Light

For a long time I wanted
to drink a cup of winter,
to become tipsy on early
dark & longer starshine.

The thinning light
my favorite ether.
These days I am uncertain, dead
reckoning my way through—

surrendering to mystery &
surprise of mapless navigation.
That fistful of blackbirds
thrown across my wind-

shield? I don’t know what
their flurried wingbeats
were trying to tell me;
not every moment is

a teacher, in the same way patience
does not mean measured inaction.
I’m only a woman who con-
tinues to bury her dead—

wearing a clenched jaw that expects
diamond dust from the crown crush;
shoulders that ride so high on worry,
they mistake themselves for wings.

I’ve never liked what I was
called, even though my
father named me &
my name in his voice

was the last word I’d hear
him speak. Last night, I
went to bed feeling hope-
less & profoundly lonely.

I left the curtains open wide.
Sleep plowed a ragged field of un-
even rows—but in the morning’s
early darkness, the fullest moon

poured its cool, bewitching light into
the small bowls of my room & garden.
As it hung impossibly low over
the Pacific, I drank & drank.