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.