no rudder. Sitting in the belly of it.
I had been waiting.
On unbended knee, on bended one. My
fists pounding cedar.
My voice carrying. My hope fed to
those tiger sharks. These hands
stretching towards a dead horizon. I
didn’t even have stars.
This is it. This is it.
I arrived anyways.
To the new land, unspoiled. Unsplit.
My bow moaning its own prayer into the
shoreline’s soil.
Wild apples falling like drums. The
sky waving to me,
then, holding my hand. I didn’t know,
but it had known.
Where I was meant for. How it must
carry the miracle of me,
saltwater wet and shivering, screaming
over water. To where I had to be.
There is lilac here like candy. A
sweetness in the wind itself.
I think the crickets already know me
by name. They don’t stop calling it.
I wonder if they’ve always known it,
passed down from their mothers.
An old woman, thick and strong as the
rhubarb around her,
nibbles sweet geranium, separates
raspberry from hull.
She doesn’t tell me her secrets, but
she shows me, leaf by leaf.
How the earth will hold you if you
just let it.
How the sheep are left to wander but
always find the light of home
in time for breakfast. How the
butterhead lettuce can grow large enough
to curl your body up to lay in its
creases. And sometimes you do.
How the glint off the sea aster can
predict the coming weather.
What else is there to learn in this
life other than the language of flowers?
At night I sleep alone, unbothered, in
a cottage swallowed by ivy.
What could be better than this place?
A land that recognized me before I did.
An earth that has fought to keep me. A
life big enough to build a home.
Talk only of their fathers. How can
they not see it, with their faces
angled up to the sky, their elbows
sunk into the good dirt?
This rich earth of sweetness, of
mushrooms, of fiddle ferns.
The fish eye sucked through the lips.
The heart of the lonely hare.
Tender-grown moss beneath them as a
bed.
All sum to something larger than a man
with a bow,
being given more than he’s earned.
Every time he uses the word harvest
to take a life,
or calls the beaver slung over his
shoulder it,
he loses three years off his own. How
does he not know?
In the taking, he is taken, just the
same.
I’ve seen a man make a lamp out of a
mushroom.
I haven’t seen a man lay down on a
cliff near the sea and cry
for the gifts of life he’s been given.
The heart is a wild thing. And this
island is a mother,
where the sun found his face
regardless,
where he was held, automatically,
always,
he never even had to ask.