For Rose on Christmas
Rose your love is a snowstorm
that shocks and shuts down entire cities
covering all in a blanket of pure, white, quiet.
It is snow days and calling in and wet feet and ruddy faces and smiling and crying children.
It's a second press of coffee with cream that stirs itself
Your love is a midnight thunderstorm
shaking and bending and blowing down trees over powerlines
by flashes of lightning
and the smell of ozone
It breaks as it builds while hushed and huddled
we count the seconds between the bolt and the boom
Your love is gray whales in May and swimming pregnant and alone in the sound
in the heat of July
It is seed time and harvest
It is the hopefulness of shoots of winter wheat pushing through bits of snow
in the bottoms of furrows in fields around the birth of a February baby boy
Your love is a wintertime windstorm on the Palouse
and the promise that while it may blow around us
and though it threaten to shear the shelter from under us
the winter is only coyotes yelping outside the window
and the warmth of a woodstove down the hall
Rose your love is Pentecostal fire
that pulls at sinew and soul and throat and pit of stomach
and wrenches the inutterable into mysterious utterance
and sets it alight
Rose your love is making love for the first time
fearful, quiet, trusting, hopeful, empowered, emboldened
Your love is making love for the last time
fearful, loud, doubting, hopeful
uninhibited by the what ifs or whys or what's next
just safety and want
and the love
and the love
Rose I have always loved you
It was the hope of you I dreamed about
the dream of you I saw
and the seeing was the end of seeing as I'd known
Rose I have always loved you
but I have never loved you well
I have feared well
I have worried well
I have thought more of myself well
Too well have I second-guessed
and too well have I come up short
Rose I have always loved you
but I've never loved you well enough
Never
Never yet
Yet
Yet if all that's left
is to wait outside
with the seed and the soil
and the howl of the winter
with an eye to the clouds
for the convergence of temperature and moisture
of wind
winter
and will
that's where I'll be
ruddy-faced
wet-footed
smiling and crying and
praying in tongues for the city to shut down
