Counting
The peaceful rooms baked by July, the driver who guns past the window nightly, the cat purring amid 100 shoes. The heat of the globe throbbing like a heartbeat under the sand that day at the beach when you were fourteen and all the boys handsome. Decades later, the record spinning: Miles’ “Sketches of Spain,” plaintive spell cast in the room, where shadows darken the corners and a single orchid teeters on its stem: and always the music…
Under his eyes, a forest grew, a dim retreat. He remembered the letters he wrote in his youth, thoughts full of light. Under whose long gaze would the story find its reasons? Meaning slipped in on Tuesday when a garden appeared, fully in bloom. His thoughts rooted in deep soil. Grace descended like twilight.
You lasso mountain to bird, bird to moss on a gate of a garden invisible. You hang flowers from the fence. Nothing comes forward to greet you. Season after season, you know you are yourself because the whispering stops, and you stand there, smelling the jasmine that grows elsewhere, leaning on the wall of the imagined house. There is a place for you in this: just lean in.