Beauty

 A staircase at Royal Château de Blois, France

Beauty is a bank of clouds and the riverbank

Beauty is the fine tip of your favorite pen

Beauty is the butter churn, the salt mine, and the breakfast plate

Beauty is a dozen eggs, a dozen cookies, a dozen months 
           each year

Beauty is an infant’s hand grasping your ear lobe

Beauty is the osprey nest, the eagle's nest, and learning

            the difference between them

Beauty is primary—a blue stamp, a yellow letter, a red mailbox

Beauty is bare feet on a warm beach, toes sinking slow

            in the surf-soft sand

Beauty is the Moroccan orange tree and the Californian lemon

Beauty is the cat purring, and beauty is the cat

Beauty is the grandmother’s garden of tended and amended soil

Beauty is the hemisphere and the blogosphere

Beauty is a screen of pixels shaping the face of your love,

            and beauty is your love

Beauty is quick—a glimpse through the train window

Beauty is slow—a dinner with as many conversations as courses.  

Beauty is a pair of dancing shoes with holes worn through,

            and beauty is the music that wore them out

Beauty is the staircase and every shadow ever cast across it

Beauty is a sink on a second story, water piping up

            from deep below the earth to wash your hands

Beauty is a hot shower

Beauty is a sky of stars and planes and satellites

Beauty is the embroidered pillow and the night full of dreams

Beauty is the truth, told straight or slant, with pen or brush 
            or body or sound or tongue or hands or clay or glass

            or stone or flowers or tile or might

Beauty is Creator and created

Beauty is here 
           and beauty is now