Since We Left Off

:: An almanac of the last months, in images and poem fragments ::

The name of my child is sweet berry on thorn bush.

Red earth falling on the mountain road winding between contentment and quaking hunger.

The first bluster of snow makes you think of the woman you love born in the far north.

How the skein of silk thread pulled between her fingertips stretches and breaks as she leans in 
and out of tenderness.

Watch how her palms rise, supplicant to the falling sky, how they fill like dark branches with snow, while on the ridge clouds billow and bleed, sweep and flurry.

Deep under the frozen surface I call doubt, the water teems.

Fertile muck, and it’s all I can do to remember that if I held each seed to the light it wouldn’t be in the dark where it belongs.

Across the thick planks of the table, wheat berries scatter like so many loaves of unbaked bread.

I’ve been calling and calling you to eat, and I wish you would listen, because life did not open the door from your mother’s womb so you would be hungry.

Yes that is spring hatching between your hands. The high trees full of singing. The world whispering soften, lean back.

Do not speak a little longer.

Look up!

That warm light is the sun that loves you. This feast is the one you wrote the recipe for long, long ago.

Hold your cup of trembled tea, grown and cut and scalding good.