Poem: December 31, 2019

Prayer

A man writes a poem
in water on the ground
and watches as it fades.

He does this every day.
Every day the poem fades.
Some days it rains.

Each day, different ground,
different water. The poem
is always the same. It says,

I love you.
I hope you know
I love you.

Poem: December 30, 2019

Penultimate

So I did a thing
for an entire year.

I noted the world
and felt my place
within it.

First person, observer.

A thumbtack lifted
and placed each day
on a map, or

a sieve
passed through
an ocean.

And I saw all
the colors I saw.

And I touched
all the rough
surfaces I touched.

And I tasted food
and blood and
kisses.

I filtered it all
through my lungs,
my skin, and then,
out through my pen.

And to what end?

Except to say
I did this work and
didn't let so much
slip away unseen.

I learned that life
is what it seems
to be: little and
long and worthy
of the time and
sacrifices,

deserving of all
the small daily
temples we build

to love, to fear,
to what we can't see.

So I am grateful to
have stood my watch.

I am better for it.

Poem: December 29, 2019

Prolific

May we all be prolific
in the new year.

Prolific in our laughter.
Prolific in our hand-holding.
Prolific in our gratitude.

May we be, of course,
prolific writers who write
letters and poems,
text messages and songs.

But may we also be
prolific tinkerers and lovers
and cocktail mixers.

May our hands be prolific
in their sculpting and painting,
in their cooking of meals,
in their planting
and dealing cards.

And may our feet be prolific
along wooded paths,
in foreign cities and
back and forth from
pier to shore.

And may those same feet
dance prolifically
the waltz and fox trot.

May we wonder prolifically
and be prolific in our curiosity,
in our excitement and
in our passion and in our
attention to one another.

May we kiss prolifically and
be prolific in our remembrances
and devotions.

May we be prolific
in our learning and our wisdom
and in the application of both.

May we enjoy prolific
friendships, old and new,

and be prolific in our work
and in our leisure.

And may we experience
prolific joy because we know
we gave entirely of ourselves.

Poem: December 28, 2019

Proposal

Love, in the morning
before I take Sophie to school,
I come to find you
in some state of mid-dress
to grab a quick kiss, an exchange
of kind wishes for a good day.

And some days,
in the middle of the day,
you send me a text to share
an idea you've had or
something that made you laugh,
and I hear your laugh.

And at night, most nights,
we eat our dinner, usually
in front of the television, binging
the stories we agreed to share,
and when I go to bed early,
you remind me to shut off the lights.

And on the weekends,
it's often all we can do to find
an evening with family
and do the shopping and
do the laundry, but we also get to
have our breakfast together.

And at Christmas,
we shop for books together,
that we then wrap together,
and we place them under the tree,
books for everyone,
each and every year.

And in the winter,
we watch the weather.
And in late spring,
we buy lots of plants for the garden.
And summer is always too busy.
And autumn is always too short.

And when we travel together,
you drive so you won't get sick.
At the beach, I build sand sculptures.
In museums, you read everything.
We go to Orlando a lot.
Sometimes, we go to Europe.

And this is our fine life:
We go to the movies. I make you coffee.
We love our children and our pets.
Now and then, we have a little sex.
I like this marriage we have.
I vote we keep it going.

Poem: December 27, 2019

Variance

Do you find it sad
that we are encouraged
to stay away from our own
strange spaces?

That what we know
is given more value
than what we don't know
or what is gray and
difficult to say?

That we are asked
to use words the way
that everyone uses words
and never stray towards
our own pronunciations,
our own definitions?

That we are taught to walk
on safe, familiar, and
predetermined paths?
That we measure twice
and never improvise?

That our personalities,
the checklists of ourselves,
are trusted when they
are steady, reliable, normal?

That we care what others,
people we don't know, think
and so we consider things
like re-sale value before we
paint a wall black with flames
or a ceiling two shades of blue?

That we believe the things
they say are true
must, therefore, be true?

Poem: December 26, 2019

Boxing Day

Boxing Day isn't our holiday
since we are neither British
nor Victorians, and the idea
that we could ever afford to
employ servants is laughable.
More likely, we would be the
downstairs help, tending to
the wash, polishing the brass,
until this day on which we
would enjoy a few hours away,
finishing off the leftover goose
and pudding and candied fruit.

