The Smallest Page
You caught me. Blame the moon.
The rain, the ink…The words.
They begin a weather in me
I won’t name.
I’d write you grocery lists
like they are love letters,
Maybe date them twice,
Hearts in the margins.
Notice the slant of your hand.
The way your t’s cross
A little too quickly.
The note, an excuse.
Come find me.
I’d keep that page
beside our bed,
not framed, but loose.
Prove I had been touched
by something ordinary
and made foolish.
So yes, my dear.
Perhaps… I am romantic.
Helpless, certainly.
But you should know
the blame belongs to you.
You turned my consonants into breath,
my periods into wanting.
What else could any poet
do, but fold her heart
into the smallest page and send it?
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It’s all in the knitting. The smallest stitch is always the strongest.
There is something quietly beautiful about a poem that refuses to separate the sacred from the ordinary.
A grocery list. A crossed t. A page left loose beside a bed. Nothing here asks to be extraordinary. And yet love has a way of altering not the objects themselves, but the attention we bring to them. Suddenly even punctuation carries a pulse.
I kept returning to "made foolish." Perhaps that is another name for love, not the loss of reason, but the surrender of the careful self we spend so much of our lives constructing.
By the end, the smallest page no longer feels small. It has become large enough to hold an entire way of seeing.
Thank you for this quiet tenderness, Dorie.