23

The used book store down the street
is a garden that's never been pruned.
I weed out a slim book of poems, rose pink,
by Bessie Peterson. There's no copyright
--thornless--and she's signed page one
With love, as if she knew I would pluck her book
on my twenty-third birthday
decades after her death. She tells me Life
is not measured in Time, but in Moments
and in this moment I knew, handing over
my $9.27 like seeds, that today my age
was not counted in years,
but in small discoveries like this,
the enlightenment
Buddha must've felt--the redwood
reaching for the bright, round face of God
in the vast mirror of the sky.