These poems are written slowly.
They come from attention—
to grief, to beauty that arrives uninvited,
to the ordinary instructions that keep us alive.
Read them as you would a house at dusk.
Let your eyes adjust.
Joy Tiptoes In
Joy never knocks upon the door,
Nor waits for an invite—
She slides beneath the creaking floor
And fills the rooms with light.
Joy heeds not to the dust and grime,
Nor empty banks of gold,
She settles in the humblest heart
And lingers when she’s bold.
She comes when least expected—soft—
And finds a place to stay,
No matter if the hearth is warm,
Or windows show decay.
We cannot bid her enter—
Nor make her turn around,
We only set a space for her,
To fill when she is found.
For Jennifer, In the Wrong Season
I was sitting on the back porch,
a cup of coffee warming my hands,
steam lifting into the cold
like something trying to leave gently.
My dog pressed against my leg,
solid and breathing,
as if he knew I needed
one living thing to stay.
I was thinking about you—
not remembering,
because remembering asks me
to believe you are complete.
I was thinking about you
the way the body thinks about a missing limb:
without language,
without permission,
with an ache that does not ask
to be resolved.
It was January.
The ground was locked shut.
The trees were stripped down
to their honest bones.
Everything knew it was winter.
Everything but what came next.
The robins arrived.
Not a few.
Not one hopeful mistake.
Hundreds of them—
darkening the branches,
red chests burning against the cold,
as if the world had inhaled
and lost its memory of winter.
Robins are not supposed to be here in January.
Everyone knows that.
And you were not supposed to leave
when you did.
You loved beginnings, Jennifer—
even the dangerous ones,
even the ones that arrived too early
and dared the frost to take them back.
I did not feel comforted.
I felt undone.
Because beauty out of season
does not fix the cold.
It only reveals it.
For a moment, the garden could not hold
all that life—
wings brushing wings,
branches bending under the weight
of something insistently alive.
And it hurt—
it hurt to witness so much arrival
when you are no longer here
to arrive beside me.
Then, as if on a signal I could not hear,
they lifted.
One breath.
One movement.
The branches emptied.
The sky closed itself again.
Winter returned without apology.
You were still gone.
And yet—
something passed through me
that was not hope
and not despair
but something older than both.
The understanding
that love does not obey seasons.
That presence does not require a body.
That what we call goodbye
is sometimes only a bend in the river
we cannot see around yet.
I do not know where you are now.
I only know that the world
behaved strangely in your absence—
as if it, too, were grieving
and forgot its own rules.
So I will speak your name
into cold mornings.
I will carry you
through the wrong seasons.
I will recognize you
whenever something impossible
insists on being beautiful anyway.
And if you are listening—
if you are anywhere near—
know this:
You did not vanish.
You did not end.
You moved through me
the way steam lifts from a cup
into winter air,
the way robins move through January—
unexpected, unexplainable,
and devastatingly brief.
Just long enough
to remind me
that love is not something
the world gets to keep—
only something
it is changed by.
My Advice for a Good Life
Use the good towels.
Eat the peach over the sink.
Write the name on the back of the photo—
first and last, year and place—
because memory is a busy pocket with a hole in it.
Call when you think of calling.
Keep a spare kindness in your glove box.
Apologize early, with ordinary words.
Offer the seat that faces the window.
Carry a pen. Sign the moment.
Let fear ride in the back,
but don’t give it the map.
The road is mostly smaller than you imagined—
potholes, lilacs, mailboxes with their flags up—
and still it gets you home.
Touch your life with your hands.
Stir the soup. Mend the elbow of the sweater.
Open the difficult jar (or ask).
Learn the neighbor’s dog’s name.
Teach your body its weather:
bare feet on the porch, a shoulder of rain.
Spend what can’t be saved:
laughter in kitchens,
sun on your wrists at a red light,
the extra thirty seconds to really look
until the face you love feels new again.
Make things.
Let them be imperfect and yours.
A crooked shelf that holds, a tune you almost keep,
a garden that forgives you for forgetting to water—
these are signatures, not errors.
Do not trade all your hours.
Keep one for walking without destination,
one for reading the good sentence twice,
one for doing nothing and meaning it.
Sleep like it’s a skill.
When it’s heavy, set it down—
not forever, just long enough
to remember your own shape.
Grief is a weight that proves the bridge;
you can cross with it.
Tell people what the day tasted like—
mint, diesel, orange, rain—
so they’ll know you were here.
Keep a small book of gladness,
and add to it when no one’s watching.
Leave doors a little kinder than you found them.
Leave rooms with a soft rumor of laughter.
Leave notes that say “Back soon”—and keep them.
If we could speak from where we are not,
we’d say: time is not a ladder you climb;
it’s a field you cross, carrying bread.
Share it.
Walk with someone part of the way.
Wave when you part, even if you’ll see them tomorrow.
And when the light moves—move with it.
Not hastily. Not grandly.
Just as if each ordinary thing
were a small, precise instruction
on how to stay alive.