CALL ME BELOVED

I’m too eager to deflect and defeat and demolish.
It’s only sometimes that the words just hang there,
low-hanging fruit to snatch at and squirrel away.
They usually don’t come at all, like this morning:
the air was cold and gray and heavy with intangibility,
the kind that sends a thrill through my heart and
sends my hands grasping for pens and searching for fruit.

I cannot hide behind maybes and question marks, or my
vacillation and strike-throughs etched in red ink.
I will find my words elsewhere. Like my mothers books
from when I was five – how I snatched and horded them
and grew up reading her marginalia, her lists and notes
a quiet and earnest pleading written between the lines –
written quickly and just as fast scratched out, building
the architecture of my childhood.

I found the books again, yesterday, stacked and stored away
in the basement. It was the light, or it could have been
the patina of twenty years, the kind you can’t brush off –
they felt like holy books in my hands. I revisited the pages
and scanned the old margins like ritual, and just as solemnly
put them away. I hadn’t forgotten them, the words were my bones,
the architecture of the life I’m still building.