What It Has Come To

It has come to this.

Hosta’s incorrigible growth through the garden beds. Black cat’s years turning another whisker white. Final drips of wax on a candle left burning overnight. Sigh of a lover’s stir, seconds before the dawn alarm. Smudge of dirt on the kitchen floor and its companion of alrightness. 

It has come to this. 

This clenched hand opening, this thousandth dish washed. This smallest ah this there murmured from the refolded blanket, never mind it will be used again tonight.

It’s hard to put up a fight in a ring of melting butter. But you try even while yes yes hearing the hush of your own damn self laughing from behind a tree, that part of you who knows better, that part of you who’s always a step ahead of the you who moves mouth and limbs. They watch you sputter on stories that have become garbled in your mouth and spit up down your chin. The last knuckle of your pinky flushed white from the last vestiges of your no no.

Maybe it isn’t trust that’s needed here. Maybe it isn’t faith that you’ll fall into the soft wombed belly of the mother. Maybe not trust, but a noticing. An attending. To wet patter; what is the creek and what is the rain? To the socks left on a Locust stump; all the feet they could be home to. And all the bodies those feet carry. And all the voices those bodies move. All those voices that have howled with yours. 

Maybe not trust. Rather, the delicate accounting of what it has all come to.