All Subtle Moments

It is easy to feel
the vibration of the shifters of my car on my fingertips
against the rough part of
Sauvie Island country roads
on my sad girl drive,
Be the Cowboy on an infinite loop
in the cool riparian air.

And it is easy to feel
the oxblood leather wrapped around me,
the physical reminder
of my commitment to the survival
of everyone and everything I love
pressed up on my chest,
gentle, but ever-present.

It is easy to feel
in these minor moments,
when my body returns to this dimension,
like how the scent of perfume
lingers in space,
when my body feels like the
most beautiful thing on Earth,
like tears in rain,
like flowers floating off branches in the Oregon springtime.

All subtle moments,
all both whole and parts,
but never the whole story,
but never all of my awareness,
a vignette in the movie of my life,
a paragraph or sentence in my memoir,
a line of ink flowing out of the nib onto the page,
a transistor on my motherboard,
easily overwhelmed by the wrong kind of dissonance,
the existential kind,
rather than the rising-and-falling, build-and-release tension
of crafting verse onto a page,
a dissonance of the soul,
a true-and-untrue threat to one’s story,
the tension of a heroine’s loss
to unimaginable and immovable forces.

To feel in my body,
to exist in it,
is to exist forever in this war
between small moments of ephemeral beauty,
of the essential ahh-ness of things,
of all that is solid melting into air,
and the most terrible tritone imaginable,
one not saveable by context and cadence,
the tautness of of the branch you’re standing on
about to snap,
sending you crashing down into a deep dried well,
and every once in a while
a flashlight is tossed
down
to
you.