woodandhoney

If I had known you when you were an infant

I would have looked at you and smiled

I would have hummed you a lullaby and played in the meadows with you.

If I had been your friend when you were a child

I would have shared my lunch with you, climbed trees with you, built forts with you.

If I had known you when you were in college

We would have gone to football games together, had study sessions together and art nights.

I wish I had known you earlier so I could have asked you out to dinner,

slept in with you and had late Sunday breakfasts with you.

But I didn’t.

I know you now with the gulf of 20 years between us so I smile when you talk about your wife and quietly drink my ice water.

Do you remember that day we were at the park?

I was watching you run through the water sprinklers

It was windy and hot

and mostly empty that late afternoon

but there was a mother watching her young daughter

and I heard the mother say “Go”

So the girl moved,

a dance across the water and concrete,

small leaps and points and pirouettes

And there was such grace in her thin sturdy limbs.

There was such delight in her form of boundless movement

Like gentle lightning in a bottle

(If such a thing can exist)

I have never known that type of beauty,

My own grace confined to the skirt I wore,

my own piece of sky,

Long folds of fabric billowing around my legs like sails

But still, there was this girl I would never know

The mother’s smile

and the dance through the water.

A dark pink bathing suit as majestic as any evening gown,

spin after spin,

her long brown hair swirling around her like a halo,

her body shining like a light

The poem you don’t know you gave me won’t leave me alone

so I carry it around as I ignore the dishes,

I feel its pressure each time I go to a light switch,

each time I run the faucet

I think of packing it up and mailing it to you

I taste it during my first cup of coffee and while I contemplate my second

I hear it when I finally notice that one of my windows is trying to tell me it has rained again this morning

I tell this poem to go outside,

but it digs deep into me,

with claws I didn’t know you had

I couldn’t sleep so I crept downstairs to the backyard

I sat in that swing under the Palapa and

I wondered what I could possibly have to say to this world

That it doesn’t already know

That it doesn’t show me how to do ten times better

What do I know of being in flight?

How can I explain vast to the moon?

Or rich to the soil that nourishes roots?

I think of love

What knowledge can four limbs hold that the fir tree doesn’t already know?

I only woke up to say I want to better love this world

I couldn’t sleep when I was burning with it

I couldn’t sleep when my body had the urge to run through all my other lives

I try to still my breathing.

I want to learn to listen.

I want to learn to let go