Threading the Lungs

The sun setting behind my shoulders caused the screen to cast a gridded shadow over the pages. Words hopscotched from one tiny golden square to the next while I thought about how unusual it was to have the sun at my back this time of day. Westerly light is warming, sure. Yet it is the east's edge that slices corseted breaths. With long strokes he butters sleeping fields and threads the lungs of pines and oak. And after supper he teases silken indigo between his finger and thumb, gently coaxing the cover for fireflies and french kissing. What is unseen still has an indelible hand. I write around and under and through as it holds me by the throaty gasp.

My bed is busy with books these days. Blankets are heavy with words as they lie undisturbed beneath the weight. Work in the gardens has slowed to a pruning maintenance. What task can now equal the communion of green and black and golden mana? I watch the heron bow into the pewter sky at his feet. Though I am half-hidden, he lets me know I am fully seen. To consider his grace is to also be stunned by one's own recklessness. #sorrynotsorry #thisisme #love

The numbing creek rushes over my feet and around my ankles causing a shackling ache to clamp my bones. The constriction causes a headache as I move with kitten steps over river rock and shards of driftwood. Sometimes it doesn't pay to get your feet wet; sometimes it's more romantic in theory is all I'm saying. But summer does open up all kinds of space that might have been too condensed beforehand. Summer does breed magic and symphonic winds and that ineffable holiness that speaks for us when we cannot tell the truth. Summer can't help herself is what I mean.

Lucille Clifton and Strand and Oliver. Peepers and bats and owls. My spine bends towards the extravagant expanse. How I arch over the marriage of certainty and the lymphatic; how I finally collapse under the cumulous tide of racing clouds against untouchable blue! These are the words that are making room for light. For east. For love.