after Jane Hirshfield
Oh look, I say to the cat
You have a soup belly.
I jiggle and wiggle her soft, floppy middle.
She does not love it.
I get it, I say to her. Sometimes
I don’t want to be touched either.
More truly, I do want to be touched,
but only in the way I want to be touched.
The cat holds her paws midair, frozen there,
as if not yet sure if to attack or relax.
She chooses relax. I choose
to massage between her ears.
She nuzzles her small skull into my palm.
I know, I say to the cat. I miss her, too.
We both know she’d rather be with my daughter.
We both feel the absence here.
We sit a long time like this, the cat nuzzling,
me dragging my fingertips forward and back,
forward and back.
With her body, she shows me
just where and how much to touch her.
When I move to rise, she lashes out with a claw
to keep me in place beside her.
In this way, I study my life.
How to hold. How to let go.
Loneliness wears a haunting perfume,
resinous, sweet, full of laughter
and silence. What a gift, I say to the cat,
to miss her together.
I cross the room. The cat follows to where I sit next.
Later, she leads me to her bowl. I follow.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cat, connection, daughter, loneliness, pet, touch | 2 Comments »
Starting here, I want to remember
the spaciousness that emerges in me
when my heart knows itself as an expression
of the one great heart. In those moments,
when the I slips away and the we is all,
when love is unbound from the walls
of my chest and expands across mountains
and deserts and oceans and returns
with the peaks and tide in each breath,
then the rightest parts of my being unclench
themselves, as if all the bars of the inner prison
dissolve and what’s left is freedom
to love beyond judgment, beyond should
and should not, beyond how my one small heart
is capable of loving. I remember the first time
I felt love carry me through a moment
I knew I could not meet alone. Since that time,
I am learning to trust that the heart of all hearts
can rise up in any moment to illumine the path
I do not yet see is possible. Since that time,
I am still surprised but not surprised when
the spaciousness opens me again
to loving what feels impossible to love.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged loss of the separate self, love, spaciousness, surrender | Leave a Comment »
Already the river is lighter in color,
less brown, less turbid, more
translucent. Just yesterday
the currents were thick with mud
and logs, needles and sticks
and bits of once-living debris.
Now that the furious flood has lost
its force, the gravel and sand
have begun their settling.
Whatever was floating now rests
on the banks and all that is left
suspended in the water
is what is most fine.
Soon, even that will sink
and the water will be clear again.
I, too, have felt the gift of slowing,
how it invites a sedimentation
of all I try to carry—the silt of my stories,
the muck of the world.
Like a river, the more calm I am,
the more clear I can become.
No magic, just a matter of physics.
How natural it is, the clearing.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged clearing, river, slowness | 4 Comments »
after “Stone” by Charles Simic
I cannot make them out,
these strange writings
on my inner walls.
Each time I feel closer
to deciphering the marks,
it’s as if they rearrange
themselves into new
more mysterious lines.
Some part of me deeply
wants to read them,
to know their secrets.
She takes out her eraser,
her pencil, and begins
the translations again.
Some part of me sits
easily in the midst of all
I do not understand.
She watches the swallows
trace shapes in the air
with the dark inky tips
of their wings.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged language, soul, swallow, translation, unknowing | Leave a Comment »
My favorite alpine skinny dipping hole
a dry rock bed, an inverted monument
to drought—
as if I needed one more reminder
of how fragile it is, this world,
how parched our hearts
can become.
On the long hike home
I swim in the seriousness
of what is not here,
remember how it felt to slip
into the snowmelt,
how my whole being shivered in elation,
how the earth itself was so alive.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged eco-grief, grief, hiking, mountains | 4 Comments »
same fingertips pattering on the grand timpani?
erratic rain on the roof, the red steady pulse inside me
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged humanity, pulse, rain, rhythm | Leave a Comment »
It scared me and thrilled me, the quick spider,
a gentle light gray, like midnight midsummer
in Finland. It was unusually large
for this part of the world where spiders
tend to be smaller than a dime. But this
spider had long, elegant legs,
I carefully gathered it in tissue.
You belong out here, I said, as I walked it to the lawn.
Slow as you please, it let out a length of dragline silk
to dangle from my hand like a pendulum.
Two nights ago, I held in my arms a newborn girl,
eyelashes barely visible, little bubbles forming
between slightly parted lips, her eyes moving
in sleep. What could be in the dreams of a three-
day-old child? I cradled her head in one hand,
her whole body in the other, astonished by how
much preciousness fits in a being so small.
All around us, so many kinds of beautiful lives.
And inside us, so many invisible strands of astonishing
elasticity and tensile strength that weave us together
through the chaos, beauty to beauty to bittersweet beauty
to innocent beauty to unlikely beauty to beauty.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beauty, life, spider | 2 Comments »
for Vivian on her 18th birthday
like six thousand five hundred seventy notes
springing out of the steps of the scales
into new surprising arrangements
she is becoming
her own ecstatic soundtrack
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged birthday, daughter, growing up, mother, parenting | 2 Comments »
I love your big green yard,
love walking in your low cut grass
in the early morning when it’s
dew-lush and cool. Love
seeing my sister crows across the lawn.
Of course, I call out to them.
That’s what we crows do.
That’s what you do, too, honey,
when you walk down the street,
say hello, even to strangers,
because that’s what intelligent,
social beings do.
And those big juicy worms
your grow here? Five out of five stars.
Would recommend.
Of course, I want all my friends
to know where to find them.
To sing is to survive, sweetheart.
And the sun’s up. Time to live loud.
Come walk barefoot in the cool, wet grass.
Feels so good, doesn’t it, the earth so moist,
the dawn light so soft.
Doesn’t it just make you want to sing?
Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »
after Muriel Rukeyser
Because two years ago,
another chipmunk ate all our birdseed;
because that same chipmunk
ate all sixty of my sunflower sprouts—
munched the entire row to the ground;
because that same chipmunk
devoured every bright-faced pansy;
because some part of me believes
that what I have planted should grow
for my pleasure and not for yours;
for this, I have decided to despise you,
little chipmunk that took up residency
last week beneath my porch.
I see you dart across the boards,
cheeks full of something,
then empty-cheeked running the other way.
You leap up onto my window sash to watch me
in my rooms. You scurry into the shadows.
Scowling, I point you out to my daughter.
She says, Oh, how cute! I think, Cute?
What? Little vermin isn’t cute.
Except you are. Except your soft, pocket-sized body
and small rounded ears are the actual definition
of cute. Except when I watch you stand straight-spined
on your back legs, front paws held at your chest
as if in prayer, little St. Chipmunk, I soften.
Except when I see your cheeks bulging
five times their normal size stuffed with seeds,
I laugh out loud. In my eagerness to revile you,
I had let myself not see you. I wasn’t interested
in your survival, your story. I wanted only to erase,
to other. To see you beyond what I expect to see
is the sort of transformation that could not have happened
if I were alone. Generosity is how we save each other.
How long would I have gone on in my clenching?
The taste of conceit is bitter.
I had filled my cheeks with it. How sweet it is now,
added to the mix, the taste of curiosity.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged chipmunk, curiosity, descrimination, frustration, judgment, new lens | 13 Comments »