January 28, 2020

it’s taken all day to get here

and still, the kitchen feels like incriminating evidence, and there are too many 
canvas bags with loose paper in them, and there is some letter I mean to be 
perennially sending, and I keep wearing some version of the same outfit, 
and I haven’t learned how to keep the plants on the windowsill alive, and I am still afraid
of the dark and results from routine medical tests and what happens the moments just
before you die, and I carry the itch of not persisting when I could have and not letting go
when it was time and hovering in wayward, shapeless places of indecision that won me
no favors, and I have unfinished business well past its sell-by date, and any apologies
I make now will sound anemic and rote, but when I saw the cardinal pause at the feeder, 
I was not thinking of every sorrow I would never be able to mend. I wasn’t thinking at all.