April 4, 2023

the poems I still want to write

have street lights in them, and spring peepers, and the word “scintilla,” and also
”smattering” and “sprinkle.” In the poems I still want to write, scars are worn
like medals, their stitchlines a good-luck charm, a treasure map, an augury.
The poems I still want to write have honey-stuck jar lids and crystals of salt on their lips,
and inside some punch-drunk insect swims ambiguous, delirious laps. In the poems
I still want to write, my father reappears at the piano and my mother on a horse
and my siblings in a field of midsummer strawberries, and we are all twelve again.
The poems I want to write are farmhouse windows winter-frosted and dirt roads during
mud season and the smell of greenhouses and the feeling of watching someone on skis
for the first time. That mountain-loud joy of falling down and getting back up again.