She sends the moon to me each night
not the moon itself but something older,
like fireflies someone caught and saved
in a jar marked with years I wasn’t born yet,
or the exact weight of snow on pine boughs
that makes them bow but never
break as I do when she leaves
Never break.
Her words nest in my ear, wrens
returning to the same hollow every spring,
finding the space that’s always been
perfectly their shape. How long
has she been saying these
things
to other midnight listeners? Other souls who don’t wake
at 3am cataloging their failures Decades of goodnights
pooling like honey in the comb,
or sap running its ancient circuit
through trees that remember when I believed
to the spile,
or seeds that wait twenty years for fire
before they know it’s time to grow. Before they know.
I’ve met maybe three others who knew
this particular incantation,
Sarah with her voice like rain, Carrie who cheated
their way of folding darkness
into something soft as forgiveness,
the way to call down stars like dandelion seeds
and plant them behind someone’s
eyes that might be lying
eyelids.
They carry it hidden like a smooth stone
in their pocket, like a bird’s magnetic knowledge
of home, like the memory water keeps
of every place it’s ever been. Every place
that taught it how to leave
written in its chemistry.
This time, I tell myself, this time
the spell will hold. Her voice braids itself
with younger voices like sweetgrass,
like smoke from the same fire that warmed our
small hands decades ago when death wasn’t inevitable yet
bodies against the dark,
like the way certain shells still carry the ocean
no matter how far inland you take them,
how far I’ve drifted from any shore that
no matter how many years you hold them
to your ear, listening,
listening for what’s already gone
listening.