Twenty-six years ago today, the tumor growing in my skull vanished, and I was thrown back in the streets like Lazarus. Today the rain is a fine mist, and I open my face for a long time, receiving water from the sky. All I can say is perhaps falling in love with the world is the bravest thing we can do. I only know that my heart grows stronger every year, a muscle gaining each time I love. This rush of life is all we have, and still we struggle to get out of it. Like fish we labor to make it to the sand as if that shore were Heaven. And when thrown back, we can grow bitter if we think we’ve failed or be humbled to accept that waking tomorrow in all of this is being saved.

The Slow Arm of All That Matters

THE SLOW ARM OF ALL THAT MATTERS

(A Song for Pilgrims)

I have fallen through and worked into

a deeper way—one step at a time, one pain

at a time, one grief at a time, one amends at

a time—until the long, slow arm of all that matters

has bowed my estimation of heaven. Now, like a

heron waiting for the waters to clear, I look for

heaven on earth and wait for the turbulence to

settle. And I confess, for all the ways we stir things

up, I can see that though we can stop, life never

stops: the lonely bird crashes into the window

just as the sun disperses my favorite doubt, a

sudden wind closes your willing heart as the

moment of truth passes between us, and the

damn phone rings as my father is dying. All

these intrusions, majestically unfair, and not

of our timing. So we spin and drop and catch

and land. And sometimes, we fall onto these

little islands of stillness, like now, from which

we are renewed by our kinship with all and that

irrepressible feeling resurrects our want to be here,

to push off again into the untamable stream.

The Thin Magic

THE THIN MAGIC

We’re just now climbing out of the

ravine and so the guard around my

heart is loosening and I cry easily.

Stillness is showing its face, again.

I almost lost you. Was forced to try

it on. Your roots, growing in my heart

for years, were ripped up by the storm.

We were hanging by a thread. But miracle

of the ordinary, hard skin graft of

time—we’re still here. And light is again

whispering along the empty chairs in the

park. And pigeons sit on top of store signs

watching as we die and come alive again.

A young couple now in front of me.

They’re falling into each other’s future,

not knowing what ravine they will have

to cross. It would all be despairing, if not

for the thin magic of how the light from

the beginning skips through every heart