Inheritance

Like bread rising in the oven, it arrives quietly, generously.

That moment when, gently rocking in the bathtub, the bones of your spine align.

That moment when, brushing your teeth, 
an entire archive of memories within you becomes suddenly saturated with color,
​as if touched by the aurora.

That moment when your feet on the bathroom tile flex, 
and the ground beneath you unfolds like a flower,
to become the step from which you could float up 
like a bee or a butterfly.

That moment when you smell the incense burning, 
and you realize that weeks of grief and illness, 
alone in your apartment,
have become a private ecstasy,
that the love poems being written in your blood are too beautiful to capture.

That moment when the miles behind you sound
like bells on the mountainside,
as the temple door appears before you.
The temple you've been dreaming, and which carried your feet
through snowstorm,
boulder,
and howling winds.

Only it's not a temple: it's you, 
standing on the mountain, having found yourself capable,
having learned to hear those bells in the miles.
You: alone, standing before the mirror,
humming like the bees.

That moment, when you can see the true shape of you,
as sunlight through colored glass.

That moment, when the coffer from which everything that streams to you is revealed,
and it is boundless.

That moment cannot be hurried nor forced,
only caught,
like my late father caught trout in the canyon, 
years ago, while I watched.
The way, at sunset, his hands listened for the fish,
loose but steady on the rod,
the way his elk-haired caddis glided on the river,
just at the edge of the bank where the shadow touched the light,
among the rippling tracks of water skippers.

The way I sit now at the edge of my desk to catch this poem,
the way I imagine myself gathering this moment
like cottonwood blossoms
to be a balm or a bath or holy incense,
to be a bell on the mountainside
or a bee floating beside whomever wanders
through the wilderness alone, with a heavy heart,
for whomever waits at river's edge,
wishing on a dandelion to be kissed by Grace.

For whomever might need to hear
what the fish told my father with its eyes 
as it pierced the evening like a silver arrow:
"You are Light."