I’m still in the river of you I discovered so many years ago.
I can measure the unfolding of our lives in your hands,
first so tiny and puffed,
then lean and brown from summer dirt,
your fingernails broken and muddied for years.
Now they become a man’s hands, still smart and lean,
but with their own hidden purposes.
Your sister joined us years after you,
her caterpillar fingers clutching your long curls
pulling them to her mouth
laughing at the sight of you.
She has always been filled with her own purposes,
to know the land, her creatures,
touching every living thing with adoring benediction,
adopting them as forever kin.
The river you make together is so vast, so thick with currents and unheard of enchantments,
I could never cross it,
would never attempt to leave it.
I’ve been carried by it, floating giddy in its joyful churning,
never really knowing where it will take me.
For a time we were your shores,
your Mother and I,
until she died.
You didn’t wander when she was gone,
instead you learned to hold yourselves and each other.
Slowly, you both became the other shore.
More and more you reveal that you know the way a river should bend,
how grace can still have a hand in this life
after losing so much.
Already I can feel the ways you will become my shores when I begin to fade, readying myself to empty into the ocean that holds us all.
