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.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ice, joy, love, poem, poetry, silence on January 21, 2013| 3 Comments »
I love this place beneath the cliff.
The sun does not shine here all winter.
The water flows and the water
stops itself in the cold and the water
finds a new way. I remember
how quiet it was when I told you
what you did not want to hear.
Perhaps the clock kept keeping time
but the moon stopped.
I think of how much has changed
since then. And how much
life is the same. The silence
here is beautifully made. It is more than
the small sound of the moving
river. It is more than memory.
Suffering is not the only truth.
There is joy. There is grace.
There is peace.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hurt, love, pain, poem, poetry, relationships on January 20, 2013| 2 Comments »
She said it to me in her kitchen, she said it,
the water rushing from the tap into the pot
for tea, she said, You know what people do,
she said, we hurt each other. She said it
with no snarl on her tongue, her face lit
by the sun spilling in through her window.
Her shoulders were soft, though her eyes
were ablaze. She said it as if she were saying,
It’s Tuesday. Or, The salt shaker’s empty.
Or any other careless fact that has no ability
to shatter a world. I did not want to believe
her, but as she spoke the words, I knew them
as glass, and I swallowed them whole and they
cut every surface they touched. I tasted in my throat
not just my own blood, but yours.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged now, poem, poetry, quatrain, the present on January 19, 2013| 2 Comments »
(after reading Before by Yehuda Amichai)
Before the frost
has left the pane
before the dawn
has come again,
before the bell
has stopped its ring,
before we think
we know something,
before the spring,
before the gasp,
before the time
for sowing’s past,
before the gap
cannot be leapt,
before the final
tears are wept,
before the honey’s
crystallized,
before the kitchen’s
sterilized,
before we remember,
before the signs,
before we think
we have more time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged perception, poem, reality, Rilke on January 19, 2013| 2 Comments »
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, poem I,1 from “Book of a Monastic Life”)
We are lonely,
the tea and me
and nine o’clock.
So I ask Rilke
to join us. He tells me,
just as the sun
leaps over the mesa
and enters the window,
that nothing has ever
been real without
my beholding it.
I sit a long,
long time considering
his words. Not the sun?
Not the tea? Not
the gray moth?
The Holocaust?
He tells me this:
All becoming
has needed me.
Looking over the white field
to the blue spruce in the grove
I do not hear
one of them fall.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, Non doing, personification, poem, wu wei on January 17, 2013| 2 Comments »
Love wakes up in the dark.
She does not make you waffles.
She does not light a candle.
She does not wake you
with a wild symphony of kisses.
She does not sing .
She does not paint you art.
She sits on the couch and
watches outside as the sun
does not yet give any hints
of rising. If someone were
to walk by, they might say,
this is Love? I thought
it looked different.
She does not bake your
favorite cake today,
nor your favorite bread.
She does not whisper to you. Come noon,
she does not catch you by the hand
and rush you into the middle
of the field where it’s whiter
and wider and warm. She does not
wish on any of the evening’s
glittering stars. She does not
offer you chocolates nor wine.
And all day, quietly, listening
to your heart, she deepens in her work,
which is no work at all,
who could explain it, (have you watched
the way a lily opens?)
loving you.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, haiku, life, Regret on January 16, 2013| 3 Comments »
doing it all again
I’d do it the same only
this time no regret
*
I told her
I only sing songs—she said
save me
*
little brown mouse
on the road, I swerve uncertain
which of us should live
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cold, light, love, poem, poetry, spectrum, winter on January 15, 2013| 2 Comments »
Twenty below
this morning
and I gasp
at the air,
part shock
and part delight
in the pure cold chill of it.
And though the sun
is barely warm
on the cheek
it is light
and getting lighter—
and that is just
the light we see.
There is more,
they say,
and I feel it,
some vaster spectrum,
they way I feel
the love I cannot
see, how it blesses me
like the sun,
blesses me
even like
the cold.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ego, maggots, poem, pretense, reality on January 14, 2013| 3 Comments »
My current contemplation is how universal it is for all of us to want to feel good about ourselves and how we edit the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to that end.
—Sally Estes
Covered in maggots, white and grey,
and tiny granules of poison. No one
wants to remember it this way. It doesn’t
matter if they were real or metaphorical.
The maggots did not wing into butterflies.
The poison was poison. You groveled
and cried. If we can’t be the hero,
we sometimes thrive on becoming
the narrator. It suits our pride. Say:
It happened in someone else’s staircase.
Say: I was younger then. Say: No, they
were ladybugs. Say: It was sand.
But you remember. They were white
and gray, the color of snow on the side
of the highway. Their bodies were soft.
And the poison, it pitted like small stones
into your knees, your bare knees.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, change, love, poem, poetry, sky on January 13, 2013| 2 Comments »
The way the sky
changes in the morning,
so swiftly from rose billow
to long gray brush strokes,
that is the way we love.
One moment we think
we know something—a contour,
a hue, a silhouette. We say,
I love this. We say it fiercely
or tenderly, it doesn’t much matter,
it changes. There is no sadness
in this, though we weave sadness
out of our longing. Blush, it will come
again, only different, a gift
offered and offered, endlessly.
Oh fools who think we prefer
it one way or another, when
at every moment the sky
comes alive for us, even in
darkness, sweet sweet darkness,
even in whatever shade
and shape we see right now.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, happiness, poems on January 12, 2013| 4 Comments »
standing in the snow
dreaming of standing
in the snow
*
my daggers
letting them gather dust
regardless who walks in
*
starting a fire
remembering even good logs
need space to burn