Everyday Grace

I’m dredging up history, digging deep;

poking my nose into other writers’ closets

just so I can avoid telling you

your eyes are like stars, pools, sapphires; your lips

rose petals, butterfly wings, berries ripe and red.

There is no grace in what I have to say.

The grace has all been used.

You are the toothpaste stain on the rim of the sink,

an understood silence at the other end

of the phone. You are the poke in the ribs

that maintains perspective. Ours is no mail-order romance

on glossy catalog pages, no mall stroll

past jewelry stores leering with diamonds.

We speak in other things: a brief glance

over a child’s head, laundry washed and folded

without asking. We are the honest appraisal

written on crumpled paper and slid

across a pawn shop counter, a willing trade

of cupidity for love.

                                  More than the Sum

I’m not your usual bird-of-prey: a squint into the sun, a flinch

from the unexpected flit of dragonflies and time.

I weep hope and home and joy.

I am grit

in the rattling red bed

of a dusty pickup truck.

I fling foible and folly, practice sloth and bee.

Rusty square-headed nail, weathered grey board, discarded shard of violet glass –

all extrude from my skin, for I am

empty mine,

ghost town,

proud and silent mountain.

I want to remember four things:

            aspen leaves shushing the wind

                        the tangible voice of dry bone

                                    a baby’s milk-curdled breath

                                                the swell and dissolve of my body lying like a sideways

         figure eight, like the long, curved stretch of infinity.