Posted in Uncategorized, tagged miracle, poem, poetry, rumplestiltskin on November 29, 2013| 4 Comments »
Corrupt, of course,
what all of them did,
bartering with daughters,
promising too big,
expecting too much,
skipping out on the bill,
wanting more than they needed,
telling tall tales,
but there’s one thing I learned
about gold being spun
out of straw, though strange,
it can be done.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, love, poem, poetry, silence, thanksgiving on November 28, 2013| 5 Comments »
After the last dishes are done
and before we start the next thing to do,
this is a favorite time with you,
when we are almost lost in the house,
a bit purposeless. Our bellies satisfied,
our children asleep. That is when
we might sit side by side
on the couch, and curl into each other.
We don’t have to say anything at all.
Every breath is a bridge.
I feel you crossing over.
Such a subtle perfume, but there
it is, the scent of gratitude.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Power of Poetry, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Voices Project, women's poetry on November 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »
A Great Site for Women’s Voices
A couple summers ago I wrote this poem, published yesterday at The Voices Project, at a Ziggie’s Poetry Festival Workshop led by Rachel Kellem, a poem about writing poems and what is possible when we do write. Check out this site if you get a chance … it is the home for women to do exactly what my poem is wishing would be possible. Thank you Voices Project!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, going back, path, poem, poetry on November 27, 2013| 2 Comments »
Useless the trail
I thought would take me back—
the crumbs are still there
but I no longer believe
in going back
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dissolution of the separate self, poetry, short poem, wind on November 27, 2013| 1 Comment »
when left in wind
the cloth unravels until it becomes
the wind
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged long marriage, love, memory, poem, poetry on November 26, 2013| 3 Comments »
The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.
—Joyce Sutphen
Is it true the heart remembers
everything it loved and gave away?
Just today I recalled
that sweet Mormon boy
who I fell in love with
at a speech tournament,
perhaps in the final round when
he beat me. What was his name?
I recall how we ate
at a greasy spoon in Denver
late, late at night
but did we eat pancakes?
Or cupcakes? Or eggs?
He didn’t kiss me, did he?
Though I wanted him to.
He was slender
and had dark hair and such
sincere eyes, and I loved
to laugh at his clean, clean jokes.
You could argue he was found again
in the heart’s archives
after passing a late night restaurant
that reminded me of the one we liked,
but he is more forgotten to me
now than remembered.
What color were his eyes?
What country was he leaving for?
What was it he did
that made my heart thrill?
It is, perhaps, like
how my husband and I
now take our children
with us on trips to foreign lands.
I remember my husband’s mother saying,
You know he won’t remember Argentina,
speaking of my three-year-old boy.
And I thought, that is not the point.
The point is he learns early what it is
to be a citizen of the world.
And so it is he has grown to love
travel and people and learning new things
and seeing new landscapes and
saying thank you in other tongues.
And he does not remember
a thing about Argentina.
And so it is, perhaps, that
all of those lovers I don’t remember,
and the ones who I vaguely, sweetly do,
they were in their way
all preparing me to be a better
love to you. Although I have forgotten
names and conversations,
inside jokes and back alley kisses,
the heart perhaps remembers
how it opened then. It was practicing
the best it could to love you, now,
though the love we have is nothing
like what I thought love would be.
How simple it was before, a side
of maple syrup, a station wagon
with a full tank of gas
and a whole night that lasted
partway to forever.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged armageddon, family, gratitude, poetry, thanksgiving on November 25, 2013| 1 Comment »
It wasn’t today.
The plane took off.
Flew. Landed.
My brother arrived.
He drove us
through eight lanes of traffic
to a beautiful home
where it was so easy
to hug, to laugh,
to eat, to remember,
to relax, to not even
think that it
might have gone
another way, so easy
to smile, to give thanks.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, grief, poem, poetry on November 24, 2013| 1 Comment »
I tugged on the thread
of grief not knowing how
completely it had tangled
with all the other threads,
how without grief
there was no cloth.
*
Here, darling,
I cannot say
the words for you,
but I will listen
for the unspeakable
whether you say
the words
or not.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged coming of age, first kiss, innocence, poem, poetry, puberty on November 22, 2013| 3 Comments »
It was Sam who,
that summer before fourth grade,
danced with me
at the church camp dance
and asked me to walk
outside with him.
