I stand on the shore of it.
Miles of shoreline stretches
Wave washed debris littering its lengths.
White caps rolling in.
Birds, predator and prey, ride the winds, searching.
And the view I see is daunting.
Eerily inviting.
Comfortingly too big to comprehend.
And yet!
I can feel the grains of sand, gritty, between my toes… and in my teeth.
And the breeze off the water smells of yesterday’s tears and tangles tugging at my brush.
And from here, my view of love is daunting.
At first, it felt like… a pause.
A temporary setting down.
A favorite mug waiting in the unran dishwasher.
Then, it felt like… a lost set of keys.
Something I’d put down in a rush
Without a plan for where I’d pick it up again.
Now, it feels like an old apartment address.
Somewhere I could get to if I tried.
Somewhere distantly familiar but no longer home.
And I worry that someday it might feel like a page out of a photo album.
A journey once taken, now a remember when.
If I suppose my mind a garden, what do I earn in weeding?
From heaven and land or from a can seeps nourishment to the roots of all the seeds I planted.
And if the bed of soil I have is poor, I’ll by all means amend it.
What blooms do grow will be cut and shown to encourage more anew.
And if from my fruits, I can’t begrudge, the inadvertent feeding of a squirrel or bird or two.
But of the weeds that won’t retreat, invasively proceeding, a tasteless anadem.
I pull. I cut. I poison. I’d be no less prosperous to beg them leave, each ill-entangled stem.
I sit and I watch the sunlight,
The way it dances through this manufactured Eden,
And I think I begin to understand what believers
find beautiful in faith.
The way it finds holes in that which would keep it out.
It sings and skips along those that reflect it.
It feeds all those whom choose to bask in it.
It even strains for those visibly just out of reach.
And yet I just can’t forgive the rarity of rainbows
on days it lets the clouds win.
Is it really so hard to understand?
Are you so guiltless?
In the minutes before I bend my knees to the dead wood of the confessional
I find myself confronting the horfrost
Of your persecution and my own confused shame.
You ask “Why?” And I find the heavy heat of incredulity suffocating.
As if you yourself are without the freckling on your conscience
And I alone have ever sinned.
Standing before you in this moment I am a gymnast in the cavern of my own chest;
Anxiety the hand waving about my rapidly devolving excuses like a ribbon.
My knees crack against the base of our private altar as the trumpet’s hollow brass rings out and the ribbon falls still.
I wrap myself in self preservation, felted and cheap though it is, and choose to lie a little longer.
642 Poems and More 