I want to build a place where gravity
does not always win. Unlike the sun,
the moon really does rise and set around us.
I want to watch the wind in the trees
The soft stone of the heart thrown
Across the clouds’ silence.
When they speak
The words grow flowers
As many years in my life
Now as weeks in the year
From my heart came the sound
Of the late May blue jay grown large
Through your fingers feel the handless night
Passing it will not obscure my palm’s river
Where you swam with your children
I know the shape of my death’s shadow
Like a stick in the water it bends across
The invisible insistence halfway
Submerged or like a stone caressed
So long it has no shape you know only
How it feels in your palm you know
Only the shadow it casts when it is gone
I left everything in a hotel room on my way to another
An eight year old boy rode his new bike with no training wheels
On the street I caught a blue pouch thrown by a stranger
I knew by how it settled into my palm it was a string of rosary beads
A butterfly fighting the gentle morning breeze on the hill again
and again to land on a dead squirrel and feed
Two early fireflies high in the ash tree’s night canopy
where earlier in the day hundreds of white flowers
Floated down, tiny parachutes onto new grass
The moon sparking off a tin roof like a match
My wife lay her head on my chest to listen to my heart
as I awoke from a dream of laughing
