No Waiting at the Mouth

In a strained breech of leaden sky, sunlight turns tiny flurries into dancing diamond motes. Each pine reveals its diadem as halo – illuminated – holy – revealed.

Snow
without footprint
or ripple or blemish
welds wounds of the land
with immaculacy.

For a few moments, any sound is heresy.

My gaze is heresy.

Winter buries what dies and for the first time in decades, there is no waiting at the mouth of the cave, weeping for daffodils. I clear bird feeders and feed people. I gather dark hours as bounty, grieved not by various despairs and calamities, but instead, nibble at rayless edges until I digest them into light.

I've gone beyond Calvary.

It's the only way.

Pain's successor brings January to pass under billows of curling woodsmoke. After midnight I pace throughout the house, needing sleep more like a bear than a human. It's an honesty hour, somehow easier to face ill-fitting truths. One truth is that Love has no womb or grave. It reveals Itself as present and alive, and one can merely soften into it or not. Dance with It or not. Love It back or not.

'Tis Customary as we part
A Trinket - to confer -
It helps to stimulate the faith
When Lovers be afar -

'Tis various – as the various taste -
Clematis – journeying far -
Present me with the single Curl
Of her Electric Hair

~ Emily Dickinson

With a healed heart, I think of Love often, and as often as I do, the River in my chest brings to surface all the trinkets shared.

The River reaches to my Mouth -
Remember - when the Sea
Swept by my searching eyes - the last -
Themselves were quick - with Thee!