I

"White flowers are the most fragrant,"
She said.
Her eyes. 

Have You

Have you given me permission to be very brave?
Your leaves have opened inches since
This morning.

Days of Heaven

I can't
Sing,
I can't
Speak.
I will go somewhere and become
Lost
So you can find me.

For the Old Woman and her Granddaughter in the Park

White candytuft on your
Doorstep.

I now
Know where you live.

And Then, Remembering an Old Promise, I Decided to Walk Under Trees More Often.

Hope deferred, like the waning moon,

Will silently wax back in expectant surrender. Luminous, invincible, even more tender. Kindness and respect without sugar, and suddenly every surface shines.

Jupiter and Venus were a sign to us, unknowingly binding brother, sister, mother in the same expectation.

And joy, and love, were so close they buckled the sky. 

Palazzo Simoncelli

“Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within.”

In eleven, not completion, these columns rise and sigh out, give me time. See a small thread winding through my side; in contemplation find a silent, iridescent solace. Hear words beyond the language of the skin, of which skin plays a part. Press against these pillars, and align. Pass beside them, and begin to long for purity past safety, joy beneath pain. Breathe from the corners of this rectangle sky, for the first time.

Belonging to a place is a delicate state.

These stanchions, like the trees of home, smell dry of smoke and lichen. Smooth against the lips, too great to throw the arms around. Still, a love requited.

Force is required for stillness. In calm allow the terror of a conscience, the comfort of a rule. Be queen, be fool. Find truth deeper than its own façade, its own sincerity. Grow within this womb of clarity.

God does no thing in halves.

Quote: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 91.

Bernini's Triton Fountain, Rome

Space and openness. Beginning to love – do I love?

This city. Dropped back in(to) silence today.

I see things I think I know or have seen before. The world is too large for me, so I must fix on something. Please let it be You, Only, Jesus. I have nothing to say. So help me speak. Green, loss, understanding. A greater and a less. Rest from trying. Find a ladder to my treehouse attic gold.  Only sunlight makes the walls worth seeing. I accept you. Hear this. My flesh is like the oil on this board. There is nothing lovelier than your arm. I will leave Rome with a few strands of my hair, sailed out the window.

This glance is soul-closed but sunny. This silence, enigmatic. Ripe to be expunged at dinner tables with milk running, wine running. Understand the courage of this gaze, my cowardice. My undeveloped demurring. This is nothing to say except everything that matters, and we don’t know where to begin. 

So I will not be afraid.

What will last? What candy-bright will loosen in the wind, and shred in sunlight? Glitter by my side. Renew me. A place for birds to nest in. Stones seem cleaner than they are. Be patient in this patient day, and wash away.

Women carry roses. Men wear leather, scarves. Noise is constant but there are rarely billboard signs. 

Caramel yellow, slate gray, warm marbled white, salmon tan.

I never feel safely alone among strangers – will this be a first? I don’t tend to like such public places, but now, I think, I could be happy in Jerusalem. Your city for a garden. Your very stones are precious.