Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, imperfection, love, peach, poem on July 20, 2012| 2 Comments »
Not the perfect ones
hanging from the bough,
red and hard in the hand,
but the fallen ones,
sun warmed, likely bruised,
often with earwigs
that squirm out the top,
oh these soft ones
nearly gone,
more nectar than flesh.
Do not be offended
when I offer you this peach.
I gaze into my heart.
It, too, is blemished,
scarred, bruised,
mottled,
fallen, ready
to be yours.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged lie, loss, love, poem, tanka on July 20, 2012| 2 Comments »
in today’s mail
the cornbread recipe
her slanted cursive
the last meal
we ever shared
*
all evening
rain and for hours
double rainbow
too sweet for poems
but oh, so sweet
*
now
it burns
the noose
of an old
lie
*
in aisle seven
the sulky girl hugs a bag
of jumbo marshmallows
you must have said no,
the stranger says to me
*
even the splash
of dishwater heart-shaped
on the counter
any excuse
to think of love
*
waving
at the woman
in the green pick up
I toss a poem
to her rearview mirror
Posted in Uncategorized on July 19, 2012| 2 Comments »
I cannot hear it,
the syntax of rain,
as it falls through sunlight
on my ears, my lips,
my arms, my thoughts
while I walk beside
the thunderous waterfall,
but we do not need
to hear the rain
to know it is here,
our shoulders bare
and increasingly
wet.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, learning, poem, poetry, relaxing, swim lessons on July 18, 2012| 2 Comments »
And again she scoops air
into her cheeks, buoys her body,
and flops face first into the water,
her limbs, unsyncopated,
thrash with joy. She is all splash
then all snort, and she wretches
and belches the water, then smiles
wide enough for three smiles,
giddy with the wonder of floating—
how just an hour ago she didn’t know
that it would be today
that she would lift
her feet from the bottom and rise
to the water’s top. I wonder
how many pools I’ve been wading in,
waist deep, not knowing
the morning will come
maybe today, when I will stumble
and find all my weight is lifted,
supported, if only I relax.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged camping, hope, monsoon, poem, rain, surrender, what is on July 18, 2012| 3 Comments »
wet hair,
wet dress, wet feet
wet eyes
across the field
blue sky
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, poem, spiral, the body, unity on July 16, 2012| 2 Comments »
this living skin
a billboard
for god’s graffiti
*
milky way
in my hand
a spiral
*
stars beyond stars
all of us swathed
in stars
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, lullaby, poem, possibility, potential on July 14, 2012| 3 Comments »
If I lay here, if I just lay here, will you lay with me and just forget the world.
—Snow Patrol
Like sipping the stars in water,
like hearing the sun in the stone
all the impossibles, all the fantastic
notions are possible now.
Like drinking gray sky in big gulps.
Like song spiraling out of bent wheat
there is improbable joy, my love,
in the imperfect, marred, defeated.
There are shoulds, my dear, and mustn’ts
there are cages we think are ourselves,
but night is here and soon there will be
nothing we can’t have.
But it’s not about the having
not even about the dream.
it’s about, well, darling, I don’t know.
Let’s close our eyes and see.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, hide and seek, parenting, poem, poetry, stillness on July 14, 2012| 5 Comments »
The lilies were orange. They boy in blue
sat in the middle of them, as if by being
still enough he might disappear and become
orange lily. The sky wore its grayest dress
for midday, and all around us people
were moving, quickly, from here to there.
One man chided him for sitting in the flowers.
Most ignored the boy and looked instead
at me as if to say, Aren’t you going to get
the boy out of the lilies? I didn’t. I wandered
around and made embellished pretense
of looking for the boy. We both knew I knew
where he was. Yoo hoo. Yoo hoo, I said
to the scarlet gilia, the lupine pods
twisted and brown, the golden currents.
Yoo hoo. And the boy sat still as the center
of the watch dial. Who could say
how long he might have been a lily
if I had not suddenly turned
into one of them, the rushing ones, reminding
him that it was time to go, now, I mean now,
the lilies, I forgot to smell them as I plucked
the boy out of the garden and pulled him
onto the path.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, compassion, poetry reading, scars, shoes, tanka, Valerie Haugen on July 13, 2012| 3 Comments »
for Valerie
implausibly balanced
on strappy bright pink heels,
the poem shows its scars—
I long to touch them gingerly
but they touch me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, love, night, oneness, poem, sound on July 10, 2012| 4 Comments »
Sometimes the night
comes with a quiet,
although the crickets
are riotous.
Although the machinery
in the distant field
makes eddies in the dark.
Even the stars
are ohming in octaves
eight scales below
what the human ear hears
and still, there is this quiet.
I was so busy praising light
that I missed how the dark
will tenderly, slowly, with no song
open the heart. Like tonight.
How first it drains the blush
from the peaches. Then steals
the deep green from the pines,
the red from the rock walls,
the mud brown from the water,
the violet orchids that nearly
bloomed in my thoughts,
until all is gray, then grayer,
then pitch. The pine,
the wall, the water and the woman
all lose their individual shapes
and become one vast dark.
This too is a way to love.