Sunday mornings, I walk the path
to the Chinese Garden Lagoon 
and visit this primordial creature
standing at the edge of his world.
The Great Blue Heron—symbol 
of good luck and wisdom
according to the Chimacum.
Sometimes I come to remember the past, 

sometimes to talk about the present.
Motionless—more pillar than bird—
he waits for breakfast to cross his path.
I tell him how last night my husband—
dead thirty years—came to me 
in a dream, more a visitation.
I felt him weigh down the left side 

of the bed, press close in the dark, 
the gentleness in him born of water 
over stone. A current so hungry 
surged through me, from skin 
to marrow, curving around muscles
filling hollows that lie beneath 
the surface. I woke to the scent 
that lingers in silence. 

It was a moment I wanted 
to capture and crawl into.
Fighting my way through that crazy 
hazy cloud between asleep and awake,
I dragged myself to the kitchen, 
stood waiting for coffee to brew, 
empty cup in hand—a beggar
wanting more. 
                        

I’m driving to Trader Joe’s early on a rainy Sunday 
morning when Garth Brooks comes on the radio 
singing The Dance and I exit the here and now 
of the highway, travel back into the past

where a man walks through the door of Ben’s Coffee Shop 
just as the waitress asks me, will there be anything else? 
Stepping out of character I reply, you can bring him over, 
nodding toward the man. Next thing I know, 

he slides across the red Naugahyde bench beside me 
and asks, do you pick up guys often? I almost spit my coffee 
across the table. There’s barely a breath between us, when
a gravitational pull tugs, a sense I already know this man 

in my bones. Around the curve, the sky brightens
like a sign from above. I drive under the arc
of a rainbow, sunlight bent in water droplets. 
Three decades after his death, memories—

intimate and constant as my own heartbeat—
line the long familiar road. Garth got it right, 
Holding you, I held everything. Not one part of me, 
not one muscle, doesn’t still want that man.
                        

Years ago, I found a book. 
Inside the back cover, someone had penciled, 
It’s the having not the keeping that is the treasure. 
I held those words close, as one after another, 

my siblings died, each younger than the last. 
I ached to disappear and find another family—
just show up at some stranger’s door, 
be taken in and live a different life. 

Impossible. Instead, for decades I waited, 
certain I’d go next. 

Now, too old to die young, I lose—
phone numbers, money, days
and especially parked cars
in large multilevel structures.

Still stuck in a life I don’t understand
or deserve.

Evenings when I sit alone in the backyard
by the hydrangea bushes, a spot for sipping
wine laced with memories that feel 
like lucky coins I can rub. 

Memories I wouldn’t trade 
for a million bucks. A train whistles 
in the distance. I close my eyes and listen
all the voices I ever loved adrift still
floating thrum-full of longing

falling somewhere between an echo 
and an answer.

Note: ‘It’s the having not the keeping that’s the treasure’ is from Jack Gilbert’s The Lost Hotels of Paris