Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, night, poem, poetry on May 16, 2013 | 8 Comments »
I have wanted
to love you. Not just
to love you, but to love you
in the way you want to be loved.
This is not always the same thing.
A woman walks out into night
and it holds her. Sometimes
this comforts her. Sometimes
she is terrified. Sometimes
she loses her own edges
and becomes night.
There is no loss in this.
There is a moment
just before we say
I love you when the feeling
is truer than the syllables
that follow. That’s what
I am trying to do.
What night does.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgiveness, letting go, love, poem, poetry, wanting on May 7, 2013 | 4 Comments »
I want to hear that you have forgiven me.
I want to hear that you see how we sail
on the water of our mistakes.
I do not know how to sail, love,
and I get sick at sea,
but here we are
like two drunks
in a tiny boat
with no map
and big waves
and darling,
we might just
go back in that sea,
I’m not saying we won’t,
but for this moment,
it all seems so funny,
so funny, we have no life vests,
no oars, and the sail has holes,
We’re surrounded by water
we cannot drink, and I don’t
see any land, but here we
are, darling, here we are,
with just the right weather
for me to forget that there’s anything
I think I need to hear.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged door, fear, haiku, love, poem, poetry on April 28, 2013 | 1 Comment »
standing on the stoop
of your heart, too scared
to ring the bell
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, opening, poem, poetry, trillium festival on April 22, 2013 | 3 Comments »
We live only to discover beauty.
All else is a form of waiting.
— Kahlil Gibran
See, our guide says, how the fern
has learned to curl itself
into a fist in order to thrust
through the crust of the earth.
At our feet, the clenched fronds
have not yet unfurled into lacy pinnate leaves.
Tight and green, they are still
filled with the drive to protect themselves.
My love, in our fight to make it
through what is hard, did we forget
the part where we open?
Are we still clamped and tight in an attempt to survive?
Look, spring ephemeral is more than here.
The bloodroot flowers have already come
and gone, and the trilliums
flaunt white and crimson petals
all across the shady glade. The black
cohosh blooms dangle like bluish brown wishing stars
just waiting for a wisher. I wish to unfurl, to unscrunch,
to open. The squirrel corn blossoms
and Dutchmen’s Breeches hang from tall stems,
dainty, white and whimsical. There is water falling
in the gorge. And warblers! It is spring! How much longer
before we trust that our time for gathering light has come?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, poem, poetry, wu wei on April 21, 2013 | 3 Comments »
Oh Silly Fools
trying to unlock
the door of love
using a wrench
and a heave
and a grunt
when all we need
to do
is knock
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, failure, father, love, piano, poem, truth on April 20, 2013 | 3 Comments »
At thirteen, after eight years
of piano lessons, I lost myself
in a Mozart Sonatina. It was
a competition. I was sitting
at a grand piano at the front
of a church. The judge sat
in the first pew. My dad sat in the back.
I made it through the long runs
of the first movement. Through
the slow diminished chords
of the second. I was clumsy,
my rhythms uneven, my fortes not
convincing, my arpeggios stuttered.
My fingers did not know what they were doing,
though we had been practicing
together for months, though they
had had many good teachers.
I wore a pin-striped tuxedo,
a white ruffled shirt. It was fitted too tight
in my shoulders, but it made me
feel what, like a man? At least
not like a girl. God, I wanted
it over. At the end of the third movement,
I reached to the top of the treble keys
before coming back down
in the final run, but somewhere at the top
my hands returned to the notes of the first movement.
There was nothing to be done
but to finish the thing the way it had begun.
The judge shuffled through
the sheet music, trying to discern
what had happened. I did not cry,
not until I left the room
and I held my dad and he told me
the terrible lie that I had done fine.
He said it with so much love,
but it wasn’t true.
I don’t know where the lines are
between truth and love. Why do we
protect each other the ways that we do?
What else could he say? It doesn’t much matter.
