Suddenly there were new flowers blooming in my garden that I hadn’t planted. Stubborn weeds of love.
Cornflower and dandelions of love, fetch and foxglove, and lupine of love. Flowers so stubborn they would push through concrete to meet the sun.
Everywhere I looked love seemed to be creeping in my windows like kudzu, climbing into my closets and tangling in my clothes.
This was not fragile elegant tenuous love.
This was tenacious, recalcitrant love.
This was the kind of love that didn’t give a shit what I had to do that day.
This was love with a lawn chair.
Settled down in the front yard with a beer and pretzels ready to wait out my arduous attempts to ignore it.
Don’t you see I had to keep you at a distance?
because if you stood too close to me you might have seen
the lilac tree that was breaking through my skin and blooming. You might have noticed the petals and fall leaves falling out of my winter coat and the wildflowers under my skirt, the foxes and doves tangled in my hair, the ivy and mistletoe clinging to my collar, the wild brambles that put runners in my stockings.
My love is too big and much too wild.
It doesn’t all fit
not inside of me, and certainly not in that dress.
My love spilled out like a night in the Appalachia wilds, cacophonous and untamed.
My love may not be pretty, but it sure as hell is persistent. I tried to barricade my door against it and love fell down the chimney, tumbling into the ashes of the cold hearth.
Love lit a fire there.
Love lit the candles in every room of this small place I call my home,
love banged into the beehives and startled the goats and upset the guinea hens. Good grief, love, could you keep it down?
But love didn’t care. Love never seems to care.
Love spun stories using my threads, love wrote out the words in the lines of a cobweb.
Do not. Let fear. Be your guide.
Love wrote long poems,
to you,
in the soot on the kettle.
Once upon a time, and follow me into the pines, and please and thank you, and wish and silver and bone.
Love sang me a song of cicadas and bells, and the creak of old dead branches singing of long days with fingers intertwined, and longer nights with bodies intertwined.
Love didn’t seem to care how short the lines were. Life is short and you, my dear, feel so big. So let it fly! cried love
throwing every window open and spilling out blackbirds and crickets into the night screeching their joy to be free. Love reached up and grabbed the clouds and shook out a thunder clap. And after a year of silent still mourning the windows of my heart were thrown open to air out the old blankets, every rafter shook and standing in the middle of it all was love dancing in a red silk cloak.
Suddenly everything stopped.
My body swayed and echoed with the absence of sound and movement, after a long still moment of silence standing in the house of my heart with my love breathing hard and shaking,
love leaned in close and asked me
to trust again.
Yes, love. Yes.