Fish soup, July, before the crape myrtles have dropped their blooms

I prepare onions for fish soup on a weekend morning.

 

The living room is strewn with moving boxes

and just-bought old desk drawers, waiting loose,

and walkers. My new walker, the boy's old walker, 

and his wheelchair, there because he took only his new walker to his father's.

 

Fish soup is good when you have been through too much and it's raining.

 

Just before I cut the fish with scissors and release the bits into the pot

I'm swept over by all I have learned of love. I must sit down.

 

There are no guarantees.

And yet the boy walks. There are no guarantees and standing here, impermanent,

yet I still feel it: a gift

suspended through the humid air, throat-burning, free and solid and true,

 

the history of all love received, or retaught where it earlier missed.

 

There will be more too much, and I have no mastery yet. I breathe in one more time and go

to heat the water.

 

Unable to exempt, love only solves.