Mt. Lemmon
There are places that reach out,
beat in the soft wrist where pulse lies.
Pine-sapped places where shadows lengthen at dusk
and remain after others shorten and disappear.
Nestled in a campfire and honeysuckle clearing,
atop the Santa Catalina Mountains,
a one-room cabin with eight shuttered windows
and a field stone fireplace waits
forty years to find us.
From a cane-seated porch rocker, I watch
my four-year-old weave through clumps of Douglas fir
and ponderosa pine—her arms stretched out like wings.
Nearby, my son digs rocks from the moist earth.
A swish of wind releases pine-needled showers
onto their sun-bleached hair and shoulders.
They fling them off, then bend to gather
Indian paintbrush and mountain lupine—poking
red and purple heads through a quilt of coral bells. The sky,
a blue cotton bowl, holds the scene like a snow globe.
Now, thirty-five years later, I seize that globe
and shake myself back into that brief moment of pine needles,
wildflowers and lives that were never mine for the keeping.
Their father has lost this memory to Alzheimer’s and I
understand lives speed by if we don’t brake to slow them down.
Defying time, I return to that place where the sky is big
and the children are small, and their father smiles
as he captures them on film. Today, I reach out and trap the wind—
hold that globe steady enough to feel its pulse beat against my fingers.
And for one, breathless moment, memory restores and
pine needles hang, suspended, before they fall.
Wildflowers
In the finite days of the wildflowers
lovers abandon everything for beauty.
Leave work and other distractions
to stand in awe of these tiny blossoms,
miraculously resurrected and sprinkled
like candy-colored raindrops
on the shadowy, woodland floor.
Knowing hope belongs to the landscape,
they sprawl out in patches of violets,
sapphire petals, downy as the blue silk
of a hummingbird’s throat.
And there is nothing anyone would ever do
to stop this loveliness from unfolding.
But one season bleeds into the next
and what nurtures can also strip away.
Soon the wildflowers will
fold in their perfect petals and disappear
into the pine-scented earth.
Only their memory will flicker
across the quiet face of time.
Having believed the world was solid,
not so beautiful and fragile as this,
one lover, riddled with longing,
understands she will see this spring,
unveiling for the remainder of her life.
Only the religious believe in edges,
as if a clear boundary between one thing
and another is proof of God.
But this love has no boundaries.
Her body is a perfect map,
a place where emptiness can turn into beauty.
Where eternity beats, day by day,
and breath by breath, inside her.
Beyond This Window
Dark and the moon has dropped
a thin layer of silver over everything.
In an empty window, I sit
trapped in darkness.
Breaking all promises to myself
I imagine you sitting alone in another night
turning the pages of an old magazine
and pointing that bullet
toward the empty hole in yourself.
On the window's black glass, my hand traces
the outline of a face, rigid as ground refusing
to accept the dead in winter.
Beyond this window, where light rises out
of the white rocks and comes so close
to my hands I can tear it into pieces
like church bread—the bread of childhood
we held on our tongues until it didn't seem
like swallowing anyone's body.
Maybe when I'm done forgetting,
when the soft lines on your face
create their own shadows and we can move
over grass without bending
maybe then . . .
It is what we forget that defines us
and nights like this unleash the memory.
Two stars hang suspended in the darkness
where it seems the dead must be awake
reaching out for each other.
