“A leaf, gone yellow, flecked with dark orange & red, so perfect it arrests the eye, lands to tell the story of its brilliance. What is it, this craft that fashions maple leaves into snow flakes, each individualized, telling the tale of what you love. Don’t be scared to love your way into winter, as the richly turned earth of a warm autumn day throws up Medusa-like roots onto the tilled crust of the topsoil, & begins to cool. Bending knees is important now, but not essential, for merely standing in what’s left of the sun can make humility throb, conquering the subsistence living of the shallow, plumb bobbing the truth, out of sinew and stone. I didn’t mean to get so out of step with the flow of my life. One might argue things were taken from me, but in equal measure, I took it all from myself. When you pray like the dickens for change, and your road, you know, is to heal, the particulars can begin to shift, heavily, awkwardly, unfriending you, while you sleep. Discontent, like things that die after planting, stir up feelings you’d rather not have anybody know. I’m ashamed of this. I should be over this. I can’t move on from this. The shovel can’t go deep enough, to ferret out that mother root, the root that was set like a tooth in childhood. With my new shovel, a little too heavy a replacement tool, I plunge vengefully, into the plots of man. They hurt me still, with their banality, with their blithe feckless smiles that tell me, they really don’t care. Would have been great to care, right? Someone made it sound easy, but it wasn’t. Posing this way and that, held together by shitty glue. But what really rankles me, is the dude by his truck. Dear, dear wood cutter tease. What’s amazing to the arc of a life, is to have time to watch what people will do then disown. They’ll leave you holding the bag - no shame! Whether it’s a mortgage, or a marriage, or a scheme. Yet my digging tools, dig on. They become more sophisticated, & tho I still can’t vocalize what I should be saying out loud, the unsaid words go flying into the dirt. The self strangulation, avoiding being hit or cut, when the body’s need to stop trying to convince becomes silence, when the pain of not ever being heard becomes a mantra of hope towards God, I say, practice, practice, practice. Chip away at being beautiful, in the moments spared you each day to feel whole. Be a mother again, just as fiercely as you were before, to the neglected corners of each garden. Because - you know. You know how to stay. When they leave, you are left. The amazing, wonderful, YOU.”