“It’s hot,” he said.
“Let’s go look at the stars.”
And I, who did not yet
understand the sweet cramping
that tendrilled deep in my gut when
Sam held my hand, said yes.
We stood there a long time,
me looking out at the stars
because that is what
we were there to do.
The night was the color
of Wisconsin violets, crushed,
and Sam, still holding
my hand murmured low, “Oh,
look over there,”
and, when I turned
my feathered head, he leaned
in quick and close
and kissed my astonished lips.
Even thirty-five years later,
I am still somewhat
unprepared as I write
what happened next,
how he sprinted away,
a gleesome hart,
how I stood there, still,
my lips apart, the soft
hands of the night
still holding the most tender
parts of me as they spilled
like fruit no one knew
was yet ripe, and the sharp
stitch of longing
so new to me
sewed itself
into my breath.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anger, athena, mad, poem, poetry, suppression on November 21, 2013| 8 Comments »
Mom, says my little girl, how does mad
get in your body? Her voice
is so sincere, full of sock monkey
innocence, transparent as pink tutu.
She is, I marvel, so curious.
All day I’ve noticed the sand bags
I’ve hoarded to lean against my doors
in an effort to keep the mad out.
I have put up signs, No Anger Allowed,
along with dispensers of small black bags,
strategically placed along my perimeters,
so that others can clean up after their own anger.
Which they seldom do.
Though sometimes they leave behind
the small black bags, heavy and foul,
hidden in the grass for me to find later
and throw away myself.
Which I do,
grumbling beneath a pretense
of patience.
How does mad get in your body?
Through the cracks, I think, though the cracks
are smaller than I want to believe.
Eventually, the water is not held back
by sacks of sand. It seeps. It leaks. It trickles.
It pools. It touches everything.
Just as the scent escapes the dark bags.
The Greeks knew how Athena could,
in her rage, make the skies
turn black and the mountains tremble
and the flowers wilt, how she once turned
a young girl who challenged her talents
into the world’s first spider.
When I was a girl, I learned
an unwritten rule, a commandment
so powerful it need not be carved in stone:
Thou shalt not be mad.
Though today, it did not matter how many barriers
I put up, how many though shalts I did not say. I was angry
anyway, felt the dark seed sprout, then bloom its terrible putrid bloom
and then, as I watched it, wilt. And I did not need do anything
except stand by and watch, more amazed than in judgment,
watched with wonder, even.
How quickly it unfurled! How distrubingly beautiful
the misshapen flower. How quickly it flagged, it drooped, it faded to nothing.
I don’t know, I tell my daughter. How do you think it gets in?
She tells me she does not know.
I want to slash through any bags I might have left behind for her.
I want to make way for the mad to rush in, and then help her
hold the doors open so the mad might recede as swiftly as it came.
But it is not my job to do.
Open your own doors, I tell myself. Slash your own bags.
And get curious, I tell myself, very curious,
the skies above me already turning
a darker shade of gray.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged identity, poetry, short poem on November 21, 2013| 1 Comment »
slipping it off,
this silken garment I thought
was my skin
*
this, too, an act
of violence, opening
my hand
*
after the flood
not stopping to pick through
the debris
*
inside
this conversation
new moon
*
so giddy to lose
this negligee of shoulds I forget
to blush
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, Hopi, myth, poem, poetry, time on November 19, 2013| 1 Comment »
“Hi Katie,” he says, as he got in the car.
“Hi Mike,” I say, “It’s Rosemerry.”
“Oh,” he says, “Yes. Hi Rosemerry,
I’ve been thinking a lot about
poetry and Alice Walker. I heard
a story about her on the radio. She’s black.
I like her,” says Mike. “I do, too,” I say.
I have gone all the way around the round about
so that I might drive in the wrong direction
to give a ride to Mike. It turns out he is going
quite a ways away, but he says he’d be happy
if I could take him just three miles down the road.
“I would love to,” I say, and I mean it.
Mike is wearing clothes that no longer fit him.
His pants are tucked into his tall black socks.
It is selfish, me picking him up. He is the man
I cross the street to say hi to, the man that I
make sure to bump into in the grocery store,
cornering him between the cans of black beans
and the measuring cups. He always tells me
the real news. “You know I live in the nursing home now,”
he says as he settles into the passenger seat.
