Life gives me wishes.
I tuck them under the lemons
in a fruit bowl that isn't a fruit bowl.
Every vessel is versatile, after all.
Both whole & empty. Both host & guest.
Holds the present as much as it
holds a whisper of the future.
I save my wishes like a child
afraid of ruining a brand-new art set.
Watercolours untouched for decades.
So many rainy days spent in boredom.
But of all the wishes rotting under lemons
the one I want to use the most is
to see him in every room I walk into
from now until our last night's last poem.
These days I wish for love more than ever,
now that I'm attuned to its give & take.
On an in-between night in Amsterdam
I stand on a bridge & watch the water turn
from passage to mirror & back again.
I’ve seen water change like this before
when it was too tired to continue carrying
the wishes of a broken world. Too clear
to protect us from what happens
at the end of joy. It's summer &
I'm rewiring myself in this new city—
one that doesn’t judge
what you wish for selfishly. Desire
will be granted in return for patience.
Outside my apartment a man dismantles
a piano soaked by overnight rain.
The wires shriek & the instrument's cavity
frees its final notes. The city moans along.
Keys & little hammers piled up
on the pavement like abandoned poems.
So many ends & new tides lately
it's got me turning to water
for direction. Something to wild the urge
to be settled for this version of now.
Life is good when you let yourself be taken
by new joys that don't yet have a name.
Here, over a canal, I weep. Life is good.