At Last, the Height and Width

 

I forget you only in the specifics.

The way I watch this blazing herald

of spring through the window

and think: Robin!

    Cardinal?

 

I wanted to keep it all.

Why you hated Skittles?

What you said to get us on that tour bus?

Why we stopped talking for a whole summer?

 

I’ve tried more than once to remember

what set off that silence. It felt perilous,

like a wounded animal I couldn’t

set down and couldn’t save

because I held it.

 

But I have this tiny slate

of a memory. The kind schoolmistresses

passed out in prairie classrooms. It isn’t much

space for details and anyway, it's filled with your name.

Which I write over and over until my chalk is a pebble I cannot hold.

 

 

Riptide

 

Something stung my arm and I fussed

at it till it oozed. But I’ve been in the ocean

three days now, and under water

all the wounded edges have reached

for each other. A taut, pink pucker

of new skin, looking like it swallowed

a scream.

 

At my church growing up, we had a minister

whose father swam out, but not back.

Her brother followed.

 

Lifeguards will warn that calm water is sign of a rip current.

Matthew will testify that calm water is the miracle of an exhausted Jesus.

But that was just a lake they called the sea.

 

Wouldn’t she have to? Believe in God after

something like that? To excuse her

feet on the shore, her lungs full of air.

Waiting for him, or him, or

Him to trouble the water.

 

 

Was Here

 

The Old of me and the Alone

of me balks at the carvings.

 

The folly of imprinting yourselves,

so brief in our snatch of time,

to stand against the whole of it.

 

But then I consider S.H., rising

in the last of the deep-dark

to pour coffee into metal tumblers.

J.G., searching out her thickest socks.

Setting off in tandem to stare

at something high and beautiful.

 

Are your marks a marker?

A cosmic IOU for the purity of the light,

the renaissance of your muscles,

how the air turns precious at altitude.

 

That final rise,

the bend,

suddenly

the valley

like a sigh in the ripe of the day.

 

A witness statement to the divine?

Your initials etched, bound

by a plus, lassoed by a heart.