The Day Started Well Enough

The Day Started Well Enough

(“No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You aren’t able to serve God and Mammon.” Luke 16:13)

The day started well enough; the sun rose
in the usual place. The grass was unruly around
the dog’s pen and
the garden beds where two rose bushes struggle.
I would have waited all day for your company,
even if you got a late start. With a porch swing in front
and a deck on the back,
my house is yours. No need to build another one.
There is music even before you arrive,
you send it ahead of you. There are memories
of the way your eyes dance at birds and clouds,
but mostly babies.
There are evenings with campfires
that should never be extinguished.
There are places where no words need be spoken.
The day starts the same for you and me,
and I know you desire for it to end more quietly.
We can pick up the sunshine with plastic shovels
and store it in pails we sometimes used for Easter baskets.
We can toss it toward night-sky imaginations and laugh
at our ingenuity. We have lassoed the sun.
Eden was a paradise I am told,
but so is my back yard. And no tree is forbidden;
the rabbits come for breakfast, the deer brunch on the
unprotected roses.

These are all yours. They do not belong to me.
I’ve kept a journal in the desk by the front window.
You can write in it every time you come, and no one will know.

The day started. They all do. We remembered; we knew.
We wondered when the boy would come finish mowing the lawn.
Then we would gather the sunlight, drop it like jewels into the
glowing embers of our campfire, and tell stories we only tell
each other.