The crows and woods both beckoned me
With different calls, both clarion
To, “Come outdoors now; come outdoors,”
Where sunlight glanced off silver trees
With bark like mirrors, emptying
The forest of all hidden things.
Where shadows have no place to flee,
Not everything is as it seems.
One child closes every open door to maintain order
While another opens each one up while she’s exploring.
There are a hundred different ways to spin a fact into a story
And the way you tell a child who she is and who she’s not
Becomes a threshold she must cross
Before she sees that it’s a doorway.
Balanced on a thin line
Between presence and erasure,
There’s a face you cannot turn away from,
Eyes that still embrace you.
When the raven tops the maple tree
Whose yellow leaves are raining,
All your memories of amber light
Are loosened from their casings.
And the voice that calls insistently
May speak of love or danger
As it draws you up and toward the things
You cannot look away from.
At the door to my car in the parking garage
Four stories up in a concrete mirage
The church bells rang out thirty times as we kissed—
One for each day we’ve known all the years that we missed
Looking at you I can always see two
And they’re joined in the back of my mind where I’ve learned
That your depth is not something my eyes can observe
But like all profound things, it is only inferred
It’s only three days until I see you again.
That’s enough time for God to descend
To Hell and then come back again
Carrying silence that no soul can measure—
The space between words that holds them together.
It’s only three days until I see you again.
That’s enough time for these words to befriend
The silence in you that no soul can measure—
The space between us that holds us together.
Sometimes just a slant of light
An essence on the breeze
Can make you feel what freedom is,
But freedom’s not those things.
Love can be a bit like that—
A look, a thought, a dream
That points toward something so much more
Than what it really is.
Attention is what builds a bridge
Between this world and that.
A tension on the ropes that holds
The space between the slats.
Deep in your eyes I have glimpsed many rooms.
I will take off my shoes and I’ll follow you in
Though I don’t know the way
Through the maze of your thoughts
To the place you’ve prepared,
I know you will come again and take my hand
And I hope that you know where you go I will follow.
