a gaggle of good things
In the quiet early diffuse dawn,
the coffee wafts, our son laughs,
and the stovetop murmers on:
this is our process now
for handling the morning,
for lifting shoulders from their laying long.
In the silent first before the yawn,
the eyes are rebels,
the mind unlevel,
and our son says his banana is all gone:
this is our mechanism for managing
the quiet early diffuse dawn.
(✎E)
Write.
Because to do anything else is to give up on the light
touch you have with heavy subjects.
Because to do all else is fodder for heavy subjects,
those clever cannons you compose.
Write because this was decided for you, not
because this is what you chose.
Write.
Because to pen is to pour out,
and this place is thirsty for your thinking.
Because to give is to receive,
to spill over is the choicest mode of drinking.
Write.
Not because you are the best
but because there is no better way to become full.
Not because you need it to fund your body
but because you need it to fund your soul.
Write.
Not because it will be
the best story you have heard.
Write because it will not be your story.
Write not because you are author of -
but instead so you become
the word.
(✎E)
I see you
You have steeled yourself
And the light bounces off of you
Almost as sharply as you must bounce back.
The men in your office
Get to be molten,
Wild fire magma mass-
ively naive.
Unaware what it takes to be you
In their world.
Is it still their world
After all these years?
It certainly is here.
The land of the free,
the brave
And the zero paid parental leave.
Is it still a place where men forget
they get
the benefit of the clout?
Still a world where you don't know
Who gets paid what
And are left guessing how much
You leave on the table
Just to save a seat at it.
(✎E)
Of a man who has spent years on a ship blown about in circles,
you do not say he has had a long voyage,
only that he has been tossed about
for a very long time.
- Seneca
Where are you going?
Everyone is going somewhere.
What goes up must come down,
what is born must arrive
somewhere
at some point.
And you must reach it before death.
But it must all be
within a day's journey -
even a moment's.
Longer, and it is essentially impossible
for some people
for those who die tonight.
Your goal in life must be one you can achieve
even if you die tonight.
Yet it must be worth spending every day pursuing.
(✎E)
I love you, Wesley.
It isn't how much you smile, though that is wonderful. It isn't how much you learn, how long you can focus on a single problem, how you beg for books to be read to you all the time, how you always want to join me in my cooking, and say "hot!" It isn't all the little things, or even what they add up to. It is more basic, more binary than that.
It is that you are ours.
It is that you are.
That is the miracle.
I have asked for many more years with you, as any parent does. But there is no peak knowledge, no peak capacity to a human. You are fully you, as fully as I am me. The potential you have is only icing on a fully baked cake. Any thought less is sacrilege: you are no less than me, you are as much as me - if anything, you are more (unsullied by disenchantment, by insecurity, by selfishness, so quick to love and believe and trust, as if that was what the world was for).
//
There is one particular thing I want you to learn: scale. So much knowledge can be summed up in comparisons of scale. One of your favorites books right now poses two questions: “What is smaller than a flea?” and “What is bigger than the sky?” The answer to the first, according to this book for kids, is “A world of things too small to see.” To the second: “The never ever ending sky.” I hope you understand how trite both of those are. There are real answers. In fact, there is one answer to both questions. An overarching, and an underpinning. A first, and a last. A beginning, and an end.
//
You began one year ago. Now we get to count: 1. If you live average, you’ll have 70-ish more of these. There are a thousand decisions that increase or decrease that number. My great-grandmother lived to be 101. She jogged each day until she was 97. My mother attributes my great-grandmother’s health to her positive attitude. As miraculous as this longevity is, the goal of life is not more days or more years. It is good days. You have already had so many good days.
//
You broke your mother, you know. In more ways than one. But the pain let you graft into her in a way too precious for me to covet. Even if I must admire the bond you share with her at a distance, it is worth it. This year has been the story of you, beginning, but it has also been the story of her, changing chapters. I would pick no better son to hurt her than you, and no more constant warmth, no more ambitious mind to challenge her and nestle into her than you.
You are the miracle.
