Tag Archives: healing

The Instructions

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The Instructions

You unfolded the instructions like a bedsheet
And smoothed out the words with your palm.

First we identify all the parts, you said
To find the thing that’s missing. Or things.

It’s hardly ever just one thing.
The tools in the instructions, you pointed out,

We’d never seen before. Might have to make
Them out of scraps of other things we have.

Eventually that toolbox will have everything you need
but for now we just need a level and some sandpaper

So you can sand this grief to a shape that fits
the frame. Of what, I said. You read from the

Instructions: of that gap you fear so much.
If you look in that envelope included in the box

You’ll find the hinges of your life. You helped
Me sand and sand and mount the door

So oddly shaped and hear the bolt slide smooth
Like a finger through a ring.You folded the instructions

So the last line was all that showed and placed it
On my palm. What’s left, I said, the door is built.

You take your time, you said, and then walk through.

Six late winter mornings

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Six late winter mornings

1.
It’s the underlined day
On the calendar of forgiveness.
But I cannot make the call.

2.
I get up early
To let the dogs out but

It’s too cold–they stay on the porch
As if waiting for a ride to pull up

Or a drink. I walk to the back yard
And relieve myself

Against the frosted grass.

3.
The black rabbit
Lounges in his hut

By the family vegetable garden.
He often rode on the back of our dog.

One day he lay on his side,
Not waiting for the morning

Or for us to find him.
He was finished and he went.

Leaving only a stiff black shroud
And the sound of birds.

Winter leaves like that.

4.
In our blizzard-crafted snow cave
We almost died

But the snow plow missed us as we hid.
Years later, my childhood friend Marty

in his capacity as a civil servant
of the public works

Tore up a curb with his plow right
Across the street from

Where we’d once schemed
How to pay for the garage window

We broke with a barrage of snowballs.

5.
After an early March storm
I snuck out before my son woke

To make lumps in the snow
Like snake coils surfacing.

Over breakfast I swore
I saw the Loch Ness Snow Monster

Out the bay window in the plow drift:
When we went to investigate

He discovered a large egg
Of ice, snow, and dirt

By the edge of the plowed pile.
He demanded we take it inside.

We put it in the freezer
To see what would hatch.

6.
Spring grows over the winter
Like a scar

The hurt season’s swelling
Diminishes

We almost over-reach for it
As if we prefer being sore

Over forgetting, a cloud
Ceiling over empty blue sky.

Valentine song via a metal plate in my wife’s wrist

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Valentine song via a metal plate in my wife’s wrist

Indivisible. Foreign. Tongue with no words.
I steady you. All the while

Time’s seven screws turn inertia inside
Out, articulating slender sunbeams.

The heat that holds us together
Bores through bone, bonds.

I am not what broke you
But I will help you bear the weight.

You will heal around me.
My unity with you is when

I am forgotten and your thumb’s
Unthinkingly nimble

With a pen, a paintbrush
A doorknob, a drink, a day.

Dark Reactions

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Dark Reactions

In the night the unseen stretches out.
Grass growing just before dawn.

I think I see the moon in my window
but it is the ceiling lamp’s reflection.

At lights out, the windowframe relaxes.
We spread downhill, and into the air a giant

centimeter. The real moon shakes hands
with every cloud. Even without eyes it

does not miss a single one. When morning
light crawls down from the treetops

and you are out with the dogs the grass
cannot believe how much you have grown.

Nothing gets done by paying attention.