thunder-heart

This is beautiful.  I learned some new words, and I had to read and re-read it to appreciate it.  It's really something:

Oh Wonder

Traci Brimhall

It's the garden spider who eats her mistakesat the end of day so she can billow in the lungof night, dangling from an insecure branchor caught on the coral spur of a dove's foot,and sleep, her spinnerets trailing radials likeungathered hair. It's a million-pound cumulus.It's the troposphere, holding it, miraculous. It'sa mammatus rolling her weight through duskwaiting to unhook and shake free the hail.Sometimes it's so ordinary it escapes your notice—pothos reaching for windows, ease of an avocadoslipping its skin. A porcelain boy with lampblackeyes told me most mammals have the same averagenumber of heartbeats in a lifetime. It is the mouseengine that hums too hot to last. It is the blue whale'sslow electricity—six pumps per minute is the wayto live centuries. I think it's also the hummingbirdI saw in a video, lifted off a cement floor by firefightersand fed sugar water until she was again a tempest.It wasn't when my mother lay on the garage floorand my brother lifted her while I tried to shout louderthan her sobs. But it was her heart, a washable ink.It was her dark's genius, how it moaned slow enoughto outlive her. It is the orca who pushes her dead calfa thousand miles before she drops it or it falls apart.And it is also when she plays with her pod the dayafter. It is the night my son tugs at his pajamacollar and cries: The sad is so big I can't get it all out,and I behold him, astonished, his sadness as cleanand abundant as spring. His thunder-heart, a marvelI refuse to invade with empathy. And outside, cloudsgroan like gods, a garden spider consumes her home.It's knowing she can weave it tomorrow betweencitrus leaves and earth. It's her chamberless heartcleaving the length of her body. It is lifting my soninto my lap to witness the birth of his grieving.