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Archive for November, 2014

In My Own Way

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 11, 2014| 3 Comments »

Disorder, let me fall in love with you—
with whatever is torn and scattered,
disheveled and spilt. I am exhausted
with straightening, sorting and tidiness.
Let me come to adore what is muddled
and cluttered, jumbled and heaped.
Let me be easy with mud and smear and muck,
let me lose this need to make things neat.
You could sing to me, disorder. You could
play me sloppy jazz-ish tunes.
You could kiss me every time I leave
a book or dish out of place. And slowly,
with encouragement, with your nurturing,
I’d perhaps start to lose control on purpose.
Oh Disorder, see how I am? Always
wanting to hold the reins. Help me to laugh
at my stickler ways. Unshould me.
Ungood me. Unglue me. Unpraise.

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Two More Openings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 9, 2014| 2 Comments »

shingle, wood panel,
tile, brick, folded arms, silence—
for every wall between us
there is also a hidden door
waiting for one of us to open it

*

at our fingertips,
there is always some new cell
of infinity blooming—
a blank page always ready
for our story to begin again

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Wild Rose Steps in at the Circus

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 8, 2014| 1 Comment »

And why shouldn’t she fill in on the trapeze?
After all, she’s no stranger to ropes and heights.
And the Great Flying Sabrina couldn’t be all that great.
She’d broken her neck in her last performance,
and that poor little ringmaster looked so cute
in his top hat and tears. Wild Rose strutted into
the trailers behind the tent and found herself a headdress
with red feathers and a red sequin leotard. Really,
how hard could it be? Climb the ladder, grab the bar,
smile and swing, gain momentum, flip three times,
hang from her ankles and spin. Sounded easier
than other things she was supposed to do that night.
Like make that call to apologize. Never mind what for.
She had other things to think about now, the audience cheering
as she walked into the center ring and let her robe fall to the floor.

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What We do When We Don’t Know What Else to Do

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 8, 2014| 3 Comments »

All day the mother
holds the ailing girl.
All day I imagine invisible
hands to hold
the mother,
to wipe her tears,
to lift her head
out of the darkness
of her own hands,
to guide her eyes
toward any small
beauty—a wisp
of laughter, a scrap
of sky. I imagine
for her a voice
that hums a soft hum
in her ear when she
is too disheartened
to pray. I imagine
a soft light that
might make the darkness
not quite so dark. I
put that soft light
inside her.

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Reality TV

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 7, 2014| 1 Comment »

In this episode, we are sitting in a warm,
sunlit room with our eyes closed. The camera
pans around to show us motionless. We sit.
We don’t say anything. The only sound
is the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional
grumbling stomach. The cameraman gets bored
and starts to zoom in and out on a white ribbon,
a stray gray hair, a pimple on someone’s cheek.
Somewhere a producer is shouting, “Quick, go
to a commercial! Who’s idea was this? A bunch
of meditators?” He spills his coffee on his tie.
After a man tries to sell swabs that whiten teeth
and a wrinkle-less woman promises a spotless
germfree toilet, the show resumes and we
are still sitting here, eyes closed. All around America,
hands are fumbling for the remotes. But somewhere,
a woman with two young fighting children
and a leaking roof and thin walls in her cold apartment
is standing in front of her small screen, riveted in
disbelief, wondering just how she might
manage to find herself someday on a show like that.

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Still, It Would Have Been Nice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 6, 2014| 1 Comment »

only one other
set of footprints in the snow
beside mine—
I try not to hold it against them
for not being yours

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That Was the Day that I Newly Saw the Leaf, the Bee, the Sky

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 5, 2014| 1 Comment »

First I prayed to be
like an empty glass
so that you might find me
and fill me.
Filled, I prayed
that I might
be emptied
so that you might
fill me again.
Emptied, I prayed
to stop praying—prayer
had become just
one more name
for wanting the world
to be other than it is.
One day it shattered,
this idea that you could
ever be contained,
that you were not already
the emptiness, the fullness,
the container itself.

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Beauty in the Hand is Worth …

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 3, 2014| 1 Comment »

Just because the new lemon squeezer
is useful does not mean I do not also admire it
for its cheerful yellow color and the surprising
weight of its grip in my hand. I have wanted
a lemon squeezer, not of course in the same way
that Romeo wanted Juliet, and not with the same
urgency that Rumi felt with his love for Shams.
Still, I have wanted it, longed for the ease of squeezing
a single lemon half into the chickpeas before they are hummus,
wanted it so I might juice a small lime into the blender already fragrant
with jalepeno and garlic, Thai basil and peanut oil.
It was a simple wish. And now, here it is
in my hands, not only useful but beautiful.
There will always be work to do.
A lemon squeezer by any other color might not squeeze as sweet—
though we use what’s at hand when we have to.

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Gathering in the Graveyard on my Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 3, 2014| 3 Comments »

They know what we do not.
Not that I envy the dead their knowledge.
I am grateful to be one of the ones standing here
amidst the crumble of granite and marble
while the words of Merwin and Yeats and Hafiz
weave into the quiet of the graveyard air.
I am curious, but not eager to slip out of this
human garment. What a blessing
to have a body, to look long into another human’s eyes,
to hold each other as we weep, to laugh
and to kiss and to wander arm in arm through the cemetery
on a day when the sun and rain both have their way.
What a blessing to read poems in the presence
of the dead about what it means to be alive.
Before we leave, we sing a prayer for every being—
and though I stumble on the words and fumble
the tune, and though I do not know who
might grant the prayer, I sing, I sing.

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The Art of Saying Yes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 2, 2014| 3 Comments »

Dear James Joyce, I will come out and say it,
I have forgotten you. Not your name, of course,
and not my general impression of your greatness.
In fact, more than anything I recall you are great,
how I celebrated you, wrote papers praising your genius.
But I do not recall why. I remember more of Andy McTaggert’s
second-grade doggerel than I do of you.
In fact, I can still sing all three verses of Andy’s song
about Herman the Heron, some ridiculous ditty he made up
and taught to me on the merry go round. And all I recall
of the hundreds of brilliant pages of your masterpiece Ulysses
is “yes, yes, yes, I say yes, yes,”
and that Guinness is good as mother’s milk.
It would be embarrassing, James, if I were inclined
to be embarrassed. But no. I am accustomed
to losing things, even things that have been
essential to me. Words I thought I would never forget,
I have lost. Men I thought I would always love,
I have gone for months, even years, without even once thinking
their names. James. You were my everything for a time.
And now, I see your name and think oh, yes, I knew
you once, could name your characters and all your techniques.
I knew where you were born and when and who you married
and what your dad telegraphed you when your mother fell ill. And then
the phone rings or I look out the window, and I am here
at the late end of autumn, saying yes to whoever
it is on the other end of the line, saying yes to the field
all golden and high, saying yes to the one shining crow that flies
without moving its wings from one bare tree to another.

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