What soft brightness is this?
This light reflected off the salt pond,
gentle as your eyelashes when you sleep,
dumb with beauty and promise as if
promises are ever a kind of gentle.

I am only looking for certainty, only looking,
window-shopping in spring’s raw, white sun
for new flowers to bring home to you,
for new flowers growing into the space once
for the old flowers, the ones I dried and preserved
in the kitchen near the salt and rosemary and thyme.

It is lovely to be promised, to be vowed,
to be sure. But I have been alive long enough
to know: there is only one kind of certainty worth
wanting and it is the kind you truly believe
in the moment. There are no other kinds

of certainty. There are no others but you,
in this returning warmth, in this promise
of growth year after year. Even spring
means it, for a little while, bringing up
the bodies through the wet dirt, bringing
us another year we can believe in.