I finally got it

It came 4 minutes and 32 second ago 

when I was typing my last blog. 

I know why there has been a year of pain.  

Why the aftershocks continue to rumble.  

Where my phases of fleeting hatred well up from. 

We both decided that we were 

the kind of people who returned the cart. 

Metaphorically.  We put things back where they belong.  

We tended to the world carefully. 

And for years, we did that for each other too.  

Finding the fulcrum after any difficulty. 

Going through cycles of challenge, 

but always finding a newer, higher, deeper place. 

We put each other's heart back. 

Except in the end.  You left me out in the parking lot. 

No where near the warmth.  

No where to a safe home. Rain raining, 

snow falling, my wheels rusting in place. 

And I rolled around, wind gusts pushing me, 

bashing into cars and through the traffic. 

I made of wreck of it. 

You did not put the cart back. 

I'd never seen you do that before. 

I'd never known you not to clean up a mess. 

You did not put the cart back. 

Even if it was empty, the food and nourishment 

gone for you.  You did not push the cart back, 

though it would have been so easy to do. 

there was a woman

There was a woman walking down the central aisle of Zagara's,

the kind of woman that turns heads.  

Men's heads, women's heads. 

Her long shiny hair floating behind her, 

her chocolate coat like wings too. 

Her face was perfect, her skin had a warm undertone.

Ebullient eyes, long arms swinging.  

She was my age, maybe even older.  

Leaning toward fifty like her life would last forever.

I could not not look and look again. 

She had a four pack of pudding in her hand, 

golden butterscotch I think. (Odd I know).  

I watched her turn down the pasta aisle. 

She squatted down to inspect the items on the lower shelves. 

Who do you know that looks good down on their haunches?

No one, right?  But she did. 

I started dreaming of meeting her at some Chagrin Falls event, 

I would -- in this imaginary future intersection -- tell her

that I had seen her before and dreamed this friendship 

before she had ever spoken a word.  

It was her hair, her coat, her floating. 

She would laugh, touch my forearm, 

and some deep seed in me would shiver. 

There I was, deep into illusion, when she did it. 

Did the thing that defined her. 

She picked up a whole wheat pasta box, 

then turned and placed her pudding in a sauce display.

Shoved it way in the back where some 

minimum wage teenager would find it hours or days later. 

My hypothetical admiration, 

my loving peasant adoration, 

shrunk away to nothing.  

Everything beautiful about her

dissolved by that one act.

Beauty is more than skin deep. 

Beauty involves butterscotch pudding. 

Where it ends up when you are in a rush. 

Beauty involves carts, if they get walked 

all the way back into the building. 

Beauty involves turn signals, 

if they flutter in plenty of time. 

Beauty's not how well you take care of yourself;

it's how well you take care of others. 

in one year

The sadness has turned into a soft spot, 

more tender bruise than beating. 

My heart is larger, porous, 

more seeping in and out. 

My eyes are darker, my hair more gray.

My skin a little thicker, a little thinner, 

it all depends on the day. 

I have known the kind of pain 

that can recognize all pain. 

(And this is a gift).

I can sit in a cold dark well, 

and not wither, not wrinkle. 

I can play with the water, 

and somehow cleanse the fear. 

I am smarter.  I am smaller. 

I walk lightly on a thin mountain path. 

I am learning to release questions, 

as the trees finally know to drop brown leaves. 

I have traveled long distances in tight spaces, 

and arrived here, where I was, 

on the night it happened, 

but tonight, I am living. 

I am living.  I am living. 

Small Insurrection

5976 miles away, John tucked my prayer into the Wailing Wall. 

If I really believed in God's omnipresence, 

I would not have handed him the scroll.

I would know that my prayer is heard here, 

in my soggy front yard, in the tiled hallways of my school, 

walking down to Stone Oven, sitting by the huge oak tree, 

in my bed  each night before I go to sleep.

But, honestly, I feel better knowing where it is, 

who has held it --as if John's ordained hand 

tucking it into the holy hole will somehow summon 

some greater power than God, 

the higher power that God leans into when God is sad, 

alone, lost as I know He must sometimes be. 

I feel better knowing that it is on the man's side of the wall, 

not because men have more pull or say, but because now 

it is a rebel prayer.  The pink paper, the twine, 

the feminine print in that strong wall 

where men have rocked and worried. 

The words ask for my love to find me, so that I can 

know love again, feel love again, learn through love again, 

fulfilling what God asks us to do, living as God lives. 

A woman asking for a woman, 

delivered by a preacher to the men's side of wall. 

There is something radical about that.  

Something that I beg gets noticed, answered. 

I think spring is approaching

...not because the ice is dripping from my roof, 

or the sky has opened up its pupils blue. 

It's because of the crushes, the rushes, 

the instant tripping over my puppy tail. 

The woman at CVS waiting to check out, 

her mocha skin and long fingers. 

The way she turned and smiled, 

the way she called the pharmacist by name. 

The woman at Stone Oven, too young, 

way too young, and yet old somehow, 

like a Mill Valley redwood, 

like a piece of blue glass not yet thrown upon the shore.

The man in black, the weight of responsibility

on his thin runner's shoulders.  

The unexpected stubble, 

the wringing of his careful hands. 

The woman I have known forever, 

her hair crisp against her scalp, 

the way it makes me want to reach out

and rub the back of her head. 

The woman I last rested with, 

thinking of her thin waist, 

the way my legs looped so easily in hers, 

the way we looked up under a star soup sky. 

The woman so far away 

who must know in some way, 

that I have always loved the way her words

ting against the true bell. 

The tall man fumbling for his keys, 

the old woman pushing flowers in her cart, 

the man who smiled before opening the door.

Everyday, someone new falls 

into the lap of my heart

and that must mean something, 

doesn't it?  The racing, 

the needing, the wanting?

After so many months of staring 

at the cement path one step ahead of me, 

it is good to lift my head 

and see -- simply see -- 

how many people there are, 

as I circling the notion of love. 

some things run deep

...like Santonio Holmes, 

like an allegiance to a team, 

Steeler black and gold. 

Number 6.  Can you believe it?