//
Miracle:
A tired word for tired people.
Code for uncanny/incredible/can't.
A name for an event I must admit
makes me believe the supernatural exists.
You were born 1 year and 34 minutes ago.
I caught you.
You were a tired word born to tired people.
You stood for the incredible.
You were an event I must admit
made me believe the supernatural exists.
You traipse through the days,
hunkered into my elbow crook.
You while toward time I do not have
and you find it for me.
You careen frequently,
veer on and off my path
at the most inconvenient intervals.
You furl up to say goodnight once a day
like clockwork conjured
from some preimagined rhythm.
You tinge everything with smile,
mull the click of buckles,
find the kilter in the sleep cycle,
and hoodwink me with wink-attempts
and chuckles.
You are a fresh take on stale speech.
You stand for the simple.
You are an event I still admit
makes me believe God exists.
- Evan
(✎E 📷S)
A tree does not know where its seed will take root.
A flower does not decide which bee will bear its fruit.
A mother cannot bring about a vision for her child,
no matter how she bends the truth.
A bird does not trust its sons forever to the nest.
A fox has not the weave with which to keep her daughter dressed.
A mother cannot promise funds or firmness of the future,
but these are not the sources of her rest.
A star will die in chaos without all sense of direction.
A night gives birth to morning but makes no vain prediction.
A mother knows not what tomorrow is,
but still she keeps conviction.
She believes beyond all vacuums,
because of patterns, hopes and hints
that there exists a stronger love
than she could provenance.
(✎E)
There is no history
between us
my experience of you is one continuous loop.
There never was before you
There will be nothing after.
Thus the Apostle's Mystery:
It may be too much to ascribe
to another person,
too divine to live firsthand.
But God the man makes a bride of mankind:
who am I to belittle what he planned?
I am now always wed to you.
I am always of a bed with you.
I am tomorrow always head to you.
Exclusivity
is an eternal setting
in the story of the heart.
This is what the children of all the divorced know:
Why can it not be with whom you said it would be?
May our children never know it.
What begins in ceremony never dies.
It only gets belied.
What grows in covenant never decays.
It only gets betrayed.
There are promises and mistakes,
Oaths and their oathbreaks.
May he bind the cords again tonight
In a moment unfit to share with anyone else.
May he write the words again tonight
In a poem meant only for us
So we know a little better
What it is to be chosen
And never lied to or betrayed -
A selection once done, ever frozen
In time.
What awe it is to be loved -
A beginning with no end.
Endless beginnings as far as the eye can see.
All beginning,
No end.
"Behold, I am making all things new."
Once more: I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
(✎E 📷S)
As yet
you see my love
as an unlanguaged blur.
You find its lines
only in the shape of my face,
its warmth in my palms.
Some day I will try to tell you
how big it was,
the holding in the night,
the patient waiting
for the cries to subside.
My parents did the same.
It is impossible
to fully comprehend
the scale of love
before we know we are
loved
at all.
For me,
I deceive myself
into the idea that I know enough
to manage my own humanness.
Really, even the smallest corners
of what I cannot see
dwarf the crannies of my mind.
In the niche nooks of knowledge,
some days I can begin
to see myself in my son:
the fury over things
that do not last,
the joy over things
that are insignificant
but are made magnificent
by that same joy.
And on those days
I sense the presence,
vague,
unworded -
but constant,
known -
wishing me into growth,
loving me in
to life.
I love you, Wesley.
(✎E 📷S)
Got gifted a big date where the dessert was smokey and looked like dirt but tasted like chocolate.
You gave it your best
shot across the bow.
But you are caught between then
and tomorrow and now.
You swam among sharks
circling you in water and in dreams.
But you are spinning in an arc
so fast you're splitting at the seams.
Before you come undone, out of touch
or before you touch the ground:
Remember this is a new decade of your life.
"You always build it better
the second time around."
Welcome to the big 3-0.
(✎E)
Birthday 2019
Adulthood, round 2.
There are so many things
you could be and do -
so many you have done and been.
