on the walk home, but this world is a street
where everyone I’ve ever known lives
& there is no hiding from the sometimes magnificent
conspiracy of love that reaches me as gently as
a voicemail from the opposite end of the earth.
Our neighborhood is full of baby grown-ups,
& we all know eachother and wave and sometimes
make the other laugh in the middle of the street like how spring comes suddenly.
I am learning to wear big yellow gloves when I wash the dishes in lemony soap;
I am learning how to check the mouse traps with more tenderness than revulsion;
I am learning to call my mother when I have nothing to ask for.
We are not old enough for old friends,
but I see how it happens: one day I wake up and forgive you
for reaching me through the phone
when you never once reached your fingertips
over the kitchen counter to hand me a tangerine.
One day, I wake up and let the girls who live on the corner
fix the straps on my dark dress, or push the hair from my face.
One day, I finally let all of the things that I do not want to find me
just find me. I will look in the mirror and say okay, so, honey,
we can make a context for anything and that’s called growing up.
I will wake up and decide that I have loved people with bones
I will never get back, that I will always have heard
someone’s voice break on the word enough. And even so.
It will be enough to walk myself home in the dark
and know I could run up to the door of nearly every little house
so gently bright against the navy spoon of the sky.
Sometimes I think that I would give anything
to not have to give anything ever again
& other days,
I would turn my pockets
inside-out.