What It Has Come To

Hosta’s incorrigible growth through the garden beds. Black cat’s years turning another whisker white. Final drips of wax on a candle left burning overnight. Sigh of a lover’s stir, seconds before the dawn alarm. Smudge of dirt on the kitchen floor.

It has come to this. 

This clenched hand opening, this thousandth dish washed. This smallest ah this there murmured with the refolded blanket, never mind it will be used again tonight.

It’s hard to put up a fight in a ring of melting butter. But you try, even while hearing the hush of your own self laughing from behind a tree, that part of you who knows better, the part of you who’s always a step ahead of the you who moves mouth and limbs. They watch you stumble on the familiar stories, your knuckles flushed white from the your no.

Maybe it isn’t trust that’s needed here. Maybe it isn’t faith that you’ll fall into the soft-wombed belly of the mother. Maybe not trust, but a noticing. An attending, to wet patter, to creek and rain, to the socks left on a Locust stump, to all the feet they could be home to, and all the bodies those feet carry. And all the voices those bodies move. All those voices that have howled with yours. 

Maybe not trust. Rather, the delicate accounting of what it has all come to.