Still-Warm Sheets of His Power

Good morning, Spring – with your honey dawn and rioting birdsong. You taste like every gift on the verge of being realized as your yellow light is gulped by daffodils.

Your mist comes as late frost leaves for heaven.

Or, it comes as one balmy day gives way

to the hard truth of March
as a lover, reluctant to leave
still-warm sheets of his power.

Your wild chives fill me as if I am kneeling at the communion rail; I have a chance to be whole.

*

It will snow a few more times. My back bends over lifeless remnants of last year's largesse to clear a little more room for sunlight. For me, there is such a thing as growing strength in the body in order to work the land in the coming months. It takes time. I'm sore for a few days after clearing death and uncovering untouched growth. My skin burns a little in the fresh light, but it emits the intoxicating incense of sunlight and new warmth.

The senses wake. Even the acrid clearing of death is a soul-salve. Jays scream into the air but it seems like they never have anything new to say. Tree shadows move from the swelling creek, to the sleepy garden, over the gazebo and bird feeders, and finally stretching long across the back deck into twilight. Hour by hour a throbbing sentience speaks of the season and the life to come. Die, rise, repeat.

*

There is a wound I am healing. It can be argued that wounds are perception...they are not real in the sense that the thinking mind is malleable to one's interpretation and self-informed context. But sometimes it is first helpful to identify what hurts before sewing it all back together.

Twice now I have fallen under a spell of what felt like a significant relationship whereby I was given glimpses of the eternal – the unending oneness of that which cannot be grasped without reflection of the other – only to find that I had created this perception myself. It was a oneway street leading away from something more true. More grounded.

I am consumed by winter or spring, the micro moments of love and growth, instead of the macrocosm of all the season at play together in a year – in a decade – in centuries.

What I see and feel in any given relationship tricks me into happiness or even the feeling of divinity. In contrast, what the other feels makes me the soup du jour.

The first time I felt this, it took me over a decade to process. The second time stings like ripping a band aid off tissue paper skin. God, it hurts. And the instinct to blame myself becomes yet another bandage to apply to the now, fresher wound. It still hurts like hell, but I can dress the wound immediately and reflect not on the injury itself, but on the unhealed child forgetting her name.

Why do I need to give myself away?

*

For now, I will dig and prepare the way of summer.

At summer's end
I will mourn
the passing of verdant light
and warm, starry nights.

In autumn I will fall
with dying colors
to sleep in the tomb
January made for me.

And I will wake
like snowdrops and crocus
when the time is right
to grow again.