Bearing at Last the God-lit Sweetness

And so the days pass, each a little shorter than the last (the internal north unfolding).

And scallop-colored mare's tails fill the sky and the wind smells faintly of smoke and fainter yet of old sweaters.

And letters arrive from continents I have never seen and go unread for days, piled on the table like tinder, like novels from the eighteenth century.

At night I dream of sentences in which one trails their fingers over cool marble balustrades, a hint of diatonic melodies where the air is coolest, and unfamiliar constellations brighter than one expects.

In the morning I lie awake a long time watching curtains brighten and listening to her breathe, bearing at last the God-lit sweetness I thought so long I had to go without.

It seems like over when we learn that nothing external can satisfy but in truth it is a beginning, though not all of us can see it that way.

Say one's heart is roughly akin to a pale blue cloth carried on high winds over the differently-sentient, the ever-rolling ocean.

I resolved to see at last - outside drama, outside mystery - the face of Christ and she said yes and so.

Mid-morning and the geese pass the way the river passes and certain kinds of love pass, or seem to.

Sometimes I fall crying at the far edge of the field watching butterflies sail though invisible breezes, bearing roughly south.

Four crows on Sam Hill Road teach me math and also what math is not.

This fallen pine tree reaching out into the fire pond is for you.

And this blueberry bush in which chickadees settle a while.

And the chickadees.

Have you learned yet that the forest belongs only to coyotes and bears and that knowing this is the only way to actually see the forest?

Slower and slower, on and on.

At 2 a.m. I press my face into the pine boughs and inhale deeply and laugh and do the little dance I do in darkness - what the bears call graceful - to say thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.

And the scratchy sound of vinyl turning, and the girls who held me as it turned, and the years that are not gone but float slowly with me through starlight and beyond to that from which starlight emerges.

And the laundry on the line, which I hang while singing from Emily Dickinson's hymnal.

And at 3 a.m. too - a last time before sleep - I step into the pine boughs and come out happily, dancing in the moonlit driveway a dance the bears taught me, saying thank you thank you a thousand times thank you.