Grateful

I am grateful for the way colliding and fusing gases

have continued to boil up our sun for 4.6 billion years.

Not “our” sun, but like a stray dog that keeps

coming around, finally called ours.

I am grateful for the leftover orbiting beads of fused

material that became our brothers and sisters, each arid

and silent as a twin who died at birth, always

held tenderly in the mind as the one who might

have understood us.

I am grateful for the Kuiper Belt, where we are able

to keep Pluto and the other outcasts among

its icy flying rocks, to remind us not everything gets in.

I am grateful for the heliosphere, the bubble blown

by the sun that holds its own exactly as far out

as possible, wiser than I ever was, with my soap bubbles.

I am grateful for the stories woven from stars,

and for the delicate brushstrokes of Chinese characters

that leave only the space between stories as if

the dragon, the monkey, the pig, the rooster, the tiger,

are just bones, lit from the inside.

I am grateful for the air inside the solar system’s bones,

because this is how it works, how the bellows

are pumped against the few obstructions, the soft

whine, the trumpet, the goshawk, the chickadee,

the roundness of sound itself, as it pushes

through the inconvenient barriers.

Yet I save my greatest gratitude for the slight

misalignments, the outside forces, the variance errors,

that tilt things toward and away, so that I have to endure

the bitter cold only until spring.

Yes, it is the tilt I have to thank for everything,

the sway in your walk, as if you were a teeter-totter

lugging the wash basket down the hall.