We opened the old trunk,
The time-latched smell of the past.
Oceanic mystery of folded linens.

Old photographs
Of long-lost friends.
I acquaint myself with austerity.

My father’s faded
Wartime papers,
Say even less than he did.

We bring fresh flowers
To an old grave—
Her youth blossoms there.

Opening the album
A photo falls to the floor
Along with the four corners of time.

Cleaning out mom’s house,
In the end, only our memories
Remain unboxed.

Reading my father’s
Handwritten letters,
My eyes beget the man.

On the shore a tree
with eagle’s nest,
the wingspan of the wind
soars over the lake.

It’s raining eyes made of snow and rain
the rain sees everything
the snow freezes everything the eyes see
all the pictures on our walls are weeping
dogs moan with human voices
our faces are drowning in a river
it is the saddest thing in the world
to see a child licking the eye of time

The heart must be bigger than an ocean
it must be bigger than the sun
it must wear elephant tusks
and with heavy legs
march slowly toward its own extinction

I woke up to snow on every rooftop.
How far I must have travelled
to be in the dream of this moment.

It’s not my anxiety; it’s the anxiety that’s out there.
It crept through my cracks and opened my doors.
It’s not my emptiness; it belongs to them.
I’m not staring at a blank page, but a blank state.

The water is replenished
The blood quickened
Spirit is reanimated
Aging wine imagines

The streams are alive
The rivers are flowing
The ocean is its waves
Hope is reborn

Thoughts are watered
Flowers their coalescing
The forest deepens
Love is refreshed

Air is resurrected
Wind enlivened
Parks are abloom
Peace is pleased

From what I know about space,
its rock gardens of unimaginable distances,
the speeds at which the immense occurs,
fires where blackness burns,
ice where desolations dwell,
the curve that confounds space and time
and gravity reaching out like God’s arm
to hold the earth in folds of cloud,
we, on this lyrical miracle of a planet,
smiling at the most distant flame
in the blue blackness of falling night,
fly through the briefest of measures,
love in a breath and then we are gone,
thankful for the fire and ice,
for any moment of earthly reflection,
for the children of our children,
the missing mass of being absent at home.