“The nurses tell me eternity is real.”
I ask him, “Tell me more.”
He goes on to mention the rocks at Lava Falls
in the Grand Canyon, how they are over five billion years old.
I do not know if it’s true, what he says, but
I remember the rush when my husband to be and I
moved through those rocks on our raft, how time
that late summer day stopped.
“Time,” says Mike, “is a myth. Something that men
have created to make themselves more comfortable in space.
I like myths,” he says. “Like the Hopi, the Navajo, the Zuni.”
“Me, too,” I say. We both ignore that the car is
making loud beeps reminding him to put his seat belt on.
It would be difficult for him to manage it,
and it seems worth risk to say nothing.
I think of the only Hopi myth I know, how the first men
emerged from a single hole in the earth
and the mockingbird was there to greet each one,
and give him a language, a place and a tribe.
How much we have forgotten about who we are,
I think, since that day.
Already, Mike and I have travelled three miles through
a canyon only 220 million years old, the reddish-brown
Cutler formation forming the basal band of rocks.
I wish that the miles would stretch longer.
For a while, I forget who we are. Forget
we are driving. Forget the myths. Forget
we have names or origins. I am intent on
the sound of his voice as he tells me about
his 90-year-old mother and how much
he loves her and how she lives now
in California. The details are mundane.
The tone of his voice is outside of time.
And then he is climbing out of the car,
wishing me and my husband well.
“Tell him hi for me,” says Mike. “I will,” I say.
And drive three miles and an eternity
back up the road.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breaking, losing the self, love, not knowing, poem, poetry, righteousness on November 18, 2013| 4 Comments »
The liars lie and the stealers
steal and the lovers love and
the takers take. The fighters
fight and the restless do not
rest. And also true, the liars
love and the fighters steal
and the restless take
and the lovers fight and all of us,
all of us want to be right.
May I be wrong. May I come
to you without my books,
without my rules, without
my shoulds. Let me always
arrive at your door with empty hands.
Let me meet you with my pockets
full of blank, not convinced
of anything except
the possibility of everything.
Let me be wrong. Let me not label anyone
a liar. Let me bottom out.
What is it in us that wants to be right?
I have seen it turn a whole month, a whole life
to ice. I have felt the chains of certainty,
I have worn the shackles of listen-to-me.
Let me be wrong. Let there be chinks
in my belief. Let there be splinters
in my conviction. Look how alone it is
in this hour when I am so perfectly right.
May my rules go begging. May my imperatives
learn to crawl. May my righteousness hold
an empty bowl. May my musts all redden to rust.
And may I be wrong as the wrongers are wrong.
And may I unknow. And unlearn.
And unselve. And love as the lovers love.
*with a first line taken from David J. Rothman, “And Remember to Be Kind to Yourself”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, partnership, poem, poetry on November 17, 2013| 2 Comments »
This morning love is like a moat,
on one side me, the other you,
and in the moat there is an empty
yellow raft, and on the raft
twin sets of oars with narrow ends
where hands might fit, and from the shores
we who have hands both choose to leap
into the moat and swim to meet
upon the boat and put our weight
toward something new that’s not quite me
and not quite you and pull together
through the wake, it’s not what I
might once have said it would be like
this love, this love that parts the waves.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, parenting, poem, poetry on November 16, 2013| 5 Comments »
It was not easy, the drive over
Dallas Divide this morning.
Last night’s snow and rain had left
a smear of snow and slush across the road,
though as it melted, I noticed how
the blue and white were mirrored
on the ice. Sky above and sky below.
It was equal parts lovely and treacherous then,
but this is not why I am writing.
It’s just a prelude to tell you how
I am thinking of the story you told
of your son. How he stole from you,
the shattered glass, how ugly it’s become.
There are days we wish would never arrive,
if we even could call it wishing.
Perhaps it is more an ignorance, or a shoving
future sorrow away. Rather to believe
that good will happen. That the boy,
grown man, will come beside us,
chop and haul and stack the wood.
That we might sit at a feast together
and laugh and share the food and wine
and bread of our daily love. We try,
don’t we, to give our children everything.
How it splits us when the story’s
ending is not happily ever. But we are not
at after yet, though the days are getting shorter.
