Who is Thirsty Drowns

Time drips from a spoon, pooling light into a certain sweetness. Or maybe it's just spring's invitation to live. I am here, in the swollen river, rising around lamp posts and street signs – erasing trails and creeping up beneath bridges. Who is thirsty for light drowns in what she cannot swallow.

Don't tell my truth; allow me. Maybe writing with a limp benefits no one in the end. The ferns evince the intention to overtake the red and yellow tulips in both height and grandeur. The world cannot hold still and I am grateful.

We had chances and made choices – our moments gilding the multiverse yet adding up to nothing. This and other hilarities rising in the icy breath of May's morning.

Letting is the lesson.

At the greenhouse, the work pushes towards shipping. Almost 70,000 plants will pass through my fingers before it is time to lift, roll, load and send. Every day, every hour, every minute my body struggles with what it can no longer do. Yet pushing through the reminders of physical paucity, I am fully present.

No longer is there room for planning dinner or haiku or amputating “what-if” scenarios from a bleeding heart. Hours knotted in backbreaking bustle yields lush fields of infinite now.

Aching fingers and backs and feet and legs are the teacher.

You don't appear in the minutia anymore. Perhaps the lessening starts there – in the tiniest blue lace knitted between the rocky border of the garden, or in the softest drift of dogwood bracts on their way towards death . . . 

because it sure as hell isn't in the first warm night of spring, under a deafening moon and croony stars. . . 

or in the swaths of sunlight slanting shadows across a meadowy sea of hungry growth . . . 

and it is most certainly not in expanse of poetic theism scrawled in perfection across this reader's heart.

The universe is full of you.

Yet
this tiny jot
of dirt under my finger nails
is simply
God

In another life, this karmic flame burned the edges of a picture-perfect presage. And in this life, it is well on its way to finishing it all off.