Three Things

1.  I Have Always Needed Music to Do What I Do

I won't start until the music begins.  All right.  There it is.


2.  She Knows How to Build a Fire in a Wood Burning Stove

We reach the other woman on the path who is also reaching.  If we reach together, we'll grab the same thing at separate times.  The cotton blue woman standing at the iron stove feeding wood through the grates, I'm calling you Great Grandmother.  You sat on his bed because it was the only place to sit in the room.  And that's why I'm here.


He was pulling the horses around while you rubbed your hands together near the potbellied stove radiating not but three feet the warmth only he'd bring round once the horses were also rounded.


You can sit in any room and see your future radiating three feet warm and the edge of it is where you find your fingers again, wordtangled like ten confused tongues.  She had the sense there were already enough words to feed the fire a hundred times in the morning:  eggs, bacon, cedar, biscuit, cotton, a note she'll slip into his hands when she has to leave to tend the life she's planted and that grows up all around her like a gift and a thing missing.


"Are you warm?"
Standing suddenly as the gloves (her work, her cover, her hiding, her distance between the fingerprints and the surface of life) fall to the clean, pine floor:  "Yes."


3.  Companion

For life the barn swallows huddle together over the five most cherishfragile eggs.  In the evening, the two swoopdive between each other, still playful.  And sharp as knives cutting blue and green slices between what is naturally done and what they'll have to choose to do because both are required and both are what they've built the nest from: mud (the dust of ashes to ashes and never lose a momentprecious) and spit (the lake upon which the words sail: are you warmyes?)