Where to Start with a Heart

I divide life into four seasons, the same year I learn to cut out paper hearts. The mountain in front of my house reveals a different personality with each season. I sense its cycle.

Nothing remains the same for long.

I am part of the seasonal pattern, following the beginning, middle, and end. This is what it means to assimilate, not simply to exist. I am learning to navigate on my own. An evolution is occurring: birth, love, and death.

It’s easier to start at the bottom of a heart.

I fold a piece of red construction paper in half and snip my scissors upwards until I have cut one entire side of the heart. The paper scraps will be turned into smaller hearts. Everything must be saved for the sake of making more hearts. Hearts turn best out when there is no pencil outline for my scissors to follow when I cut. I freehand cut hundreds from folded construction papers: the shape is simple. We are the ones who complicate things: Beauty relies on any artist to be patient.

After I finish cutting, I open my heart and smooth out the seam that runs down the center. It will be the first of many seams I try and smooth out. Little do I know, I will grow up, fall in love several times, face the un-repairable creases, some more evident in some than others, and there will be nothing I can do to make them disappear.

I offer handfuls of hearts to my mother and father, some end up in drawers or become lost in the daily shuffle, while some make it to the refrigerator—fanning starlets, pinned with a letter from my alphabet magnet set. This is love.

What You See

My mother, blonde and bent,

cleans the garage, not even a year

after your death. She pulls on the miles

of dive equipment, cracked and black

hoses baked from deadpan heat.

Reminiscent of the years

they had lived underwater,

now piles of oxygen-starved heaps:

Oceans to be buried by earth.

She continues late past summer,

counts three falling stars before bed,

dreams in metal, as wind chimes

sing out low from the east.

The sunrise will be sure to come,

stretch her body

across the half empty house.

Hours pass, hard as quartz,

pushing holes in the sky, and then,

she finds his dive slate, writing still legible;

it says, what you see are fish eggs.

Little sacs of life, the size of hope,

living inside their universe,

legs--all in oceanic unison, and

ghost-like as they emerge,

rising and falling

into each other's arms

deep inside the salt of the earth.

Time

Clusters of desire, red as rubies, have the authority to cast shadows and
blur the bouquets, perfected visions, when we hold them too close to our eye.

Oversight

More silence...yet, somehow, deeper insights unfold. This perspective allows me to receive sharper angles of truth. I witness your character unveil. Outside, the natural world whispers. Beauty transfixes me, turning this place we've stumbled into right side up, again. Life carries my wings out from underneath your man-child shadow. I wish I could love you. I've never been good at goodbyes.

Discussion & Love. For My Blog Followers...

I took this picture today--two flowers leaning towards each other. Part of me sees botany in discussion, while the other half sees the flowers entirely in love. Perhaps that is significant in love...a slow, but perpetual growth towards one another. It takes two, I know that...

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I am savoring the last few pages in the book, "One Thousand Gifts," by Ann Voskamp. My life has been altered by the focus of another's vantage point on gratitude. This book has gifted me; it's indescribable to incapsulate in a single blog entry. I just know I leaned into it, and with that, like love, anything is possible. But you have to lean into love if you want it...

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On the drive to work today, I thought about gratitude in the not-so-obivous areas of my life, and I felt moved to let the people out there who read my blog, the ones I do know, and the ones I've never met, that I appreciate you.

I dedicate this posting and photo to you...you out there in the United States, Russia, Germany, China, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, France, and Latvia who have been following my blog that contains my poems, photos, essays, random thoughts, and the intimate chapters of my heart.

Love & Thanks,

Pilar