Spilling e's

O that moment in
7th grade
wasting time at the school library

when I was supposed to be
reading the Odyssey )who 
knows? This might also be a journey.
O that moment when
the smallcase e's and periods
poured off the shelf into my palms,
pushed from the other side by a mouse?
A dusty angel?

Pod of pages bursting

into thistle silk syllables
carried on a cruel lovely
April breath punctuated mad-

ly with dashes and a half
parenthesis )the 
smiling horizon of a world 
that awaited finishing
like a chrysalis on my shoulders
with a hole full of stars on top.
How can my stammering
imaginal brain cells

thank you enough, e. e.

for this baptism in
the spill of your broken rules,

the grammar of your grace,
where anyone lives in a
pretty how town with
up so floating many bells down?

Soon after, in a used book shop,

the mud-luscious messenger nudged
another rainbow off the shelf

entitled, "Cherry Blossoms,"

a tiny volume of haiku.
I was only 12
when Issa's tear dissolved me:

This dewdrop world...

it may be a dewdrop...

and yet, and yet.

Soon it would be Ferlinghetti's

naked nude

flying on a violin horse

with the ghost of Chagall.

Then Keats, pillowed on his fair love's

ripening breast.

And the Trappist monk who told me

that his favorite mystic was
Emily Dickenson

because she taught him to dwell
in possibility.

But my inner life began
with those insouciant smallcase e's

spilling into my prayer cupped hands

while I was wasting time
at the library.

It was Just
spring. 

Yet even now,
still whistling far and wee

might uncapital-eyes
everything, even god, 

because a sparrow-single song that falls
is none to ear or i the less for thee
than ten million suns.