Tag Archives: happiness

Before peonies, late March 2020

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Before peonies, late March 2020

One day you walk out your door, unhappy.
Your eyes roll with anger, looking anywhere

for relief, but find none. The agitation dislodges
a lash which falls, unmissed like a happy moment

not worth your time, to the earth by the walkway.
A season passes. The last week of March

you walk out your door, unhappy, head down,
your unhappiness fortunately angled so you see them.

They rise like something going backwards in time.
Like how memories grow. Curious, inevitable.

Snakes rolled over by countless tires, crumpled
yet rising to unheard music, enchanted maybe.

Each morning they elongate, uncrinkle, dance
slowly toward the sun. The crumpled snakeheads

fill with — what? — the moment you discarded
and the countless moments it created in turn,

filling like a reverse venom, crowding out the poison
tooth of regret, bursting open, these are all the

effects of your happiness, countless effects of being,
weightless and regal, dancing in the slightest breeze

or is that you dancing, crushed snake of a soul,
forgiving the wheel and opening to the sun?

Happy

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happy

Happy

Even if it weren’t happening now
As in a happiness in the past

Or a happiness anticipated
It can be read like a poem

Fixed in the climate of stars
Visible or invisible above us.

Not touchable but undeniably
Touching us like a breeze or shadow.

It’s not gratitude. Happiness gave its
Train ticket or last drink or favorite book

to gratitude and even if gratitude didn’t
Read the book it carried it on the train

And paged through it. Of course you can’t
Be grateful for a drink unless you drink it.

Gratitude’s empty glass. Book as a coaster.
The years of spilled thoughts. Happiness

Like apprehending the earth’s curvature
Or finding the denominator of God.

Whether you believe in it or not
It will keep saving you.

Happiness

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Happiness

 

I know these  petals unless pressed
in your own life’s book will not survive
and even then as a shadow of love’s shape
or unless adrift in your river’s endless flow
come to outline any eddy worth circling
and even then could gutter off a bank or
regret’s cold stone where air
tears at life’s evaporating edge
or unless emblazoned with wing
of robes softly opening to heat and
even then burn only as a blindfolded
assurance of need, need:
or unless left alone a becoming
drifts around it, swirls it down just so
like snow a mile up lands finely
at the foot of the sky