More Honest Than Vows

Learning language in order to read One book . . .

We travel through a copse of meadow shrubs and leggy grasses unto a shared opening.

A heron rises on golden air from the shallows leaving only rippled hints of what was.

The watcher and the watched, intersecting and calling it love.

It's too cold for crickets and the frogs are finding a place, deeper.

I've collected the wood for burning but it's a little too damp to burn easily.

How terrible to hold the coming winter in the same hands as acorns and pinecones!

And yet . . . acorns and pinecones!

Where we arrive, out of the distance, the woods are familiar and filled with the songs of birds we know by heart.

Only, it is time that allows for shadows and seasons and the reclaiming of fallen things.

It is time that shackles the body to days and longing and the parameters of light.

Accordingly, that learned language becomes a knowing gaze.

And such a look pulls silk across my shoulders, shuddering to the floor.

More intimate than life – more honest than vows.

Black bean soup and a struggling fire in the fireplace.

Woodsmoke, an “I love you” . . . and I do.