As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Walt Whitman

I wake: Place my feet on the blue-gray rug.
Move slowly toward the bathroom, the sink

requiring cleaning. Then notice,
in the mirror, the miracle of aging.

Then notice, in my bed,
the miracle of you, who almost didn’t find me.

The white forest of your chest,
your thighs reminding me of baobab trees

that grow without buckling, that can live
for three-thousand years, can shelter

up to forty people inside the safety
of its trunk. We are old and in love.

And I thank the universe, thank whatever
I can thank, maybe trees, maybe that cloud

shaped like a basket filled with zinnias.
And know there is no end to this poem, no end.

*

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus, 2011. Small-McKinney is the author of two full-length books, Walking Toward Cranes (Glass Lyre Press, The Kithara Book Prize, 2016) and Life is Perfect (BookArts Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks, including Body of Surrender (2004) and Clear Moon, Frost (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her most recent chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was written during COVID and her husband’s illness and death (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Banyan Review, The Cortland Review, Comstock Review, Connotation Press, Inflectionist Review, Pedestal Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Tiferet, SWWIM, and Vox Populi, and is forthcoming in Verse Daily. Small-McKinney’s poems also appear in several anthologies, most recently, Rumors Secrets & Lies Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and Stained, an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian. Her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. Small-McKinney has a degree in Clinical Neuropsychology from Drexel University and an MFA in Poetry.