Practicing How to Be in This World

I want to be enough, but it’s still an outline
of a woman inside the outline of another woman.

The house inside me is empty, the sun
slanting over the floor a small caveat.

The tree inside me is not empty. It is full
of apples that fall with a warm hollow thud.

You look inside & say, Let this be enough.
The house fills with books

& dishes pile up with their painted wild flowers
inside the cabinets inside the house inside of me.

The spoons inside quietly tuck
together like a row of ampersands.

I like you inside me &, later, next to me.
Our marriage is like the moon:

varieties of emptiness & fullness.
I name the moons inside me: flower, blood,

hunter, or harvest—depending on my season.
The seasons inside are many different kinds of light.

Inside me the bees revive with a hum,
rub together, roll in yellow. These bees,

they keep getting reborn, brought from the brink,
still finding the trees at the farthest edges of my fields.

This is how we practice living: fill ourselves
with gesture, dusk, apple blossoms.