to say hello

Within the light a horror,
a twist of tangled fangs.
a jaw that opened wide and then
again crashed with a bang

My heart cried out in fear,
and then took flight once more,
Until ripped and bruised and bleeding
it lay upon the ocean floor

And there it sat in solitude
no hope, nor dream, nor wish,
but while it lay despairing
along came a little fish

“What are you doing here?” it asked,
“Pumping tears into the sea?”
“I flew, I burned, I fell, I drowned,
I fled, now let me bleed”

“Wow!” said the fish, mouth agape,
admiration in its eye
“You flew like a bird? You kissed the sun?
You dove out of the sky?”

“You swam into the trenches?
Fled monsters in the black?
Don’t tell me more you big brave heart
or my heart will attack!”

“All I have done is swim here,
hanging near the ocean floor,
That you’ve done too (quite well in fact)
Yet you’ve done so much more!”

“You inspire me dear friend,
I am forever in your debt!”
and with a little shake of its little tail
it swam off in a fret.

My heart sat there for a moment,
bewildered and bemused,
Then with a sigh it mustered:
“Well, what have I to lose?”

And so it paddled forth,
for what else could it do?
Though it had no direction
it couldn’t stay amid the blue.

I don’t know where my heart is going
but I know it mustn't cease
I know that it will find itself
safe from singe and sea and teeth.

At the beach or the park it is appropriate to lie on the ground.
To sit still and do nothing but absorb the cries of gulls or the hum of an airplane or other distant sounds and smells and sensations.
But you can absorb those things standing up, and here on the ground
there is a world you can only explore if you put your eye up next to it.
At the beach it is not uncommon, when aimlessly watching people, to espy someone
(a child more often than not)
running their fingers through the sand,
transfixed in the singular feel of it and-if they are looking-
its infinite aesthetic.
Each grain is a world anew and you would not know it unless you
put your face right up to the ground and looked.
At the park it's much the same.
Two-inch fields of grass give away to dirt plateaus,
and it turns out there are a thousand little scarabs-
black & green & red jewels scurrying in the understory.
Twigs as big as logs lie haphazardly, and there a leaf is
wilting, wilting, wilting
for weeks or forever.
I knew a woman once who did not wait for the beach or the park.
In her observation of the ground she was infinitely delighted.
There was always something new or unexpected just waiting to be found if only the
right mind was there to appreciate it.
Tesoras she called them.
She would hold up a piece of dead grass as if it were a seashell pointing out a fold or dip that created a shadow just… so.
“Tesora”.
Now sometimes when the viscera of my mind have trouble digesting a certain memory
I lie on the floor and stare at the veneer of dust,
a tangle of hair,
or the husk of a stink bug and in my mind I see a leaf
wilting, wilting, wilting.

They say Love casts long shadows but
that reduces Love to a material thing and
though it has undeniable presence
(right here, you said, tapping on my chest)
I can no more taste it than the
spectre of a long eaten apple picked clean through
core
&
seed
&
stem
and leaving for me
as if by my own gluttonous design the
sanguine verisimilitude of
hunger

the sea it slowly breathes.
my lungs quickly ebb & flow.
from far Moon has her say,
and in my ear your soft “Hello”.