It piles up –

the unwashed dishes,

the undone laundry,

the organizing baskets and boxes unfilled and dusty –

and you swear you will always

wake up and look for the beauty in the world, but

all you see

are the unmade beds,

the stinking litter box,

the shoes the kids kicked off in front of the hall closet – WHY can’t they put them inside the closet, just a few damn inches, is it really that hard?  Do I ask too much? –

and it is so easy to not look 

at the sticky kitchen table,

the unopened mail with its attendant unpaid bills,

the plants with the browning leaves

and give it up to the hot gray day fetid with humidity and still as breath held,

no breeze to make the boughs of the trees move

like Russian ballerinas

with a heartbreaking near-perfect curve of shoulder elbow wrist fingers,

and only the swift straight line of the brown birds, the sparrows,

no bright flash of red cardinal or the arrogant bluebird or even

the shiny black slash of the crow, whose smooth feathers have always reminded me of my friend Kiki and her chin-length bob of 20 years ago, but could it really be 20 years?

and your life feels like an ocean

very very early on a very cloudy morning when you can’t separate water and sky

and you can’t see any damn beauty and

you don’t even want to get out of bed and look for it because your head

hurts and your left hip hurts, like it has for the past month,

and that is why, I think, that

sometimes I still read People magazine

so that I can distract myself from the fact that I swore that

I would always wake up and look for the beauty in the world.