Monday Morning Confession

This morning a surgeon laid a sharp knife against my niece's abdomen.  At least that's how I imagined it: harsh white lights, the sterile gowns, green masks.  To the surgeon it was routine, a simple procedure, one more appendix out, one more child whisked back to recovery where she would wake, run her finger along a new scar.  Of course to us, her family, this simple procedure felt complicated, full of risk and grace and a reminder of how your life changes in an instant, the way nothing is sure.  Coming home from dropping off my own daughter at school, I felt it and wondered again at how everyone experiences the same morning so differently.

What does it mean, then, that my morning
unfolded gentle as dew?  Long shadows slanted
to the grass where the dog sat, waiting for a squirrel,
and when I walked upstairs, my daughter, still sleep-creased,
wrapped her soft arms around my neck.

I have not forgotten waking to different days,
a hand at my throat, another at my mouth,
a boulder's weight on my chest.  Those days
the dew still came, the dog still waited for squirrels,
maybe buds even swelled to bloom--I can't remember.

What I mean to say to you is simple
but hard:  we can't write our happiness
and we can't write our sorrow.  One or the other
opens wings in an unseen place, circles in to perch
at our feeder--flocks of birds sometimes.
What can we do but wake, and walk to the window,
throw it wide?

Maybe you rose easy
into the soft embrace of morning
but maybe the air was painful in your lungs.
Either way, rise, walk away from bed,
stand at the window.

The birds come and go,
but they mean you no harm.

Yet below the dewy grass,
the earth;
and above your head,
the sky.
What I mean to say is,
there is downdeep goodness
that holds you, that will not let you go.