Not our holiday, no, and not
actually our lot in life, but
being the Anglophile that I am,
I like to note the 26th, and
explain to the uninformed,
the significance of Boxing Day,
and after so much indulgence,
I do see the pleasure in less.
Less waste. Less noisiness.

I like to imagine the clean lines
of boxes wrapped in plain
brown paper, tied with twine.
I like the idea of the gift of
idleness and the romance of
returning home, a whole pantry
in hand, to a humble bit
happy time with my family,
the second-hand efficiencies of
thrift paired to the grand sigh
of a day without work to do.

And I enjoy the thought of
a great empty house with fewer
people and less bustling about.
So quiet, you can hear the snip
of the cigar cutter and the
updraft in the fireplace and
across the house, the echo of
footsteps on a marble floor.
More uninterrupted space and
a dormant place to pause and
rest one's eyes. One quiet day
before we give in to obligation.

Poem: December 25, 2019

Hark!

It is hard to imagine
there are many angels
much inclined to descend
in all their glory, blazing
in the light of God's
fierce and abundant love,
to bring glad tidings unto,
say, the tired and harried
checkers working third
shift at Walmart with
their light-up reindeer
headbands and jingle bell
necklaces swaying as
they scan our cartloads
of temporary distraction.

It's hard to think that
any angel would appear
to any politician and say
unto them fear not
as they travel their divided
roads, setting their flocks
upon one another.

We seem to have worked
as hard as elves to make
an unlovable world,
thick with plastics and
urban sprawl, cheaper,
emptier, faster, distracted,
more covetous and blind,
and convinced our pain
is nothing more than gravy.

We look for reasons
not to love and not to find
any common cause with
anyone unlike ourselves,
as we sing love and joy
come to you and Hark!
the herald angel sings.

But we do want love, and
we want a world that loves,
and in our humble squalor,
we have the chance to be
the angels we wish to find.

Poem: December 24, 2019

Bearing Gifts

To choose not to have a child
because you fear the future is
to misunderstand what it means
to be human. To have a child

is an act of hope, the most
humanly vulnerable act of hope.

We cannot give the world to
a child. The world is the world.

We give our child to the world,
our golden gift, the only gift
we have to give, and hope and
hope it is enough.

What is our alternative?
No bright star? An empty house?

Poem: December 23, 2019

Wrapped

It seems we've been wrapping
for weeks now.

Yards of paper, miles of tape
covering over our surfaces

burying the normal and
the work-a-day under
our annual festive landscape.

We've hung hundreds
of ornaments and strewn
dozens of snowmen
about the house.

We've replaced the tea towels
with Christmas tea towels,
the soaps and mugs
with holiday soaps and mugs.

The songs we play,
the candles we light,
all season-specific, the same
story we tell about ourselves,
only larger, deeper.

But we've moved my easy chair
from the living room
to make space for the tree,

and reduced our number
of workable surfaces to give
reindeer and Santas and
nutcrackers a place to be.

We've made room for Jesus.

And the kitchen counters,
covered with a snowfall
of flour from all the baking,
and the cookie tins stacked high
and full too many cookies.

And our diet, as rich as it is
this time of year, means even we
are wrapped in extra layers,

and even our clothes
are red and green and Christmas-
themed, and

nothing is boring, and
nothing is slow, and
everything, everything is stuffed
full to spilling, and so, and so,

I'd like to do some unwrapping,
some stripping away of layers.

Just you and me and my big chair.
Some boredom and somewhere to sit.

Poem: December 22, 2019

Solstice

Amidst all the rushing
through our holidays,

the deadlines
and destinations

the wine and the noisy
starting and stopping,

it is unlikely
we noted the passing
of the Winter Solstice,

its silence
and its darkness,
its invitation to
peaceful contemplation

of new beginnings,
new definitions,
new paths to new worlds.

But if you had
stepped outside, say,
into the cold night
last night at 10:29,
here in southwest Indiana,

and if the street
had been silent

and if the street lights
and house lights
had not been lit,

you could have
born witness to the first
hopeful moments
in which half our world
tilted in tiny degrees
toward Spring.

And maybe you
would have taken
a cool, deep breath.

And maybe the air
would have tasted clean.

Poem: December 21, 2019

Charity

I give because there have been some
times when I couldn't give,
and even more when I didn't give
even though I could, when,

I suppose, I felt entitled

to the enough that I had, and
for that I feel badly.

