This Morning

I am reading Every Dress a Decision, by Elizabeth Austen. I am on my fourth time through it, as I'm writing a review, but my first time through was standing in the kitchen at the table where the mailing package lay torn open, turning page after page.

For now, a little excerpt from "This Morning," which has an epigraph by Theodore Roethke: Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? 


It's time. It's almost too late.
Did you see the magnolia light its pink fires?
You could be your own, unknown self.
No one is keeping it from you.

The magnolia lights its pink fires,
daffodils shed papery sheaths.
No one is keeping you from it--
your church of window, pen, and morning.

My church of window this morning streams with rain. I am thinking of my dad on Father's Day, his love of trees, how he had to take down a gigantic cedar recently, because it did not come back to life after the winter.

Thinking of him at the beach in my Florida childhood, and, as a toddler, sitting on his shoulder, him growling into my naked belly and nibbling it, me laughing till I couldn't breathe.

Happy Father's Day.

And here's a special Father's Day pictorial at The Sartorialist.