I don’t know, friend, what I’m trying to say.
That I hear you. That sometimes we can find blue sky
in the most surprising places.
That I wish I could help you pick up
the shards. That it’s hard to be a father.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged abecedarius, alphabet, change, poem, poetry on November 15, 2013| 1 Comment »
An angel of arrows,
a box of bubbles,
a cauldron of cradles,
a danger of doubles.
Everything ends
and forever fails.
Gold unglitters
and hangmen hail.
I am illusion
and joy is jive,
kisses are kismet
but luck is live.
More is madness.
None is none.
Om is the omen
and pomes are puns.
Questions go quantum.
Ravens rhapsodize.
Schisms go soaring
and tongues tantalize.
Ugh. We’re unbearable,
voiceless and vile.
We’re wonderless, weary,
extorted, exiled.
Years become yesterday.
No zeal. No zest.
Time to try a new spin
on the old alphabet.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged destiny, parenting, poem, poetry, surrender on November 13, 2013| 3 Comments »
Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now.
—John Ashbery, “Blue Sonata”
I take the kids to dinner, and Finn
eats all his grilled cheese and fries, and Vivian eats
half her plain cheese pizza. We read Winnie the Pooh
and color with old crayons in a torn and well-used
Garfield coloring book. Curious to think that years ago
I would never have known to imagine
that this would be my destiny.
Neither of my children
spills a drink nor throws
a fit nor starts to randomly scream
like lovesick pterodactyls,
and the evening feels
like a divine success. It all comes to this.
Mom, says Vivian, what is destiny?
She is quoting Star Wars.
Perhaps this is what gets me thinking
along these lines, of the difference
between destiny and fate
and how it is I find myself here
at The Angler Inn on a Wednesday night
after running odd errands and finding it
late to get home to make dinner.
I do not say to Vivian, Destiny
is a predetermined course of events
often held to be an irresistible power
or agency. I say, It’s what will
happen to us someday.
She is thinking of Anakin, not
of her own someday, nor the someday
of her mother. In the parking lot,
my son stares long at the waxing moon
all skirted in clouds and warmish shine,
and the boy says, Mom, I wish
it could be like this every night.
It is just as Ashbery said.
“Each image fits into place, with the calm
of not having too many, of having just enough.”
I don’t want to make more of the night than it is.
The egg yolk on my salad not too hard, not too soft.
The barking dog we do not hear. The clear scent
of my daughter’s hair, her weight shifting in my arms.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fingerprint, losing the self, poem, poetry on November 12, 2013| 3 Comments »
Just when I think
I am perfectly lost
I have to get
my fingerprints taken,
proof that not only am I
still here, but I am
indentified, classified, filed away,
and able to located.
No matter how many layers
of stories I have shed,
how many lifetimes
I think I have left behind,
no matter how many
shells of myself I have broken through,
no matter how much
I might like to think
I have changed
I am marked by the same
ten whorls. Oh be humble,
woman, and make way
for the light
to move in.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged door, key, poem, poetry, self inquiry, wholeness on November 11, 2013| 3 Comments »
When I feel lonely, my first thought is that you hold the key to my loneliness. … In the end, seeking only brings us to the edge of knowing ourselves.
—Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening, November 10
Here it is not,
the key I was looking for,
here where I knocked
on beautiful doors,
and ornate doors, and grand
doors, and ancient doors, and
safe doors, and hidden
doors and doors of November.
But here it is,
so close I could hardly
step without walking into it,
this door that has
no lock, no key,
this door
with my own name
on it.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged god, humility, mystery, paradox, poem, poetry, spirituality on November 10, 2013| 1 Comment »
Power to the paradox.
–Jack Mueller
Today you are the cut on the finger
and you also the knife.
You the bandage that wraps the wound.
You the Advil, the ice.
You the sun, and the burn that comes.
You the aloe salve.
You the moon and the absence of moon.
You the children’s laugh.
And you the scent of old dead leaves,
and you the stubborn green.
You the red wine and the empty cup.
The song, the one who sings.
And you the silence between the notes.
You the coat and the chill.
You the uncomfortable anger, the blame,
you the one who sees through.
And you the lines I will never write.
And you the eraser, the lead.
You the peace and you the unrest
the beginning without end.