While I’m waiting, I am distilling neon signs in a drop of rain, nearby the rushing of the world’s many neurons, held by the weight of stillness: the back and forth and back of this daily game of hide-and-seek.
Waiting in the Rain
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Poems
A Missionary’s Lament
Stories from all over the world hold that wayfarers, especially sailors, often got tattoos of swallows. It was, after all, the swooping swallows against the blue sky they would see well before they could see familiar shores. Swallows meant they were home. When I got my first tattoo, I already had a foot in Costa Rica and Georgia. I was coming to terms with the hard truth that having made a home in two countries meant I’d never “come home” without leaving another.
Rain
After the longest dry season, you pour yourself into the cracks in the clay and your overflowing, lasting long after the clouds have passed us by, is the color green. Hope, after so many days wondering when you might arrive, that the days of the hunger season are numbered. That tomorrow I will not ache from sowing in dry ground.
Prayer for the Artist
Sister, I see your arms are trembling. Brother, I see your tears, your stone-set face, how this fire rattling in your bones, shut up no longer, has burned you in the telling.
Midnight Thoughts
Midnight thoughts surround me, messy and monstrous, so I tread carefully. I slip between the forests built of whispers of words, searching for possibilities.
Spaceless Race
I run a race that no one can see, but too often I lag behind. I watch the leaves glide on the wind and wonder what it’s like to bide time. When I pause to take a breath, the wind shoves an unchecked task list into my clenched hand.
The Stars Are Singing
Earth, an infant of giant size, rocked gently by the ocean’s rise; calm, unpeopled, its surface lies. Above are spread the lightening skies with all the joy of the planets ringing; together the morning stars are singing.
The Idea of Flowers
Each bee that’s crystalline with spring’s golden frost (each filament gleaming with the idea of flowers) carries with it the possibility of true abundance—the hope of things not yet seen by the manifold eyes of the wild world.
Mosaic
They say these years are where you find yourself—but mind yourself, they don’t tell you where to look. I tried to search in mirrors, but I fear they seem far fiercer when scattered scars and freckles are the only baited hooks. I’ve watched the windows of my soul to catch a glimpse beyond their gates, but the eyes that watched me back were quick to bicker and deceive.
The Man Who Lives a Few Roads Down
I know his face, I know his frown, the man who lives a few roads down. His walk didn’t change, though he grew older; his bent back and hunched shoulders.
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