Even now, of course,
I do not give enough, ungrateful
as I am for

my warm house
with all its broken and leaking things,

for all the food in the pantry
I do not feel like cooking,

for the paychecks
within whose means I stubbornly
fail to live,

I give. Of course I give,
but not like one who does with less.
And yes, I have beed someone
to do with less, grateful for
the pieces at the edges of the plate

which may now feed my covetousness,

but I know better, and I am
self-aware and hopeful for
your forgiveness for the little that I give.

Poem: December 20, 2019

Heirlooms

My desk at home, made of pine,
a solid and simple expanse of
beautifully stained wood, began
its life in the early 20th century
as a teacher's desk, a place to
plan lessons or grade papers. It
might not be mine now except
it was rescued from a local
school when my grandfather
who taught and was a principal
learned it was going to be thrown
away during a renovation, so he
took it home with him, and now
it is where I am writing this poem.

The chair in which I am sitting
is even older, a proper college
professor's chair, the Wabash
crest carved into the back rest,
now dark with patina, came from
my alma mater, where my father
learned as well, and where my
mother's father taught my father,
and this was my grandfather's
chair, retired from the basement
cafe in the student union where
the faculty met, and where, I
imagine, my grandfather held
court. And now this is where I sit.

My house is full of heirlooms
like these, artifacts passed along
to me to fill my utilitarian needs:
I have shelves for books, and
old post office drawers in which
I keep my pens. And a Hoosier
cabinet we've used as both a
changing table and a bar. And I
have that old rocking chair that
can pinch your fingers, but is a
comfortable place to think, and
a wrought iron lamp with a handy
ashtray in which to place a drink.

I am surrounded by all the worn
and perfect spaces in which my
good ancestors paused to rest
or worked long hours or stored
their tools or lost themselves to
thought, and even now, all this,
rich as it is with family history,
is put to use, reupholstered and
repurposed, and given meaning
because these things are useful,
because I have work to do, until
one day when I do not, and I pass
them along. And in that moment,
I  will  have served my purpose to
care for them until they find in you,
some new and worthy work to do.

Poem: December 19, 2019

Honorific

I declare myself Poet Laureate
of this house, and possibly this
neighborhood; although, to be
fair, we do live awfully close
to the university, so maybe just
this street and our house and,
by extension, the yard barn and
our cars and my cubicle at work.

Poem: December 18, 2019

Be the Stream

The plumber fixed the water heater

in about ten minutes and charged us

$138.91 for the trouble. He said that

the thermal coupling had stopped

doing its job (which is a thing that,

I learned, tells the heater to give it

some gas). He might as well have

said Your main flux-T oscillator had

rotted due to its proximity to the ion

pulse modulator, which is common

in these older heaters. I wouldn't

have known the difference. I was

just glad to have dodged a bigger

thousand-dollar bullet right before

the holidays. You can get hung up

on lots of possible cosmic injustices

until you find out your problems are

just caused by a bit of built-up soot.

$138.91 is big, but not so big, and

a warm shower makes all the difference.

Poem: December 17, 2019

Stolen Words
A poem made with 20 words I took from 20 poems.

It takes a bit of wading
in cold waters, a bit of
slogging along until
your feet are numb, to
finally see the futility
of the slogging, and

it takes some time amid
the shoulder-high and
steely stalks and leaves,
making slow and quarrelsome
progress and being torn
to rags to suddenly know
you can remove yourself
from your own enclosure,

and one can spend a good
bit of ticking time behind
a curtain, uttering sad,
imagined lines and looking
for the part between the
black, heavy velvet walls,
that are poured like darkness
from the rafter to the floor,
before one enters left,
emblazoned in stage light
to cross to center stage
and take a chair like Banquo,
justified and righteous and
born of a type of witchcraft,

and it can require a long bit
of fitful sleep to wake to
the cool and silent gifts
of one's own forgiveness,
and in so doing, be soothed.

Poem: December 16, 2019

Plenty

None of the children
believe in Santa anymore,
but we hang the stockings
from the kitchen bookcase
anyway, and we stay up late
until everyone is asleep
before we take them down
and fill them full of candy
and bookmarks, collectables
and lip gloss, so that when
the kids get up on Christmas
and wander into the kitchen,
they find (as they have
always found) the bulging,
abundant, red and white
cornucopian evidence that
magic still exists. They find
the over-stuffed promise
that what is empty will be
filled, that there are still
sweet ways to start the day.
And we, we are allowed
this fantasy, our children
all around us, made happy
through the work of years.

