An eggy disaster. An opulently abandoned theatre. A jade box full of childhood fears. A library book overdue & despised. A highway beautification with a rerun of the full moon. An informercial they would really like us to watch, in formalwear. Their aunties
who each bring just a thimble of thunder. Their grandmothers who bring us geodes to crack: a jack, a jenny: Twins! Reasonably priced dental plans! Fondue & dipping breads but we’re already full. Other birds but we don’t care about them. Words
we’ve spoken to our parents that we would take back. That we wouldn’t. The blue pen that exploded. What bees wear at night when they want to feel sexy. The math of Halley’s Comet. A miracle but we just couldn’t accept, no no, that’s far too much, you’re too kind, no.
Jasmine tea. Property tax. War but they see our hands are already full of it. So. The notion that if we mourned every single person killed just today. Learned the name & wept the name. If we had the body. To grieve every body.
Friends I am here to modestly report seeing in an orchard in my town a goldfinch kissing a sunflower again and again dangling upside down by its tiny claws steadying itself by snapping open like an old-timey fan its wings again and again, until, swooning, it tumbled off and swooped back to the very same perch, where the sunflower curled its giant swirling of seeds around the bird and leaned back to admire the soft wind nudging the bird’s plumage, and friends I could see the points on the flower’s stately crown soften and curl inward as it almost indiscernibly lifted the food of its body to the bird’s nuzzling mouth whose fervor I could hear from oh 20 or 30 feet away and see from the tiny hulls that sailed from their good racket, which good racket, I have to say was making me blush, and rock up on my tippy-toes, and just barely purse my lips with what I realize now was being, simply, glad, which such love, if we let it, makes us feel.
live in the layers 