But mostly I think about love.
I think about you. I think about time
as the ocean and our stories as boats
made of paper. The fragility of our stories,
the unlikeliness of love, and the tomboy
certainty of a childhood in Arkansas
where I swallowed back down my fear
and felt things secretly, then not at all.
I think about the ocean, the engineering
within ocean waves. I feel the technicality
of my body as a part of the waves, the pull
and suck of the tides. The moon as a kind
of kindness masterminding the landscape.
I feel Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer providing
rhythm for just how the living will remember
the dead. I swear on my own skeleton that
I can see the hidden architecture inside living
things in the natural world. I remember darkness.
I remember my mother, the way she held her jaw
like stone and maintained that rigid grip
even as she was dying. I think about her.
I think about you. And my words as bricks
that sink deeper and deeper, as bricks dreaming
their way back into the earth.