Poem: December 15, 2019

Qualia

I take a bite
of an oatmeal cookie,
my grandmother's recipe,
and I am changed,

I ache, for lack of
a better word, in ways
you do not ache
when you bite into
the same cookie, the same
grandmother's recipe,

which demonstrates
the difficulty of being
a human, I suppose.

I do not equal you.
My ache is not your ache.
Your itch is not mine,

and all of our separate,
blind and restless fumblings
within this world go
essentially undefined.

Language, so inadequate,
traps us in our cruel
and foolish binary state:
Me-Not Me. You-Not You.

So you bite the cookie
and you do not ache.

But the cookie is good.
Enjoy the cookie.

Poem: December 14, 2019

Hands

I love your hands,
how you use them to hold
a glass of wine, to wrap
a gift, to undo twine,
to write, to point, and
to my delight, to lace
your hand with mine.
I love the warm
of your hands, the soft
and perfumed
of your hands, and also
their adornments. I love
them tanned and bare
in the summer. I love them
emerging from the arms
of your sweaters. And
I love to watch you use
your hands to straighten
your clothes and apply
your mascara. I love to see
you mess up your hair
and wipe the extra color
from the corner of your lips.
I love the way you place
your hands firmly on
your hips, and when we
are out I love the way
you wave them about
to make a point
when you talk. And when
we are alone, and you
are being dramatic, I
love the way you splay
them out like fans to
strike a dancer's pose.
I love the smooth lines
of your fingers and the
curved shine of your nails.
I love every crease and
bend of them. I love
the pads and the hollow
of the palm. I love the
tapping of your fingertips,
and how you trace them
along the surfaces, the
contours of our home.
I love how you use your
hands to touch me and
to capture my attention.

Poem: December 13, 2019

Siloed

God says to you, Build an Ark,
so you build an Ark because
God is God, and you are you,
and maybe project management
is your strong suit, and maybe
you love the mission, and maybe
you trust your team, so all the
meetings in which you draw up
plans and perform risk analyses,
all the lists of materials, all the
estimates and systems, all the
time you take to clearly state
and align your actions to your
mission are both invigorating
and joyous, and you have the
pleasure of knowing that no
mistake you make is actually a
mistake, because it is yours and
is forgiven. And so you build
that Ark to spec, on budget and
on time, and God delivers all
the animals into your hands and
hospitality, and as predicted,
the rain comes down and the
water rises, and everything
beyond your work, your team,
your mission is lost, and so you
have proof of concept, a scalable
use case. How grand it is to be
successful and to be assured of
the terrible rightness of the ways
you've spent the only time you have.

Poem: December 12, 2019

Thoughts About My Kids When They Were Little

I remember less about you
in those first days

when you were mostly just tiny,
quivering, blind, red
things with little range
and few interests.

You were like raw thumbs,
amoebas in a dish,
jellyfish.

Involuntary reflexes.

I remember we gathered around you,
scientists around a beaker.

We tended you like a fire
that hasn't yet quite taken.

But who can make much
of such things?
Single data points before
you can see the trend lines take shape.

Love, of course, biological
and assumed, but little else
to make any meaning with.

I start to remember you,
to place you in a narrative,
to make sense of you
after a year.

Waddling and laughing.

Little self-guided,
dirt-eating,
messy-haired,
drooling jesters.

Tilted little L's, sitting
in your little worlds,
paying me no mind,

impossibly flopping forward
to take hold of everything
in your radius,

slapping the ground and
constantly crawling
toward danger.

I remember your big
wet, expressive faces,
each a performance:
delight
betrayal
grief
disdain.

I remember your sighs
and the way you looked in hats.

That's when I remember you
first and best,

as little people being people,
so much the same as,
so different from
everyone else.

Your own human stories,
both magical and gross.

Poem: December 11, 2019

Gifts

I give you a poem,
hand-written on white paper,
which, of course,
requires its own unwrapping.
And you place yourself
inside the poem, fitting
as you see fit,
which is and isn't
my intention, just as
this is and isn't my poem.

Poem: December 10, 2019

A Poem for Emily Dickinson on her Birthday

Happy Birthday to you Emily.
You are often on my mind-
Having written so prolifically,
The poetic passage of your time.

I wonder if you were driven
By the Muses or the Task?
And I hope I'd be forgiven
If, were we to meet, I asked.

Don't think I've not considered
The Notoriety that would ensue,
If before my Last Bird flittered,
I had written more than you.

