Andrea Racine
Part XII

I loved you
So much
The way the sun is able
To kiss skin
Through a breeze

I loved you
Like I love oxygen
Like the Milky Way Galaxy
Discovered through a lens

I loved you
Like a heartbeat

You loved me
This, I know
Is true

But how often
Or how much
Or how hard

How hard does a daffodil love
The soil, the earth, and the sun

How hard does a moth love
The light that it can
Never really touch, no never
Touch the light, never love the light
Never make it through the
Mouth and the lips of the light

How hard does a lightning bug
Love a summer night

How hard can I, or could
I, or how hard could you
Ravaging my skin, biting
My nipple, kicking and kicking
Getting through my mouth


Through my mouth, into hills
Breaking and pouring down
Over every caress, every whispered
I love you, I and you, I love
Everything there is to love about you
Not enough, no never enough, no
So hard and enough enough enough



In our yard were black walnut trees.
The squirrels, who ate out of our birdfeeders, grew
fat and round like they swallowed baseballs, and would
gather the black walnuts and bury them around the house.
From these nuts, saplings grew and tore up the stone steps
that ran down one of the hills. My mother and I would spend
days in the summer and early fall wearing leather
gloves tearing the saplings from their roots.

There were many hills around that house.
From a far enough distance
there is no doubt that it looked like one great hill
leading down into a valley. But we stood close
and watched the hills break into patches of flat land.

Once, my mother stood in front of the mirror cutting her own hair
inspecting every strand of gray against the black. She blamed
her graying on me, not my sister, because
when I was a child I had a habit of pulling out her hair
to play with while I fell asleep.

One of us was a sapling
One of us was a bee and we
Rang for each other and we
Kept on bumping into our bodies

When I learned to forgive my mother, I realized
that most of the grey probably was my fault. Although
my sister, too, was partially to blame.
Sometimes, rarely, I feel so sad for my mother
who looks back on a decade of her life as misery
and the following decade with a sense of failure.
Only now, in her late 50s, has she found the happiness