Magic in the Air

Do you feel it?
There is magic in the air tonight.
A raw and palpable sense of potential.
I want to cry, because I know that every sincere striving toward awakening is met
with the touch of something wonderful, mysterious, and tender.
I want to open my mouth and have music pour out.
I don’t want to keep speaking words.
I want to sing.
To gather the air’s rainbow droplets and place them in my hair.
To remove my shoes and step onto moss spongey and wet with the kiss of underground rivers.
I want to step into the sky with the ease of childhood dreams
and walk over the city tonight, as over an ocean of floating candles.

And would you join me in this serious endeavor?
Would you companion one daring enough to re-open the treasure chest,
to forego years of jadedness and recall the way it feels to live
as if each moment were an eternal horizon and you had all the keys
and all the friends a girl could wish for?
Would you bravely trade your certainty
for the mystery of seeing
with your real eyes
a fairy?

Like the one I saw that summer many years ago, as I sat at river’s edge
listening to my friend tell a story
A kind of listening as if hearing the orbit of planets
in between the words as they leave the mouth.
My friend was listening to me in the same way,
a rapturous listening as if the cells inside were bowing
at the space between,
And I swear to God in Heaven and on the name of my mother who still goes to actual church
that we both at the same moment saw an orb of light flash between us
and a stunned silence overcame us.
​
It was so fast we almost second-guessed our eyes, but we had BOTH seen it.
And we both stared out over the water where it had disappeared
filled with the same kind of magic that is in the air tonight.
A kind of invisible glow under the edges of things,
a kind of anything-could-happen-including-your-long-dead-grandfather-could-knock-on-the-door-and-no one-would-bat-an-eye-as-if-your-neighbor-were-coming-to-borrow-an-egg kind of feeling
somehow as simple as it is miraculous,
as just-right
and as mind-bendingly ridiculous
as trustworthy as being tucked into flannel sheets in winter as the moon glows on falling snow outside the window
as shocking as the bedposts suddenly shaking in the turbulence of dreamy ocean waves
as assuring as the wheel that readily appears in your hands to steer the ship across the Milky Way
as nebulous as the ache in your chest which some have named “awe,”
as blissful and as piercing as melting, as dissolving as surrendering
into the feeling
until there is no more edge between you and the stars
no more edge between you
no more between
no more
you