the way things start

slowly and all at once:
a cigarette flick, ashes strewn across wind, carrying
a baby in one arm, a tremble in the other.

a glimpse turns into a look turns into
a stare, upstairs, there’s a window that perfectly shows the length of an alley
that the orange cats traipse down, a kid and presumably his dad
play catch in the back yard, a memory forms
itself around moments, we catalogue each day
as a series of passing moments, passing lives, past lives
culminating into this one we have today, here and now.

There is a distinct way a trumpet carries a note, lingering
as all the air gets sucked out of the room,
a vacuum of melodies and half-played notes, half-written notes.
I peel you an orange. It is the greatest gift I can give, my hands
working their way around the sphere, slowly measuring how many times
my fingers must plunge themselves into skin
without breaking a juicy core, splitting it half and half,
one for you and one for every time we started a day
with weights on our chests.

Ross Gay’s catalogue of unabashed gratitude plays,
we each the orange. We listen for sounds that stick,
imaginations glistening, our minds boggling, mouths
watering as we bite citrus in half, chewing in colors, we are
the colors themselves painted across this small town we’ve created.
The fireplace is on and I’m finding myself remembering how
a poem works or how it doesn’t work, how we do the work
of taking it in, interpreting, intermingling the concepts that we
know and those that we don’t.

Sitting on the precipice of the unknown, we wonder
how we got here, why we got here, when we got here: slowly and all
at once.