Let’s be honest, I’m a sucker for easy happiness.

For the glowing world full of tulips, saffron,

honey, and straw. For butter on pancakes,

the lemony light of our kitchen in the morning,

and the gloss time brushes onto memory.

I adore aspen leaves in their vibrant dying,

shaking like the bells on a belly dancer’s skirt.

I love the pistil of the honeysuckle, the silk moth’s

wine-hued body, the hair of Botticelli’s Venus.

And the skin of a softening pear—my God.

The flesh too. Such honeyed joys. That hour

before sunset when you look up from work

to smile at me, the night nearly ours. Luminous.

But marigolds are also the color of larva and wasps.

Citrines share a shade with sulphur. When workers

in Cambodia milking the golden pigment from

Garcinia trees couldn’t get the bark to keep weeping,

they split a tree open and found the sap clotted

around a bullet. The bloody yellow of gallstones,

yes, I must learn to praise that too. Praise the late

sunflowers and the brittle champagne of last year’s

prairie as loudly as I praise the many short tongues

of flame that feast on the grasses. Praise for you

and I floundering in a golden ocean of forever

letting go. Praise for letting happiness change.

For amber. For orioles. For the ring around

your iris, the ring on my finger, the light that

flies into my chest when you call my name.