The once-hidden sweet was never shy. She just wasn’t ready. Beauty is the armored body, opening.
The dance goes silvery then delicate then complicated then slippery then gone.
There is deep satisfaction in a miniature, a diorama, a dollhouse. Not so I can be god/giant wielding tiny things with my meaty fingers, but so I can shrink myself into the quiet stories of three-sided rooms. So I can find the right size to rest in forests of giant clover and admire the flocks of bees overhead.
This tree caught me looking at the base of their trunk and told me they weren’t ashamed of their past. Can’t pluck out the ugly or ignore it til it goes away. I thrive because of and despite.
Sometimes it’s work. Get down under the flowers. Tilt blue skyward. Gather lost dandelion wishes from the dried out corners of hip joints and don’t blow them away. Hold them in the throat until they burn through the tarry numb.
Here are some long grass waves out on Sauvie Island that didn’t make it into my dreams last night. Instead I shouted myself awake twice. Irrational dream anger rattling my heart.
This tree told me they were born many. Remain many. They didn’t understand all the single, untethered beings running by them every day. Are they scared? Did they find who they were looking for?
There’s so much happening in the world right now: The ants are unearthing all the sand beneath the driveway pavers, building a whole new city. The trees are shedding/sharing their gifts, a sidewalk celebration of catkins and over-ripe cherries. Food was created when a tomato appeared today where there was no tomato yesterday.
Why do we call it decay and not transformation?
This is a picture from a month and a half ago when everything was changing and everything was resisting change and you could look at a cloud undoing itself into the sky and mourn the loss. Just like now.
Sometimes a whole box of naked women bodies gets tossed to the curb, no longer needed. Sometimes a naked woman steps off the curb, sits down before the show of force and becomes Sheela-na-gig.
The woman who checked us in to this bayside motel used to own a lovely piano shop down the street from me in Portland. She tells me that the pot shop that owns the building now were the only outfit that could afford the seismic upgrades required by the city. She bemoans all the neighborhoods losing their charm. I’m supposed to be out here making memories, she says, but I keep forgetting.
A crane stood on shore with wings unfolded to welcome the sun. We watched him from the dock while waiting for our dinner. The tree slept in the water and we did not want to wake him. We paddled by him in our boats in silence.
The clouds roll in, the insect gets eaten, the jelly dissolves, the waves flow, the river runs, the sun dapples, the mystery bird flies, the trees moss.
And for a minute, we live in a world not a country. And for a minute, the water floats me, the sun warms my pale belly, and my heart beats from my chest into the current, into the slippery rocks.
Tracy Burkholder 
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