Posted in Uncategorized, tagged admiration, jude Janett, mentor, poem, poetry, praise on January 31, 2013| 3 Comments »
—for Jude Janett
You sing, and even
nine hundred miles away
all of my body
turns to ears—
and the ears of my
eyes and the ears
of my gut and
the ears of my ears
all sprout legs and
start dancing in awkward,
ecstatic and awe-drenched hallelujahs,
and I may be broken
and I am a mess but I
am dancing under
your pulpit, keep singing,
I am listening
to your shining
pounding rests.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged italian sonnet, love, poem, poetry, shoulds on January 30, 2013| 2 Comments »
While sitting down to work, I see the thin
spine of a paperback called “It’s So Hard
to Love You.” Waiting’s hard, and driving cars
on icy roads is hard, and losing skin.
Or filing taxes. Calmly walking in
a room where men are fighting. Swimming far
through four foot waves. Or dropping what we are
so sure of. Vomiting up shots of gin.
But loving? Loving’s not so hard. It’s what
comes easiest. You’ve seen the way the grass
bends with the breeze? How ferns unfurl? Like love.
It’s all the shoulds we put on love that cut
and burn and roughen us. Ferns never ask
for more. Grass never tells the wind, enough.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, letting go, name, poem, poetry on January 29, 2013| 3 Comments »
Sometimes a person’s name
becomes so heavy around her neck
that the gravity of it pulls her down,
down into the snow drift, so far down,
syllables wrapped around buried stones,
that she cleaves it from her, expecting
blood, but there is only a sweet
emptiness where the name once was.
Such levity, she nearly floats above
the white bank. But you know what
happens to an empty space. Don’t
tell her. She is talking with the birds now,
and the sky. And the space
behind the sky.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, thoughts, wanting, wind, woman on January 28, 2013| 3 Comments »
All day the wind thrusts
against the house.
It does not want
to get in, it is doing
what wind does.
All day, these thoughts,
these driving thoughts.
But they are not
like wind. They want
very much
to get in.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged letting go, love, peace, poem, Right, sonnet, unknowing on January 27, 2013| 3 Comments »
So much grace available, but how we receive it depends on what we can let go of.
—Joi Sharp
Inside the place where we are right, the rain
can never fall. Inside the place where we
are right, the leaves fall yellowed off the trees.
No breeze. No bells. No peaches. We explain.
We judge, contend, defend and claim, maintain
our certainty. And meanwhile, we don’t see
the lilacs wilting, grasses browning, bees
without their hives, lost crows, the sunset drained.
But sometimes in this shrinking cage of right
wings in a doubt. A question. Nothing’s clear.
And see how soon the crows return, a slight
of breeze, a scent of rain. I’ll meet you here,
this open place, exposed, unclosed. How light
spills in as our defenses disappear.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged minute form, personalizing, poem, poetry, silence, waiting on January 26, 2013| 5 Comments »
Did he just say what I just heard?
Those unkind words—
malicious pokes
disguised as jokes.
Should I carp back? Or balk? Or scoff?
Just laugh it off?
Stare blank as sky?
Collapse and cry?
Or keep on making oolong tea,
for him, for me.
A silent room.
The dark leaves bloom.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chickadee, haiku, inspiration, song on January 25, 2013| 3 Comments »
flat gray sky
the chickadee sings
no less brightly
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged children, James and the Giant Peach, literacy, mothering, poem, poetry on January 24, 2013| 2 Comments »
By page twenty, things
have not gotten better.
Vivian clenches into my ribs.
She does not seem to breath,
as if her silence might help
the young boy with the two
evil aunts who beat him,
rebuke him, and lock him up.
Finn, curled into my other side,
twists at the hem of his blue and gray
flannel pajamas and fidgets
with a pillow’s edge. We are all
hoping for something miraculous
to happen, and soon. Something wonderful.
Something to stop all this
sinking we’re feeling. By page twenty-six,
things are still not better
and it is long past bedtime
and I cannot stop reading
until there is something brighter
to end the night. I can feel in this
chapter of dulled hatchets
and threats, how I want to offer
my boy and my girl
not just happily ever after,
but happily now. Though I also feel
how even this now, with the boy in the book
tripping and spilling all of his magic
into the ground and the aunts hurling “wretched” at him,
and “miserable” and “twerp,”
there is something here more than
happy, something that straddles
real and unreal, the three of us curled so closely
into each other, so warm and still
trembling at the edge of despair.
It is like that feeling of falling
right before sleep, and you don’t know
where you will land, or when,
are you really falling? could it hurt?
only this time we’re falling together.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growth, losing the self, pinecone, poem, self on January 24, 2013| 4 Comments »
Like a pinecone
after it’s been trod on
and snowed on and
summered and rained on,
that is how I find myself.
Softer now, and with less
sense of separateness.
The earth has a fine way
of saying here, here.
And gravity, it makes things
so easy. I would not have thought
it sounded so good,
all that wearing down,
lessening to dust.
I could not have imagined
sharing my browns, much less
losing my sharpness, my articulate
serration, spilling my seeds.
Though spilling, that is what seeds
are for. And the opening beyond.
And losing the self, that is perhaps
what a self is for.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, moon, poem, poetry, story, woman on January 22, 2013| 3 Comments »
Chapter 43
Looking up
at the moon
is a woman.
On her cheek
there is a tear.
In the tear there is
a teacher.
In the teacher
is a story.
In the story
is the moon.
Looking up at that moon
is a woman.
On her cheek
there is a tear.
In the tear
there is a teacher.
In the teacher
is a story.
In the story
is the moon.