The Blind Girl’s Blue

She imagines it’s like
a slow kiss on a hot day,
a full body mirage next
to crashing waves;

She imagines it bleeds
from her bumpy novels
and intertwines with
airborne symphonies;

She imagines it falls
softly and dampens
the earth just enough
to squish between toes;

She imagines it feels
like looking love in
the face. Not the hot kind
(the lead you to bed, dip you

between beats, gasping kind),
but the roll over softly–brush
through duvet and ripple with
internal sunshine–kind.

Resilience

I want to say we’re so
small
but that’s been written
in stone and bark,
washed over by
foamy waves, and
screamed into the
twinkling vastness
more times than the
billions of seconds
I’ve been alive.

So I’ll say:
we have been smaller.

We have been microscopic
pieces of one day humans;
we’ve been monsoons
and sun showers,
soft ice and hard snow.

When you feel
the enormity of existence,

remember what you have
grown from,
and know that being
small
is entirely a matter of
perspective.

Mother,

I would have nothing
left that dares to whisper
if you had not built me

to walk with the wind
rather than run against it.

Nature’s Beauty

Standing at the edge of a lake where

the clouds are gray as a swallows bellies

and the sky is low as the sloping hills,

you wonder how an image can feel

far too vast

for a simple mossy dock over tepid water.

 

As the water reflects the sky,

the worlds meet like kissing horizons

and you’re suddenly left staring

 

over the edge of eternity

in your ice-thin sneakers and ratty coat,

your mind its own extraordinary infinity.

Shrouded Meadow

Trapped sunbeams glide

down stacked leaves

far over our heads

& creep slowly toward

shade-blanketed skin;

 

your vision fades, lids heavy

as they resist the seduction of

whispering flame-dyed petals

(a natural bit of Monet

beset by cracked wood),

 

& my hands frolic, bursting

full with poppies & hydrangeas.

Our fingers interweave as my

daisy-chain crown splits apart:

wishes blown on the wind.

 

She Only Misses Him at Midnight

She believed that the heavens cut

precisely in half; that the celestial

sphere opened neatly along its seam

like a plastic children’s globe–that

we occupy only the empty hollow.

 

She believed that the bottom filled

with a sea around Andromeda–

an eternal punishment bred in

the deepest part of the universe–

the top left dry so that Cassiopeia

may freely witness the havoc she wrought.

She believed him when he proclaimed her

the most beautiful; when he denounced

 

the other’s messages and memories;

when he whispered a new story

for her to grasp– a story that glimmered.

She believed in fruit made of gold

trapped in dragon’s coils, wickedly

 

tantalizing in its gilded skin, worth

prideful kingdoms, audacious victories,

and the devastating competition– the

raging love– of two men. She believed in

pain and magic, loveliness and treachery,

as faithfully as she believed in the power

of the grief felt by a betrayed woman,

star-sculpted or otherwise.

 

She believed these things silently,

and only said aloud (to the rubbed-raw photo

in her hand and the winking sky above)

that belief cuts like fractured crystals:

with a beautiful shine.