Poem: December 9, 2019

Adjustments

This mild December Monday-
60 degrees and full of rain-

isn't what we expect or hope for.
It's what we have,

and we should find a way
to love this day despite ourselves.

The rain falls and is wondrous,
as snow falls and is wondrous.

Warm air fills our lungs the same
as cold air fills our lungs.

We love each other to the sound
of falling rain, and

we love each other in the hush
of a winter snow.

Poem: December 8, 2019

The Thing We Chase

It can happen, sometimes
four or five songs into a set,
when your voice is warm
and the lyrics are familiar,
it can happen that you forget
yourself, and the microphone,
the orange and purple lights,
everything outside your skin,
and you begin to only be
the sound of your own voice,
rising like a swell inside your
own great hollow cathedral,
a shining perfect selflessness,
the first and only vibrant word.

Poem: December 7, 2019

Harder

Even in these hard times
there are those who are hopeful,
who scratch joyfully toward
a more perfect imperfect,
who don't see only what they
don't have, who do make do,
but also build upon, add to, improve.

There are those who have
no time for the boiling noise
of anger or the circular mazes of
despair, and they are not yoked
to someone else's machinery
unless they want to be, in which
case they will tell you that
this is their own machinery,
their own toil, their chosen yoke.

There are those who are nimble
and who dance amidst the immovable,
who smile when they climb
and equally smile when they crawl,
who move left and right and
backward to move forward, who
enjoy the adventure of the longest
paths, the paths that shift and fall off,
who know there is only this one path.

There are those who lean forward
into hard and opposing forces,
whose hands are made thick
by cold winds and grasping thorns,
who gave up minding the hard
and sharp world. It's just a world.
And they hold it and rise up
and put it to their purpose.

Poem: December 6, 2019

John Dewey Quote

From the standpoint of the child,

the great waste
of the school

comes from his inability to utilize
the experiences
he gets outside the school
in any complete

and free
way within the school itself;

while, on the other hand,
he is unable to apply in daily life
what he is learning at school.

That is the isolation

of    the    school--

its

isolation

from

life.

Poem: December 5, 2019

The Writing Life

There is a good bit of irony
in writing to be mindful.

The nature of writing
is not being present.
The nature of writing
is being past.

To write about experience
is to be present
in the writing
perhaps, if one is
conscious of the pen,
the paper, the pause,
the gathering and planting.

More likely, writing is
an act of being present
to not experience,
not even memory of experience,
but to meaning
strained from memory
which is its own
filter of experience.

Writing is distilling
and steeping
and playing with the settings,
cropping and combining,
layering and stripping away
and saturating,
separating the wheat,
as they say, from the chaff.

Writing is the long way
to mindfulness.

We take the orange,
extract the juice,
strain the pulp,
and drink what's left
to experience
the orange.

Poem: December 4, 2019

Shadow and Light

In the light, we are defined.
In the shadows, we are possible.

Light lays bare our surfaces.
Shadow suggests our art.

With light we find our edges.
With shadow we find our reach.

Light is factual, scientific.
Shadow is truthful, intuitive.

We work in the light.
We dream in the shadows.

Poem: December 3, 2019

Advent

Wait.

Wait quietly and listen.

Set your eyes for a long time
onto the ghostly blue center
of the flame, the heart of it
beneath the dancing edges.

Breathe in.

Breathe in deeply.

Breathe the scent,
the warm heat,
the cedar and mistletoe
and rosemary.

Advent asks that we be
present,
patient,

that we step outside our noisy lives
and love what is
and what will come
and pass.

That we prepare
an empty place
for hope to arrive
and take root.

Advent invites us
to open the gifts
we already possess,
to open our eyes
and orient ourselves
to light, dim on the horizon,
there, certainly, there.

That we take our long
and hopeful journey
slowly, quietly,
with reverence,

counting every grain
of sand along the way.

Poem: December 2, 2019

Fourth and Goal

The end of the semester
compresses like a red zone
defense, everything more
difficult and confined by
its edges, a wall of meaty
obstacles between us and
the freedom of the goal
line, and all the noise
echoing around us, all
the brightly waving colors,
complicating the snap
count, creating the potential
for mistakes, false starts,
interference, and while
the temptation is to make
an end run on a reverse
or to float one to the corner,
we know there's nothing
for it but to punch one
up the gut and hope we
don't fumble the football.

