This morning, I found the prism had fallen, and I picked it up and put it back on the window, and it resumed its fractured turning, taking sun, spilling rainbows about the room as if it had never stopped.
Today I touched a bee that had alighted on my green bag with the cherry blossom lining, tapping it, pressing his pistils to the cloth as if it were fragrant, a real field of flowers and not a wallpaper fabric. I touched his wings. I touched his buzzing back; he let me. Once I touched a raccoon. Once I was saved from a rattlesnake by a stray dog who bit it, striking, in his mouth.
We are all trying our best.
My friend the artist, his love the teacher, the cantor, the waitress, the student with the black eye, the smoking girl.
We are trying our best. I see this now. I see my sister in her apartment, working all day, coming home late, and cracking stained glass sheets in patterns, into shapes, all night. We are trying our best.
The bright cardinal found me where I sat on the hill by the abandoned ranger station, the fire road. And then I saw it: the bluebird, two of them. I know what it is. I know what it means.
I am trying my best. I am not talking about a poem, or a novel, or a house, or a job. I am trying my best, and one day, one day, one day, I will get it right.
