Seeing Between The Space of the Blossom and Her Falling Drop of Water

The Space Between the Blossom and Her Falling Drop of Water

It’s hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more

I believe that our lives are not built out of time,

but light.

                                                Colum McCann

                                                Transatlantic

It’s not so much shock really but resolve

that makes us, or me at least, pause

when the news has finally landed

with grace, or not, caught in the tire

or feather and cutting it shorter

than it may have wanted to have been

delivered.  As if such news were a machine,

or a rabid animal.  I take it

with me into what’s left of the rain

and I make it perch with the drops

of water on the blossoms: opening,

going by, or still in a fist and a tight

as jaw buckling from the blow,

the knuckle still clenched, both,

after the letting go, drifting off like pollen

when the sun comes back, and the wind,

to gather it.  I take it

out the way Frost may have when he

sweeps debris from the spot

he’ll dig for his first son and the work

you know it’s the work the digging

is what saves him.  These timeless

deeds see us

into the next and next and make us

ready to hear about it at last

when the time comes, isn’t it just

like this on the Tuesday I’m called

and my son’s just that morning turned

three and my daughter’s turning one

in two days and they called to say

you’d taken

too many pills deliberately.

I poured milk

for my son and I watched it

bubble as it rose in the cup and he reached

for it but held back his hand

and I said not yet honey,

not just yet.