If I Told You

If I Told You, Courtney Marie Andrews

-didn't hate this, definitely still have to change my strings. 

Lily

Lily 

In the French restaurant you asked me if you

would have to eat snails,

And I told you “no” but there might be steak with sauce.

The French and their sauces which - if separated - represent failure, lack of intuition;

If intact - the glorious balance of being unbroken.

But alas, you do not like steak with sauce,

Or separation - or divorce - or the feeling of not being so young and so able. 

Your freckle, fine face is just here and 

Still so frail but lights at the prospect of cracking the brûlée. 

Lily, it will not be that separation can be remedied with an extra egg yolk,

Or the cloying of effort and awkward whisking conversations, 

But it will be necessary at some point 

To accept defeat and crack the shell and admit

That life is sweetest when it is barely burnt.

Maybe I'll post music here?

 

the bowl in me

 

For all that I hold which is precious

My mother’s hand: 

Weather-worn, small,

Folded in mine, ridged,

Sculpted by moment, and love.

My second baby:

Cupped captive in the womb, 

Kept safe, mysterious, hiccups,

Enveloped expectations.

My beloved:

Woven and wonderful relief 

with the pain of belonging

To each and every tide together.

The chin of my dog:

Gray and toothy, pleading,

almond-eyed trust I cannot 

Imagine departing in so short a time.

A raspberry:

Plucked plump and filled

With light and love, sunny seeds

That help a sweet-sour life to grow.  

The perpetual heart:

Pinned to all things yet

Fleeting as all hearts are,

viscera-bound to beat the everlasting.

My heart.

 

March.

Poem: A Lens

-Malcolm Guite

That All, which always is all everywhere
—Donne

Not that we think he is confined to us,
Locked in the box of our religious rites,
Or curtained by these frail cathedral walls,
No church is broad or creed compendious
Enough. All thought’s a narrowing of sites.
Before him every definition fails,
Words fall and flutter into emptiness,
Like motes of dust within his spaciousness.

Not that we summon him, but that he lends
The very means whereby he might be known,
Till this opacity of stone on stone,
This trace of light and music on the air,
This sacred space itself becomes a lens
To sense his presence who is everywhere.