Dig

“I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.”

Li-Young Lee, The Gift

One of the complications of managing decline was nostalgia … this self-deceiving mood

Only children think one person can ever wholly save another.

… and perhaps, in some imagined utopia, … she could be met on even, common ground with a clever soul

So much of life is delusion.

– (ZS)

I Am Trying to Love the Whole World

is such a public display of affection, a flex even,

one the lone magpie staring back from the backside

of a badly shorn sheep finds suspect. I flap my arms

& blink three times. Bad luck to glimpse just one.

Magpie being the only creature rumored to have

refused the ark, preferring to perch high on the mast

& curse the rain. I too keep rewinding this mixtape

of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon

or a tent pole. The world stays busy out there, hammering

itself into softer ground with a flat rock & yet, the sound

of wind softly shaking the stars awake. My world

I have missed your mouth, your morning

breath coming round the wild garlic, your fat

lilacs forgetting to be the flower of death.

– Jenny Brown, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World

Nothing today hasn’t happened before: 
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him, 
fed him, left him to his cage for the day 
closing just now. My eye drifts 
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling, 
as they do, in a late fall light that melts 
against the turning oak and smelts 
its leaves bronze. 
                             Before you left, 
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face; 
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse 
against my own, your scent familiar 
as a thousand evenings. 
                                       Another time, 
I might have dismissed as hunger 
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing, 
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company 
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling, 
supple, misses the wind.

– Donika Kelly, I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house.

we are carried. 
in bellies. in arms. 
in love. in hope. 
in caskets. in urns. 
in grief. in memories. 
our whole lives 
and into the next 
we are carried

Sara Ria via IG