having ascended summer mountain

1. shiz and i plus wall-leaning mattress
fill the room
with our cat-cows and triangles and
i fly in crow pose while you
press your back into floor and
cup your knees in your hands

2. i slice up two oranges
6 wedges slipped into a platebowl
one for you (purple)
one for me (blue)

3. security guard at albertsons
when asked how he’s doing
talks about the shade and spending as much time in it
as he can

4. clear water sloshing in glass gallon
cradled and head-balanced in your hands
i like to pretend
i tell shiz
that we’re back in the waipio valley
(hiking 15 minutes out towards the ocean
to gather drinking water at the spring)

5. you call them
spring sproing birds
in upside down handwriting and
i laugh out loud
for the specificity
the sharpness of your memory
and how puzzle-piece fitted i feel

6. a sketched horse released from its stable
munching on grass patches near the address part of  the
sunken ship postcard
it is the word endings
that drops the weighty anchor
and the word transition
that lifts it up again

7. this song embeds itself in skin
landscape
the air itself
i imagine listening in a year or two
and how the hum
the rhythm
the pitch and texture
will carry me back
to this
the place where seasons rotate
longest day of light here and gone
having ascended summer mountain
and having begun the trek back down

8. we walk past the plumeria plant
for the second time in a day
both times bending down to pick up
fallen fragrant flowers
this is not as good as hawaii
but at least it smells like it

9. knock em dead
you say
and mouth to mouth em back alive
feeding each syllable slipped mama bird style
past their lips/ears/hearts
and even if this communication is out of line
it couldn’t have been any better time or any more
perfectly worded

10. four rows back i send secrets in through the side door
when i think i’m not looking
until eventually
i surprise myself
with the truths that choose to surface

11. gathered in a sideyard
we mill near the snacks and drinks
before fitting ourselves into seated formation

12. five poems and i go from zero to onfire in the sideyard
in a matter of minutes
the power of being witnessed
the power of sensing
in the silence
each of you
breath-paused
and offering
i’m right here with you
without even realizing
you had allowed me to take you there in the first place

12. dark hair held back with a crocheted flower she
turns around to tell me
how my work/words made her cry
later christina reports
two other women
wiping at their eyes
which might mean nothing more than
something in them
recognizes something in me
and the recognition is like the shock of running into an identical twin
you never knew you had
followed by the calm
of finally discovering the context
for feeling like something was always missing

13. dearest shiz
asleep
five feet from me as i type
curled under the pinkgreenpurple afghan grandma siedlewski knitted
my deepest
appreciations
for being with me
for chopping salad while i hand-typed details
for stopwatching me while the poems tell me which ones want to go on tonight
for letting me link arms with you on university
in an attempt to
bend time
i am
eternally
grateful