We roll along- 2015

In the morning,

On the verge of Christmas work week,

I wake  to the slow grinding scrape of metal

Asking not to be geared into metal—

A house is being built.

A harder part of love is letting go

Of your control over what it was—

That it could be broken without always having been broken—

That it could have changed you without that always having been its aim.

The lime tree reaches into the winter light

A bare lilting of stiff neck to the sun.

Where does this tree gain the strength

To ceaselessly tend towards something so far and unattainable?

{3 weeks worth of living in a small room}
{bowls of lentils} {the gin soaked orange rind in the bottom

of a negroni glass} {a menorah with 9 waxy spines} {and books}

somebody somewhere is inventing something that will change everything

for them. A harder part is clopening.

Staying until close and yet still arriving in time to open.

Exhausted, used, no life in between, out of necessity,

That if you aren’t there in the morning you might never

be let back. I wonder if it is my house

undergoing such pain, Shingles shuffling off

to splatter on the ground like rain.

If the uniform is not clean, if the apron is not pressed,

If there is no wine key, if pens run out of ink, if the kitchen is closed,

If the liquor is missing, if your shoes are untied, if your calves

Will not move, if they find out, if they find out, if you can’t

Find out what they want, if they need more time, if you forget, if

You remember the wrong times, if nobody will work with you,

If nothing is clean, if you can’t let yourself speak, if you’ve mastered it too well,

If you’re tired, if you need to let go, if somebody else needs to be in control, if they need everything to stay clean, if it wont work no matter how much you return and try and turn over in your sleep

There was a wedding in iowa, where the corn grown

Tall in summer in fall was sheared and you could see from the marks on the ground

How it gave itself. How sure it must have been.

Jacob smiles a wry smile full of homes 

and quiet afternoons and children, full 

of decision and resignation and a single future, 

not the many extending refracted from himself the prism, 

but the one he wants looking into his new wife’s

thousand colors.

The harder part of what will be

Will be is allowing more than fear.

More than what it means if I was wrong.

More than what it means if she was wrong.

More than losing.

With everybody gone and 60 hours of work ahead,

I strangely want to see her

before I plunge into a new life no longer

pieced together by the stones I needed to run away.

Something is shifting, something more

Than fear. The grey sky flat and scalable,

The mountains singing, the rain on the way,

Friends family hundreds of miles calculating lives

With the things they want in them.

And this ground is solid, though the feeling is

Everything can razed to the ground; the slow clicking

I hear

            as I rise from bed is

 a

                                                 house

being built.