A broken tulip

They say your love is a wide open sky

They say your love is unending ocean

I believe it.

But today the blue winter sky is so far away

the ocean is something I can’t reach for

and I need

Your love to be a small, black rock for me today.

 

These hands, my hands, they’re so small

(You made them, so I guess you know)

all my life I’ve stretched farther

but never far enough

trying so hard to hold what I can’t

Is your love just one more beautiful thing

that becomes vaporous as a cloud to my touch,

does your love leak through my cupped hands

like salt water?

Maybe I can’t hold anything else in this life,

but

could I just hold you, entwined in my fingers

ensconced in a purple coat pocket

as I walk along a river of cars

(they call it a highway)

my world framed in a dome of gray fur like the sky

my blue-knit scarf heaving like an ocean horizon

my world, defined by defense against cold.

Right now, right here

could I just hold you

like a smooth stone that won’t slip away?

I just need you.

Yesterday I plucked a dying maple leaf

and swung it in wide arcs

my baton

conducting my soul, the furniture outlets,

the shopping mall and the stopped cars

at red rush hour traffic lights

into this song –

JESUS LOVES ME THIS I KNOW

 

You became a tiny fetus

is it so hard for your love to be small enough

for me to hold on to you tonight?

Yesterday I sang each word

as though the weight of the world

pressed it from my cold lungs –

LITTLE ONES TO HIM BELONG

(Remember how little I am?)

THEY ARE WEAK

BUT HE IS STRONG

I think

I can wrap my fingers around the solidity

of these words.

There’s smooth certainty here

YES JESUS LOVES ME!

 

Could your love be a small black rock

Could I just hold you tonight

and know I never, ever have to let you go?

Could you not be the sky I travel under,

the ocean I travel over,

but something I can close my hand on

and travel with?

Could you be certainty to my soul?

(if this is heresy, forgive me Father

I just want you close)

 

Sky of God, Ocean of God,

become a stone for me,

because I am one of the little ones

with small hands

and I belong to you.