I open myself to write and a space
spreads out around my being.
It is large enough to turn
my sighs into a whisper and my thoughts
into a gentle rain landing on everything,
no center, nothing to hold onto.
I don’t mind, yet the practice of poetry has a life
in my finger tips, a music in my spirit.
Like breath. Like what lives in the silence
between heartbeats. This moment
in all its ordinariness – rain, a bit of flute music,
an early dinner on the stove top,
the roll of tires along wet ground
just outside an open window –
asks for me to notice and record,
to feel the soft tick of time press forward
and not move at all, this same stunning
moment that always simply is.
I haven’t a path, not just now.
I have only the rise and fall of a notion,
a shadow, a not-quite-traceable love
settling on my hands, my shoulders,
the lanky forms of my growing children.
For now, this has to be enough.