Spaces

Sometimes, it so happens that we've paid so much attention to the things in front of us, we've forgotten to look at what is not there. To consider the whole picture, background and foreground, positive and negative space, stuff and emptiness. We need both for the beauty of the picture, for the balance. Yet how difficult to let go of the song in front of us and free fall into the murky nothing. How difficult to forget our name and lose ourselves in the infinite letters. But, is there any other way to understand the shape of things?

Spaces

i.

the trees

have strung up our

hearts, a thumping, bumping

fruit, on this

infernal, vernal day

with the lavender blooms

of mountain laurel, the glory

of birdsong,

and the earthy taste of

greens plucked from the dirt

christening our senses,

making us forget our sins of

winter

and believe in a perpetual

spring day

ii.

the birds have been singing

outside our window

in the light and in the dark

they sang through the storms,

though I remember creature silence

during the thunderstorms of my

childhood, birds only beginning to

chirp again when the gray clouds

had emptied their tears onto the land,

respectful of earth’s exquisite grief.

these birds, now, are brazen

and do not make themselves

vulnerable 

to the spaces between

the sounds

iii.

the trees need the

leaves and

the spaces in between

to be whole;

the warble is gorgeous 

for the silence it rents;

I am as much the negative

space I don’t use in the

world as I am the

body displacing air and water,

as much the places I have

been as those I have not

seen.

the pause between exhale and inhale

is the place of divinity;

our outlines let us know

we’re alive

and who we are
to one another.