Poem: December 1, 2019

Christmas Village

Setting up the village,
with its hand-painted
porcelain buildings and
Victorian figurines is
a strange and comforting
form of story-telling.

Imagine the Spectacle
shop cottage with its
permanent remnants of
snow, still and forever
melting on the roof,
nestled between the low
Olde Curiosity Shoppe
and the grand Victoria
station where the portly
grandmother crouches,
arms outstretched to
greet her granddaughter.

And across the room,
the Catholic church,
leaning into its flying
buttresses, its wooden
door, slightly ajar, and
men outside with canes
and top hats, and women,
their arms full of food
for the poor and hungry.

And Charles Dickens
himself, surrounded by
a crowd of villagers,
reading by lamplight from
A Christmas Carol,

while atop the bookcase
sit the Tower of London,
and Westminster Abbey,
and the Globe Theatre,
impossibly close to one
another and decorated
with garland and bows.

Look how the barristers
gather outside the Houses
of Parliament, and the
Beefeaters tend the ravens.
Look how the players
sound their horns to call
the world to the play.

I like how still this small
world is, how it remains
in stasis, lit from the
inside by its nightlight
bulbs. I like how kindly
and warmly it sits there
throughout the Advent season.

Poem: November 30, 2019

Christmas Lists

Everyone is making their Christmas lists,
guidance to head off the possibility of
poorly-chosen gifts and the necessity of
post-Christmas returns and trips to the mall.

So in a way, our lists are a form of defining
ourselves and of knowing those for whom
we find ourselves shopping. Our Amazon
wishlists and Google Docs with hyperlinks
become a form of shorthand, a kindness,
we think, so that things go more smoothly,
so that our shared life is a little less stressful.

But so little of us can really find its way
onto a list, since I am more than some
passport wallet or fedora or sweater vest,
and you are more than a novel, earrings,
a scented oil diffuser or a Disney LEGO set.

At best we will find ourselves at Christmas
opening the simplest reflections of ourselves
because they don't sell the excitement you
feel the night before it snows, or something
to heal the ache I feel when children are left
alone. No stores stock their shelves with the
memories that we already cherish or the hopes
we can hardly define. Nothing mass-produced
and imported from China could speak to
the rich, strange, and complex mess of us.

But we make these lists to pass around, a
limited language to define ourselves, a
collection plate to simplify the giving.

Poem: November 29, 2019

Unproductive

I'm listening to the lady
on the other side of my
cubicle get nothing done.
When I arrived and set
up my to-do list, she
was regaling the janitor
with stories about her
grandad who wouldn't
eat processed meat, wore
bibs to church, and spit
his tobacco on the floor.

By the time I was deep
in the morning emails,
she was laughing with
the new secretary from
across the building about
the sign in her kitchen
that reads I can cook, but
I choose not to do it!,
even though at this time
of year, with all the boys
at home, who isn't cooking?

When I get back from the
restroom, she's cornered
a neighbor who hasn't yet
heard the story about her
sister who lost the eye, and
the other sister who lost
one leg above the knee,
which she somehow segues
into a cataloguing of all
the Santa Clauses she
keeps around the house,
one of which she surrounds
with reindeer and that
stands about so tall, and
she wouldn't put them all
out since it takes so much
energy to do, except that
the grandchildren love it so,
and isn't that what this season
is supposed to be about?

Poem: November 28, 2019

Brine

I am grateful to whomever figured out
that steeping the turkey in a briny bath
creates a more delicious and satisfying
meal, with all of its juice and flesh, soft
as a kind look, created through a type
of breathing in and out, a movement,
together and apart in which some part
is left behind in the circular traveling.

And I think of all of us, all our moving
away and returning home over the years,
along highways and mental distances,
the way we flavor one another with what
we bring along and what we take away.
I am changed because of your learning,
your aches and celebrations, your losses.
We are seasoned, made tender in the
salt and wash of one another, in the seas
of our embraces, momentary as kisses.

Poem: November 27, 2019

Gnats

We forget the pleasure
of a coat of paint,
a tightened screw,
the hard brush scrubbing
of the bathroom tile.

These projects that seem
to grow in their enormity,
to accumulate against us.

We live with thousands
of little burdens, flying
then settling like dust,
like gnats, and we forget

that we are burdened,
we forget, but we stoop
a little lower, work
harder to rise from it.

We hide from ourselves
the obvious, our desire
and ability to make
things right.