Hope
After everything I find it intact
like a chimney
standing beside a basement
jumbled with black
and smoking rafters.
It is the bubble that rises
from a sunken ship as a diver
cracks into the wreck.
It is the bird that builds
in a fallen tree, the tracks of anything
crossing a desert, a tortoise
tucked into its orange shell
as a burning meadow sweeps over it.
It is the blinking light
of my answering machine,
the beer that was
hiding beneath the squash.
It is nightlights and cribs
and milky breath — the spider missing
from the bedroom wall
when I come back
with a tissue to crush it out.
~ Charles Rafferty