Somewhere, there is a screen door.
Warm air breathes through gauze
And a voice from a kitchen
Says “Come in, there’s more, I’m in here.”
Somewhere, there’s a loving black dog,
And a loyal brown dog,
And a faithful white dog,
And a dog with gilt angel thumb prints
above his butterfly antennae brows.
There is a porch where they snore together
Under the plumbago bloom sky,
Until all the cows have come home.
Dinner there is daily served
On a duck-patterned plate,
peace meals dished by darling palms.
That world beyond these halls.
A day laying warmed by a sun
That knows not the hateful march of a clock.
Somewhere, there’s a woman in a dress,
her soft, familiar hands
Diamond ring deep in dough and laughter.
Life’s unrest cannot touch her,
And her music is all the harmony and home
Of a fine bone china cup
finding its place on the saucer.
She meets my shadows with her light,
like biscuit meets tea,
like tea meets hot water.
She is no longer an ‘only’
but now overflowing:
A child grown and intimate with knowing,
that there,
She is and was always
someone’s beloved daughter.
She lives in me and away from me,
unbound by death,
To steep the long, endless day of heaven
in a love whose fragrant scent and steam
can still be felt across the veil. By all of us.
Like breath.
In my head, as she holds my face in her hands -
When I dream of him and it breaks me but never the fall -
I wonder if that is all I am really here to do,
for myself:
wait for her to meet me, somewhere beyond this.
Somewhere kindness is a cake set on a table
where every elbow is welcome.
Can she see me when I curse?
When I burn and rage?
Does she close her ears to the yelling,
my salt-bitter telling her loving God
That he feels like a bully above this empty page,
blowing me away like dust from my own attic shelf.
Does she know I’m broken,
Too tired of the cage:
my inexplicably ineligible, love-bruised neck,
Exhausted and unsteady,
to not be on that next page -
The place where she is - already.
Can she hear me ask against the shower tiles,
Before the lie of the day’s capable face
Has been painted on,
When the joke of my heart will be over.
It feels like it never will.
In a box, in the room across from me,
In this world I still am where she is not,
There are laces and strings
Still wound to the width of her hand.
Tomorrow I will try again
to get up, want the day and mean it;
To reclaim the land of me,
With renewed belief
in this nettled grace it now stings to hold.
But today, just today,
I would give anything for her to reach through,
with love of old,
and pull me between
The craft shop sewing box pearls she left behind:
A music box lid upon a place where any kind of love
Is never found wanting.
She keeps my cheeks in her hands
as though I am the moon,
A little lost in a place of daylight.
“Is it all just a thing to be endured?” I ask.
“Is my path even a path or just
Somewhere to wait until
The sadness is done?”
Her joy, bar none, is a birdsong
In the trees on the hill.
Already her answers, against my wounded grain,
Are known to me in this quiet,
where nothing is simple and
Nothing is still.
“Waiting isn’t living,” she says,
With a distant squeeze of my heart's hand.
“It’s only in the fall from the highest height
We learn the uneasy weight
of compassion and thanks
For the soft places we had to land,
when all we were was stars, and
All we had was night.”
© Erin Brown, 2024
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