On Your Birthday
 
For years, he wrapped his best gift
 into a single sheet of typing paper
 and tucked it in the corner of your vanity mirror.
 And there, your husband’s words,
 like spring’s first crocus, 
 pushed their snowy heads eagerly
 into the gray days of winter.
 Each birthday, they took careful root in the only
 seed bed worth tending.
 
 To his best reader,
 to the love—oh, the love of his life!
 To the home he carried with him
 into and out of the dark places that might have undone him, 
 but for you. 
 To the one who makes do, who takes little
 and gives much.
 To the loveliest of all the birds he kept,
 the one whose silver wings flash like bright berries
 in the junipers.
 
 And now the words are left to me.
 I can hear my father’s fingers on his Royal typewriter,
 the quick slap of thumb and forefingers,
 the blue rush of each carriage return.
 I can feel the round keys give themselves, as they must,
 to a rhythm preordained. 
 And the small metal stand with wings that unfold 
 to hold notebooks and such
 quakes with each image pounded into life.
  
 Now, the words he gifted--
 so many words spilling from line to line, 
 jumping the white spaces of the decades--
 now, this word cache strains against the grave.
  
 And so, on your birthday,
 consider this a single page tucked into the corner
 of your vanity. 
 Consider that the old black Royal lumbers on
 with humble words unearthed from the genetic soil 
 of the one who loves you
 always. 


With all my love, Shannon