2 Poems

Salt

Will you be home soon?  I wonder in all this wind and rain beginning. I know that you are happy but I miss you. Sometimes, when you are gone, I recall the melodies of favorite songs but don’t sing them.  My heart turns to salt in its leathery shell and the many names of God light candles behind my teeth. Love is not loyalty, nor joy, nor lust only.  As high up in crowns of windblown pine, ants work, heedless. Resisting amnesia This morning a herd of deer passed slow and graceful over the late winter snow. No sun, no wind.  I knelt on the upper ridge to see.  Our lives resist flowering.  But sometimes, no warning, there is a momentary clarifying bloom.