He loved me. I grew out
of the shirt. I told myself the truth.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, life, loss, love, ocean, poem, poetry, value on April 14, 2013 | 1 Comment »
It disappears, the shell,
just as you reach to pick
it up. The wave, indifferent
to value, draws it in.
The shell is more precious then.
Because it is gone.
Like when a dear one dies. It doesn’t matter
if it were a surprise or something
expected. Suddenly, the last time
we saw them alive—maybe
holding a peach or sitting
in a chair—it doesn’t matter
how simple the moment was,
we replay it with a golden hue,
as if every second of listening
to bird songs or talking
about the day’s events
were precious. Remember the scent?
Remember the light as it fell just so?
Remember how normal it was.
As the normal is precious—
sitting under a tree, or walking
the beach choosing stones,
or washing dishes, making the bed,
or eating oatmeal with blueberries,
or answering the phone to hear
the other person say hello.
How easy, how impossible
to reach now for what never can be held.
For a moment we think we have it,
but our hands come up with only sand
and what’s left of the tide running
through the our fingers.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dance, dancing, hula, love, poem, poetry on April 12, 2013 | 3 Comments »
Don’t move your shoulders,
she says. Just your hips. She
does not say why. Her back
is straight and still, knees bent,
and she teaches me the hela,
the ka’apuni, the kaholo.
Our feet move, our hips
move. We are slow and quiet.
Then she teaches my hands to speak.
The rain is falling, she says.
We flutter our fingers
and turn. It brings life
to the land and makes flowers
bloom. But this is only
what it means on the surface,
she says. The blossom, she says,
as she turns her hands up, is our love
for our children, or for a lover,
or even, she says for our parents.
No one ever knows exactly
what the hula really says.
Our hands rise to the left, the ocean waters
evaporate, turn to clouds. Our right hands
unfurl from our lips, become
song. We touch our left hand to our chest
and it rises, sweet divine one.
One step follows the next. I quiet the rest.
The breeze is impossibly sweet.
I am saying this as well as I can.
There is more, of course,
the blossoms falling, the return
of the rain, the woman
trading places with the waves.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, falling, family, father, love, poem on March 31, 2013 | 2 Comments »
By the ankles
he would hold me
at the end
of the long, white pier.
“Don’t fall in,”
he would say.
“Whatever you do,
don’t fall in.”
His enormous,
generous hands
gripped my small legs
and he’d dangle
my sun-bleached hair
toward the water
till it dipped in the lake
and began to drip.
“Don’t fall in,”
I’d be squealing by now,
not out of any real fear,
more with the thrill
of being held at the edge,
knowing there was not
a thing I could do to save
myself, nor was there any
real danger. God,
he was strong.
And big. And so full
of love. And play.
“Don’t fall in,”
he would say,
the release me.
The water always colder
than I’d want it to be.
I’d come up all splutter
and dripping, somewhere
between happiness
and surrender. I’d clamber
back up the old wooden ladder
and beg him to do it again.
What did I know then of falling?
It is not the falling that hurts.
It’s the landing that can be so awful.
Tear of skin, fracture of bone,
terrible thud of flesh. He taught me
the joy of falling when it ended
in a splash.
I come to tell Dad I’m falling.
This time it is by my own hand.
I am falling even now
at the table where we sit.
Falling through the water glass.
Falling through the words as they fall
from my lips. Falling through lies I told.
He offers me his thick fingers, his enormous palm,
still so much bigger than my own.
He reaches for me. I am falling.
He would catch me if he could.
What do I know of falling?
I fall right through his hands.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chance, doors, love, misunderstanding, poem, poetry on March 31, 2013 | 1 Comment »
There are doors
we never see.
Just this morning
I failed to find
the door that would have led me
to a deeper understanding of your heart.
Sometimes it’s hidden
because we do not find the handle.
Sometimes because we try the handle once
and the door sticks,
a trick into thinking
it is locked.
And sometimes,
distracted by a leaf, a siren,
a blue, blue sky, the door
stands wide open
and still we walk by.
