Making it Himself & Of The Beginning Years, You Are, poems by Mélanie Faith

He looks lost within
his drippy blue windbreaker.
Spring Saturday, and not everything used

gets a second lease. A new life,
tender pale circle where the ring once was.
He sighed, left it on the bathroom sink

this morning. He's rifling through
not home improvement manuals for the deck she wanted
but cheery Better Homes and Gardens Cookbooks,

thumbing recipes of another era, musty with matrons'
solitary hours. For his own, the same sustenance:
meat and potatoes, burgeoning gooey pot roasts

for pot lucks he will never host.
Skulking, he wears the expression of the hungry
pooch left at home: once expectant, now knows better

than to expect more than mere scraps of the banquet.
Whatever he's going to make, this time
he'll be making it himself.

Beautiful as a lilac is beautiful in a dooryard called spring.
Sweeping as a westerly breeze in the face of all that gladdens.
Rare as the seeming of all that is and isn’t in actuality.
Migrant as the harbor of the heart’s own nesting.
Valued as the shape of shivering into the distant moraines .
Felt as the ordinary context of the lovely in their trampling.
Suited as the inviolate morning sunning on the hillside.
Gifted as the grazing of the skin with razor in the morning.
Someday as the sky from canopy to canopy covers, stretches.
Innocent as the elderberry and the asp in forests twining.
Cumbersome as all that isn’t in its own element and yet stands.
Stained as something that has hue and holy ember in its being.
Clear as the distance between expectation and enduring.
Immutable as the lane of leisure and listening kept hidden.
Waiting as the sweet simplicity meant for not one but every.
Blistered as the temperate on their travels through the fogscape.
Fertile as showers on the sycamore branch, shuddering droplets.
Believed as naming is identity to the root of the unmoored.
Fevered as the turning of the cheek to cool case of redeeming.
Rested as the stretching of the purring of the beginning.
Indelible as the fingerprints of an envelope ten years found.
Sustained as the weight of the wait over and not seeming.
Kept as the curtains at the casement, lace drawn back to face.
Effervescent as the bubbles in the wand of shaking round.
Beautiful as kept hidden purring of the beginning years, you are.