I don’t know if it’s the change in the season
or if I accidentally stepped on a fragile god’s toe,
but for the past week,
life has been tenderizing me for a recipe
that nobody has the guts to show me.

Every morning, another mallet.
Every night, God whispering, “Trust the process”,
(which, by the way, is exactly what a cannibal would say).

Pause: I know I’m being dramatic.
I’m an artist.
We don’t leave inconveniences in their original size.
Give me an upset tummy and an open afternoon
and I’ll give you a solo exhibit by dinner
out of what I’ve been going through.

Anyway. Back to what I’ve been going through:

For seven straight days I’ve been moving
from one “you’ve got to be kidding me”
to the next assurance that all kidding has been discontinued.
I’ve felt like a package marked HANDLE WITH CARE
in a warehouse staffed by handsy men
who just found out they’re all dating the same woman.

Large paintings I spent months making
have been damaged partially
and lost completely by UPS,
a company whose entire business model
is now only asking, What can brown do to you?

There have been commissions that won’t cooperate,
each starting as a beautiful idea and ending forty hours later,
with me standing in front of the canvas
with the exhausted tenderness of a parent
whose child just licked the airport floor.

“I love you, but I cannot support what you are becoming anymore.”

And then there was my body,
that refused to let the paintings have all the drama.
Instead, it cooked up a nice virus which sent me incoherently into a CVS
where the MinuteClinic needed considerably less than a minute
to decide I was above its pay grade
and off I went to Urgent Care.

Nothing steadies the soul like being medically rejected
by the place where you buy your toothpaste and Halloween Candy.

It’s been a wild week, but then yesterday happened too.

Before breakfast,
while Cannon Beach was still developing itself in the dark,
we walked near the water at the edge of the continent
and Roosevelt Elk emerged out of the Oregon fog.

Their bodies held the brown of bread pulled from an oven
and they bowed their chandelier heads when the sun stood up. 

In a low tide pool,
starfish clung to oyster shells with all five of its hands
and crabs crawled everywhere on their tiny little stilts.

Next to me, my heart let me hold her hand.

I keep asking life to be more careful with the things I love,
and life keeps spilling everywhere:

Paintings out of trucks.
Elk out of fogs.
Health out of bodies.
Stars into pools.
Her fingers through mine.

I think the reason why life never stops giving me reasons to grieve,
is because life keeps giving me reasons to stay.

Because her hand is warm.
Because she points to something in the water
and I get to turn and find out what she sees.
Because two elks are behaving like men who should’ve left the bar an hour ago.
Because the moon can move a body without ever touching it once.

We savor because Neverland is near and now.
We grieve because not everything now will always be near.

And the whole week belongs.

“Neverland”
36×36 Oil on Canvas
Framed in a Black Pine Floating Frame