every morning, in air where moonlight
and sunlight come to mingle,

i fill her copper kettle with water from
the well, and bring a morning
prayer to the herbs and flowers.

the hawk and heron come as well.
every day they tell me winged stories,

they teach me how to lay beauty
into the bones of reality.

we remember her, we recite her name.

she would sit in the small house,
the world to her back, and stitch
together small promises ~

she would remember the red-winged
blackbird.
she would wish for the black rose,
red stigma.

I wear her moon face around my neck,
over the scar, over the place where the
end of the world was born and where a
new world was imagined.

in the spring, into a new earth,
I planted her garden ~

hibiscus, lavender, rosemary, sage, forsythia,
three rose bushes for our roaming Alice.
lilacs, basil, blueberries, crape myrtle.

in firefly light she gave the garden back to me.

I share it with my silver daughter,
two wild cats,
a gentle man.

but her voice emanates from
the flowers and the bee hum.
her eyes sparkle in dragonfly wing,
her spirit scents the air on tip of
butterfly flight.















every night, as the moon takes shape in a flurry
of bat wing and cicada song,

I take his hand, and we walk into the hills,
I look over the land down to where the
river rolls and say,

"I love this copper-kettle life."

He sends me a warm look, squeezes my
hand and smiles ~ "you say that every night"

and every night, it is true ~