Instructions for Staying
Brie Radis

Listen,
I was left twice by the people,
who were supposed to be the soil.
First my mother, who taught me early
that a door can quietly stop being a door.
Then my wife, who I believed
would be the exception to the leaving.

But this is not a poem about who left.
This is a poem about ferns.

Have you seen how a fern unfurls?
It does not apologize for the shape of its wanting.
It was folded tight against itself in the dark
and still it opened,
frond by green frond,
a slow fist becoming a hand, becoming an offering.

I have two of them growing in my house.

One is fourteen and restless in the world
in the way you can only be restless,
when you still believe it can be made better,
who reads me the names of the ones the world discarded,
and asks me why, and will not accept the world
as it is handed to us.

The other is twelve and has told me, whispered and sure,
that they are both, and neither, and entirely their own,
they live in the wide green space between.
And here is what I know: the fern has always lived this way
two forms, both true, neither the whole of it
biology itself leaning past the binary,
the oldest green beings on earth refusing to choose.

We are all just trying to grow toward what warms us.
That is not a metaphor. That is photosynthesis,
the oldest truth: the leaning-toward.

So, I show up. I make eggs.
I invent games with the young one,
worlds drawn on the backs of envelopes,
rules we make and break and remake together.
The older one teaches me basketball,
the pivot, the arc, the follow-through,
and I am clumsy, and they are patient,
and this too is a kind of love turned inside out.
Some nights we do not speak at all…
just sit, each with a book, in the same pooled lamplight,
the silence itself a room we’ve built to hold us.
I share truths in doses they can carry.

I trust them with my grief,
I show them sorrow and comfort in the same breath,
so they’ll know this ache is survivable,
I do not teach them that sorrow has an ending,
or that love, when it leaves, stops being love,
so, they know the body survives its own salt water.

I am apprenticed to this ache. I tend it
the way you tend a fire meant to warm.
I carry the grief in one hand
and everything green in the other,
and I show them: look, both hands are full.

Listen,
whoever taught you that love is a thing that stays
only if it is easy
was lying, or afraid, or never had children,
watching them
turning their faces
toward the light.

I am not the leaving.
I am the staying.
I am the maidenhair amidst storms,
and I am still here,
green side to the sun,
still growing.