I can see you a famous writer,
or a well-known picture-taker,
or another path - but always fighter.
Courageous, honest, smile-maker.
Wherever you take me, I will go.
Wherever you work, I will assist.
You are brilliant and brave, you know.
(And impossible to resist).
Be it Spain or outer space,
a new home, new state, new child,
whether we replace inventions
or reinvent our place,
I will be with you
and it will be worthwhile
while wild.
-E
You turned and said
How will we hear this music
after we leave?
The next artist
talked about the state of the world today
Now
How bad.
The magic of a moment
or its misery -
Neither remain.
(✎E)
After the earth
has shed its skin,
I will roam its raw rebirth.
Step over steppe,
touch over tundra,
trace channels,
walk along waters.
I will find no death,
no war,
no silent killers of souls -
the secrets
every culture, every country holds.
(✎E)
When her fire is burnt out
and in this cold taxi
and with this cold distance
I have no heat left to give her,
be Warmth
please.
(✎E)
Your heart is weighing on my heart.
Lighter than I would've thought,
but no less in need of art.
(✎E)
The past is a cardboard wall
someone else pokes holes through with stories.
Only then do we glimpse slivers of yesterday.
(✎E 📷S)
If there's a chance you'll forget
don't take it.
Slice clean through an orange
mull:
The veined lines are never straight
but nevertheless delightful.
To be perfect
is not to be precise
but to give delight.
You are flawless today;
Every day.
Take two onions and compare:
full of water,
and increasingly inner
sanctums.
Never two alike.
To be perfect
is an absolute state
of infinite degrees.
No matter how you change,
you are always the choicest variety
of my happiness.
(✎E 📷S)
Huddle against the hurtling chill
the freezer breeze brings its own kind
of charm,
candles in the night
early dark and slower Dawn
Christmas, cinnamon, steam
and all the hope we need to carry on.
(✎E 📷S)
Some stories
have dying
in them.
Not all stories.
Today's story did.
Some stories
you will make,
some stories
will be made for you.
All stories
will shape you.
Some stories
have dying
in them.
All stories
have living
in them.
Most stories
have living
and then dying.
One story
has dying
and then living.
Keep looking
for the story
that has dying
and then living
and living
and living.
(✎E 📷S)
You haven't lived
until you've driven
ill-advised through
dusk-prepared Cascades
just after the first snowfall.
Therefore, we paused
even as we moved at speeds
only common to mankind
for the last half century.
Restart the track. Raise volume.
Restart contemplations. Raise eyes.
The winter-dusted hills here are haunted
with hints of threat.
These bastions,
these behemoth boneyards
of some corrupted past:
they taunt the very thought
that we could ever last
beyond today.
The next turn brings new vistas,
or ice patches, or pain.
It takes no great metaphor to gain
knowledge of our frailty;
only great attention
to ensure that it remain.
As songs - written and recorded by someone else -
the stereos now recite
attempt to tune their tones to this time-torn terrain,
the razor-peaks pierce our souls with mixed scents
of our imperfections
and their pine.
I must ask again:
Between the crest-settled stars
and the divine,
can you identify the line?
The mountains demand their poetry of us;
the rocks make men cry out on their behalf:
"Enter!
Here is no boundary
no border
no barrier to heaven
lest you misperceive it.
Here is summary of bounty,
but you disbelieve it.
There is no distraction, no matter how insipid,
you cannot be redeemed from.
Hell hath no fury
you cannot overcome."
(✎E 📷S)
You sit in front of your toybasket.
I plop in front of my toolbox.
The two are not so different.
Toys are tools by which we enjoy
the world;
tools are toys which we employ
to build the world.
Both should be satisfying.
But when you get older
you will find few people feel this way.
Toys are freedom
they say,
and tools are chains.
Toys are happy
they say
and tools are sad.
Find the similarity in them:
tools can be happy,
toys can be sad.
Consider your tools toys,
and your toys tools.
Show all the world its secret joys,
and call out its hidden fools.
(✎E)
