What the Knife Knows About The Peach

The wound and the opening are the same gesture — 

this is what the surgeon knows, 

what the gardener knows 

when she cuts the rose back to nothing and calls it care.

I have been tended to like that. 

I have tended like that.

Forgive us. We learned love from people 

who learned it from people who 

confused devotion with removal.

The candle again. I keep coming back to the candle — 

how it was made to diminish, 

how it was made to do this beautifully, 

how we place it at the center of every table 

where we gather to celebrate being alive.

The light doesn't know it's a tragedy.

The light just keeps being given.

There is a particular grief in being someone who stays — 

how the leaving ones take something with them 

you didn't know you were carrying 

until the weight was gone and you felt both lighter 

and emptied of something you needed.

The river is not cruel to the stone. 

It is only perpetually arriving —

and the stone becomes beautiful 

the way all things become beautiful 

under sustained and patient attention.

Worn to the shape of what moved through it.

Smooth. Unrecognisable. Still itself, somehow. 

Still held by the same river that made it so.

The morning comes in the way kindness does 

from someone who doesn't know they're being kind — 

sideways, catching on everything it touches, 

indifferent to how beautiful it makes the damage look.

I have loved people the way rivers love banks — 

constantly, and by wearing them down.

The cherry tree doesn't mourn the blossoms. 

I know this. I have read this in fourteen different poems 

written by people who also mourned the blossoms.

We are all very educated in our own undoing.