I cried over the stove today,
almost bawled into the butter
I was melting, it was melting…
Aching, crying with the wonder.
I covered my mouth in pure astonishment,
Standing on the pinnacle of Pisgah ,
Breathing, reaching for my Cannan.
And I was grateful.
Thin as a thought,
Is the beautiful tragedy of life.
Astonishment and love and crazy peace
Shot out of me with a sear of inside music. Oh! Delicious light.
It transformed the browns and yellows
Outside my window into mohagany and gold.
What is beauty?
The man across the road kicking leaves, hoping
To find the miracle of fruit folded inside the skull-like shells?
Pears ripening in a thousand shades of embarrassment?
Poetry caught in the web of the mind?
Unlikely hobbit holes? And tiny worlds of moss?
Is it in granola, and sage, honest words, and the quiver of a baby’s lip?
What was in that story I just heard-
Dark, convoluted-but still a lovely nuanced story
That broke my heart and knocked me reeling, slamming into beauty?
Those simmering sounds?
The white flesh of the onion
Shot its pungency into the tiny space, yelling,
“Notice! Notice! Notice!”?
( Fold upon fold of cells full of fusty oils darted into the feathering air
and muttered, “We are transient. It will not always be so.”)
Life will not always go on like this;
These are vagabond days that we have traveled through.
And I am grateful.
The renegade leaf on a crazy kamikaze mission of pure laughter above the washline,
A battalion of mushrooms in hardhats,
This dazzling hour is here, but will go…
Like so many exactly as dazzling,
But in a million different ways than it.
For a second, in a tide of golden light and butter my kitchen was a heaven.
Brilliant in its flash of beauty,
than gone.
And in a flash I was caught giddy with gratefulness.
So grateful to be alive on this surprising planet.
Star Soup 