In Bloom

The lilacs tumble and grow in every garden, the desert valley awash with sweet scents. On the field outside my window, the season's new calves stumble around in the cold morning. It will be hot soon enough, May in the mountains feels like a deep breath of air, a calm before the storm. He sends pictures from the south and we compare skies: so wide out here, so tinged with the humanity that lies beneath hem. In New York, the swelter has begun. 

I sat under the full moon last night, speaking into the stars and wondering that I had so little for which to ask. My mother paces around the questions that surround her, speaking with her chickens and forgetting the routine for planting her sprouts. Life is long and short all at once, you cannot grasp it as it trickles through your fingers, I grew up in the woods very far from here and I don't know how I made it all make sense. My father tells stories of our ancestors, how they, too, traveled to the edges of their universe, how they, too, made ends meet only as a means to afford their creative endeavors how they, too, burned for something they could never reach but couldn't help trying. 

In the early mornings I sit on the cold stone on the back porch, focus on the things I can count: breaths of lilac, turns of the hawk across the field, mountain peaks with snow still on them. Ten years from now this valley will be unrecogizable. 

Ten years from now, will not you, too?