Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, emptiness, light, poem, poetry, winter solstice on December 21, 2017| Leave a Comment »
One of the rooms
in the longest night
has an empty chair
and an open book—
and in the book
is an empty page
full of light—
if you read it
long enough
you might forget
what an hour is,
or night,
forget all stories
besides this one,
older than scripture,
where everything
is possible.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, poem, poetry, wind on December 21, 2017| Leave a Comment »
another morning,
another chance to be
utterly rearranged
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adjectives, happiness, language, poem, poetry on December 20, 2017| Leave a Comment »
We begin with simple words.
Fat. Ugly. Good. Tall.
Gordo. Feo. Bueno. Alto.
How odd to break the world
into adjectives—
how human this longing
to describe a thing,
as if to explain it is to know it.
Easy. Big. Blonde.
Facil. Grande. Rubio.
I imagine a language
where instead of delineating
how different we are,
it had only shades of sameness.
Would we still find ways
to fight? To judge? To grade
and order and assess?
What if it were only ever a day—
not a good day, not a bad day,
just a day. And the woman—
not a fat woman, not a blonde woman,
just a woman—moved through that day
and met a man. Would they
be happier if they didn’t live
happily ever after, if they just lived,
their hearts not even knowing
you could fill in all that lovely silence
with adjectives and adverbs—
it would rain sometimes.
And the flowers would bloom.
Dinner would be served.
They would look in the mirror and smile.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter in law, failure, family dynamics, holiday meal, pumpkin pie, storytelling on December 18, 2017| 1 Comment »
Dear poetry friends,
I’ve been dabbling in storytelling, both written and oral, and this month Edible Southwest, an elegant gourmet magazine, picked up a story of mine in their annual storytelling issue. It’s a story of when things go wrong around holiday meals … and how sometimes, that allows for things to go right …
You can check it out here: The Lesson of the Daughter-in-Law
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daydream, poem, poetry, reality on December 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »
While sautéing onions
in the warm kitchen
I find myself on a tire swing
arcing through fields
of night—
is it the sound of crickets
or the pungent scent
that makes me cry?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged choir, poem, poetry, Steven Nightingale, unity, voice on December 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Who said your real voice is not the choir?
—Steven Nightingale, “Who Said, Who Decided, Who”
and if you are not only the melody
but also the baseline, the harmony,
the descant, then who’s to say
you’re not also the quarter rest,
the fermata, the coda, the clef—
and perhaps you are also
the hand that wrote the score
and the woman who loved
to take that hand in her own
and wander the halls toward bed.
And perhaps you are also the rumpled
sheets, the ones that never made
it to the choir, the sheets that fell
to the floor while the notes
made their way uncomposed
into throats of the singers,
the air full of such improvisational grace
you’d swear the angel choirs
were singing, too.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breast exam, day, poem, poetry, question on December 16, 2017| 2 Comments »
By the time you wake,
the day is already a question.
Whatever declaration there was
in your dreams has already
curled itself into a question mark.
No matter how you wrestle
with the punctuation—try,
perhaps, to straighten it
into an exclamation or crumple it
into a period—regardless, the day
insists on being interrogative.
And why shouldn’t it
insist on being a curve
like a river bed,
like a nautilus,
like a naked breast
beneath the ultrasound—
nature despises a straight line.
Now what matters
is what always matters—
how will you meet the day?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bindweed, determination, discouragement, poem, poetry on December 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
just ask the bindweed—
the more someone tries to destroy it
the more vigorously it grows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, meditation, poem, poetry on December 13, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Darkness lands in my lap
on all fours, curls up and purrs—
I learn to miss
its weightless weight
when it leaves,
learn to be more still
so it will stay,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, poem, poetry, walking, work on December 12, 2017| 2 Comments »
Even on a Monday it can happen,
you step out of the office
and instead of going to your car
or making another call or running
to the bank, your feet
and legs conspire to move you
toward the woods where after
only ten minutes you are more breath
than brain, more here than anywhere else—
water drips in the creek bed,
sunlight pushes through empty branches,
and at your sides your arms swing
as if they were made for this.