rain and jam

Why do I keep?
There is a tingle in my right leg that makes my big toe into a bale of hay.
My eyes are closing up for the night, sweeping out the last of the customers
They are wanting to stay
And we want our legs back

things are leaping onto outside

Leaps into reflections of a roof

And I stand up to close the door.

My ship crashes through waves pushes my legs back to be stumbling,

Balance comes slowly more slowly than the couple below joined beneath an umbrella beneath falling marbles explosions at their feet.

Cold bones

I am keeping 

Warmth in the taste of words

A new book of old poetry

Freshly bought, tightly squeezed, making orange juice from Cummings and Elliot in my lips

They taste like rain and jam, thunder and a quilt, rain dropping and I feel you here too

Sometimes

Warming my cold fingers with words and fingerprints pressed against mine--

but I am alone in paper and Paris

thanksgiving, three years later

when i have no words to write I'm thankful for the sky,
who wouldn't read them anyway.

Sometime we could remember,
Remember for years until we forget ourselves and wake up groggy-eyed in heaven.

Let's remember magnesium-green cliffs and the drunk man Greg who must have been a priest,
he bowed his head to his guitar and prayed while his hand painted nylon strings into the blues.
His church was the hostel at his back and its pews the single white plastic chair
where he slouched at midnight.

We were only in Moab.

But sometimes I'm afraid of running out of light, like last night on the cliffs. I'm thankful that God put stars above my head, and a half moon.
I'm thankful that he tightened my grip on the rope and gave me leather gloves and friends with cheez-its who caught me at the bottom.
He put red walls around us for a day and put us together in a car thinking about home and russia and our next trip... Me? I'm trying to remember how to write.

Grow a little, y'all. don't be scared.
When we get taller we'll just buy new clothes and graduate from primary and
see the world from a few inches higher and
buy ourselves new bikes.

Someone's with you to catch you when you fall and cradle your head til the tears stop.
I'm no tree but I've felt hollow,
sometimes when life is a little much I think thanks and look into fish tanks and remember how
God loves me more.

..................................

& big thoughts like those
make me grow,

tall and thankful