January 2023

January 2023

I’ll dare you to call me ugly in the winter. Not dolled up with snow. When the leaves are lost and trees are bare and even the ivy has lost its grip on the neck of the ordinal trees. It has to happen. The dead staying dead. The Saturday before Easter. Everyone forgetting green like the face of someone who used to love you back.

These things are supposed to be gone though. Can’t we focus on what’s here?

I have two girls in their winter coats, cooking breakfast. Telling stories before bed. Two girls tucked in the attic, dripping faucets, lamenting the lack of snow.

They knit and read and bake and puzzle and against all sense, when the snow does come, they put on cotton dresses and call it weird summer.

Enough about the girls. She left me alone more days than not.

I’ve been busy with the stillness. Coaxing it out of the quiet. If she’d stay gone for a full week maybe, I’d have some luck with getting the dust to settle. I’d have a proper audience for three o’clock sun through the window. I’d jar the gold light. I’d be dripping with it.

And maybe I am. (If you can keep a secret.)

(There’s real honey stored up with the stowaways in the roof. They made it themselves. In the buzzing heat of summer.)

(And they share.)

(With me.)

(In a slow drip down the wall.)

(And I don’t care that there are bigger rivers out the door or in my pipes.)

(This small river is gold, is mine.)

Instead, I have two girls. With one voice. Framed in the dutch door like a tarot card.

We’re are all missing something and we’re bitter about it, like tea before the sugar.

We are missing something, but not each other,

the apple house