Not a Prayer, Not a Poem

I wait for you. In the morning, before anyone else is awake, I wait.

I give myself to you. In the morning, before anyone else is awake, I give myself to you.

Between folds in the curtain, a single star glistens. Where the the curtain does not reach the sill, I see the side yard covered in snow. It is cold here, but not too cold.

My waiting is not a vigil. My waiting is not a penance.

My waiting is not a prayer. Nor is it a poem.

Last night the crescent moon shone so brightly over Main Street that I felt it enter my body. Bright like mica, cold and hard like ice. My heart shuddered, my shoes grew thin then disappeared.

Yet when I woke up the ice had melted and my shoulders were full of light.

Quietly I came downstairs, made coffee, and sat in the darkness facing north, waiting.

Waiting for you is a form of remembering you. Memory rises like a slow soft tide saying "you have never not been the sea. The one you wait for is here. Your solitude is conjoined, your loneliness shared."

In summer, violets will spill through the grass beneath the apple trees, a profluence impossible to measure. In summer, swallows will trace their hidden-to-me alphabet through dusky skies. Thunder will fill the valley, the river will flood its banks.

In summer, after midnight, the horses will settle on the warm earth, legs folded, waiting for the sun.

Summer, winter . . . the nights and mornings are not different to me thereby. Yesterdays, tomorrows . . . the fulcrum of time is dusty from not being used.

[Every step I take makes the map you gave me grow fainter, as if the point all along were to be lost in you]

How quiet it is before anyone wakes up. How gently the darkness appears to the one in whom the moon travels, endlessly cycling through declarations of light.

How easy to say nothing but let it all pass and only rest in you, in whom all travelling, this and everyone else's, unfolds.

For I am not waiting but flowing in you, like melted snow on quartz. Not flowing but living in you like an orchestral heart that's never not in tune. Not living but singing, a little song for those with ears, the ones in whom this sentence nests, nestles, needfully and otherwise.