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Archive for December, 2014

Listening to George Winston from the Balcony, Second Row

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 31, 2014| 3 Comments »

And I am again thirteen and ripening.
It is the summer my record player breaks
and plays “Winter into Spring” over and over
for months. Outside my bedroom window,
the hollyhocks grow from stubs to blooming staves,
and the garden snakes braid in the tall grass and my window
is always open. At night I read ten-cent paperback novels
with a flashlight beneath my sheets. There is a curious
feeling unfurling in me, something that quickens and trembles,
as if I also have strings to be played and strummed and plucked,
oh sweet strange chords of pink and red, taut and then slack.
The arm raises the needle, then sets it down again into
the vinyl grooves, and the summer spins and spins.

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It’s a New Kind of Wonderful Now, But

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 30, 2014| 2 Comments »

I was a river
then and you,
you were a god.
What did we know
of drought? There
was nothing
I could not smooth
given time. You,
you would wade
in me and I delighted
in playing against
your roughness,
pulled you deeper
deeper in. You
did not struggle
to leave. We did
not measure time
in hours, nor in waves,
nor in kisses, we
had no need
to measure. Those
were the days
we never forgot
that we belong
to each other.

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Matter of Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 29, 2014| 2 Comments »

In the boat
how could she know,
fixed as she was
upon the waves,
about the leakage,
small and slow
and of the sharks
that swam below—
she had hungers,
too, and so
toward distant shores
she rowed, she rowed
not noticing
the water cold
around her feet
and how it rose
I think about
her bailing.

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Does This Explain that Strange Feeling of Emptiness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 27, 2014| 4 Comments »

In a book that has not yet been written
the pages are already turning to dust
and a reader is pressing the petals of roses
from a lover she’s yet to meet and love,
and the lover is off in a forest somewhere
where the trees are all still seeds in the ground—
he is singing a song that’s not yet been composed
while he rides on a horse that hasn’t been foaled
and by now the reader is not the same woman
she was when she first began to read
the book and already her skin has been pricked
by the thorns of the rose she’s yet to receive,
and she’s singing the song he never sang,
she sings as if she knows the tune
from long ago, now how did that
old lyric go? She hums where she
forgets the words, something about
a man, a horse, a drop of blood,
a peace that has never and always been,
a woman who thinks she’s lost something,
but can’t remember what.

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Disconnecting the Dots

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 27, 2014| 2 Comments »

The miracle cannot be separated from the mess.
—Teddy Macker, “Christmas Morning”

Every time I connect the dots
I get it wrong. It never turns out
to be an image of a tree or a cat

or a happy woman. Always a mess,
lines scratched and scrabbled
and crisscrossed. And always

I wonder if someone else could
get it right? Could make a coherent
picture by connecting the facts instead

of this jumbled thatch of misdrawn
links and errant nexuses.
Oh this strange longing to get

it right. This urge to make sense
of separate points. There are nights
I stand beneath the moonless sky

and realize I don’t know how
to constellate the stars in the ancient ways.
And instead of trying to draw

the lines, I simply look at the stars
and notice how beautiful they are,
how unfathomable the space

that holds them, that holds
the woman staring at the stars,
holds even her longing to get it right.

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Christmas Morning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 26, 2014| 3 Comments »

What was it under the tree
I was hoping for—perhaps
forgiveness, not the kind
you can tie up with a bow,
no, rather the kind
you don’t even know is there,
except you notice you can’t
stop laughing and everything,
even the awkward scale
you carry in your breath,
even that seems luminous,
some small, amusing scrap
of heaven.

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Tucking My Daughter into Bed We Discuss Contingencies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 24, 2014| 3 Comments »

In the dark
she says, but what if
the fire alarm goes off?
and I say, it won’t
and she says, but what if
and I say, shhhh, it’s
time to sleep and she says,
but what if the alarm
goes off? and I say
then I will carry you
outside to my car
and you will be safe
and she says
thank you and rolls
over, and I lie awake,
holding her in the silence
long after her breathing
has steadied into sleep,
our bodies curled into
each other like two
question marks.

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Three Questions and Two Mysteries the Day After the Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 23, 2014| 5 Comments »

is it lighter?
I can’t tell—that’s the way
light is sometimes

*

remind me again,
what are we circling? and what
is it circling us?

*

not bell, not mirror
not sigh, not kiss, not morning,
not moon, not kiss, but

*

is it possible
that I might praise
everything

*

oh yes, I remember,
be a fool—that is what
the wise man said

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When You Ask Me that Question, I Remember a Day in Wisconsin

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 22, 2014| 3 Comments »

A big snowy hill
and at its base
a wooden wall
and an open lake

and teetering there
on the wooden edge
in red plastic saucer
is a smallish girl

who to this day
cannot recall
if she fell in
or walked away

but she remembers
how she sat so still
with one side safe
the other in peril.

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Isn’t That What We All Want?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 21, 2014| 3 Comments »

Kneeling in aisle three,
in front of the red hots,

colored sugars and non-pareils
reading their labels

and shopping price,
I did not know what I wanted

until a stranger with a dark beard
and brown coat walked around me

and said in a soft, smiling voice,
“I forgive you.”

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