Posted in Uncategorized, tagged letting go, lightly on November 30, 2020| 4 Comments »
Lightly, lightly. It’s the best advice ever given to me.
–Aldous Huxley, Island
Eventually I learn
that anything I would hold onto
will weigh me down—
sorrow, of course,
but even delight.
And there is no predicting
when the next step
will find me travelling
onto thin ice—
so I remind myself
each step, each breath,
each grasp, each hope,
go light, go light.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged praise, snow, snowmen on November 30, 2020| 2 Comments »
Their hats are cockamamie.
One has lost its carrot nose.
Stone buttons and eyes
have long since succumbed
to gravity. But there is
something yet dignified
about the snow people in the yard,
their knobby stick arms raised
as if, in their declining state,
there’s still so much to praise.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged advent, bird, hawk, joy, kayleen, wonder on November 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »
What might you need to let go of or “clean out” in order to make room for wonder or joy?
—Kayleen Asbo, Advent and the Arts: The Week of Hope
Just today I walked
in the shadows
and noticed how
they scrubbed me
the way silence sometimes
scrubs a room.
Wonder rushed in.
It wasn’t that I was trying
to keep wonder out,
it’s just that with my schedule
and rigor, I hadn’t left it
space to enter.
If only with mop
and broom I could sweep
out anything
that would keep me
from wonder, from joy.
Instead, the world offers
shadow, stillness,
quietude, loss,
and a red-tailed hawk
in the heart,
circling, circling,
wondering what
it might subtract next.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged interview on November 28, 2020| 3 Comments »
What does control have to do with the creative process? How could a poem really save you? How might we fall more deeply in love with the world as it is? These are some of the questions I muse about with poet/radio host/friend James Navé on his radio show Twice 5 Miles. Recorded last week, the hour contains lots of practical ideas for writing and meeting the self that might rather hide … I hope you enjoy listening!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dinner, kids, manners, mothering, obama, thanksgiving on November 28, 2020| 2 Comments »
I no longer remember much of etiquette
from reading White Gloves and Party Manners,
so when Obama doesn’t come to our house
for Thanksgiving dinner, I needn’t worry
that I’ve forgotten how to address a former president
in an informal setting. I do, however, remind my kids
that if Obama were sitting with us,
they would want to remember to put their napkins
in their laps. They do.
And you probably don’t want to lick the serving spoon,
I add, as it goes from the cranberry sauce
into an eager mouth. And we don’t talk about farting.
The whole time Obama isn’t eating mashed potatoes with us,
we wonder what he is eating with his family
and what they are talking about,
and if he might not just accept an invitation
to our home for dinner. If he did,
we agree we would refrain from using the knife
with the butter dish to butter our own bread.
And, uncertain how to address him,
we’d just ask him personally how he’d like be called.
I’d like to believe that Obama might actually show up.
He’d knock at the door in his elegant and humble way,
no fanfare, holding a side dish of roasted brussels sprouts,
and we’d listen as he told us what he’s up to these days.
As it is, it’s kinda fun when he doesn’t show up
and we act like ourselves. I eat my green beans
with my fingers—they taste better that way.
My daughter plays with the candlewax.
Sometimes, I lick my plate.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, play, snowmen on November 27, 2020| 4 Comments »
We rolled them out of backyard snow.
How quickly snow balls the size of a heart
become snow boulders the size of a man.
We gave them features
to make them more like us.
Dark brown stems and leaves of dried mint?
Those became hair. Carrots for noses,
of course. Small gray rocks for eyes.
Plus knobby sticks. Rust-colored leaves.
Thin icicles from the eaves.
The wail of a siren going by—
that went into them, too.
Plus a prayer for those in pain.
And a slip of blue Colorado sky.
We walked among them,
these rare guests in a time of quarantine,
and perhaps we felt our loneliness lift.
What is a snow man but a temporary cairn,
a dolled up trail marker that leads us
back to ourselves, back to our own backyard.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, mistake, sweetness, thanksgiving on November 26, 2020| 6 Comments »
So little of life’s sweetness
can be planned. Oh, meals,
of course, and sometimes
children. But mostly, joy
loves a surprise, loves
when schedules get shuffled
and agendas unravel and
suddenly there’s a space
for bliss to slip in dressed
in calamity’s clothes.
So easy to praise what
looks like success—
but teach me to give thanks
for the mess—
whatever is burnt, broken,
wounded, fumbled, missed.
Teach me to be open in each
unscripted moment
to the bloom of gratefulness.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, kindness, small steps on November 25, 2020| 4 Comments »
Small things aren’t just important,
says my father. They’re everything.
And I think of how,
night after night, he’d lie
on his back on the floor
and bench press me
as I stood with one foot
in each of his hands.
Years later, every morning
he’d lift me with a phone call—
This is the Broadmoor. This is your
morning wake up call.
He’d say it in his snootiest,
haughtiest British butler voice.
And years later,
when we hold hands
he rubs his thumb across my thumb,
a small, familiar gesture of love.
Now, wishing I could hold
his hand while we sit
in different rooms together
a thousand miles away,
I can almost feel
the pad of his thumb
move across my knuckles
the way wind moves over water
and creates the weather.
It lifts me.
It’s everything.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged passion, Rilke, usefulness, writing on November 24, 2020| 5 Comments »
And do you know that you’re actually going to make more of a difference by focusing on politics than on the culture you’re passionate about? You don’t know what you might help make happen. Our world is full of the result of unintended as well as intended consequences.
—Yo-Yo Ma, “Yo-Yo Ma and the Meaning of Life” in The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 20, 2020
When Rilke travelled through Russia
and studied Saint Francis
and fell in love with the married Salomé
and wrote poems for The Book of Hours,
he could not have known
that over a century later
a woman on another continent
would find herself wrestled by darkness
and find in his poems encouragement
to lean even deeper into darkness
until she could fall in love
with what she feared most.
He could not have known she would
tattoo his words into her memory
and scribe them into her blood
so whenever she walked or lay in the dark
she would have his words ever with her,
and they made her not only more brave
but more wildly alive than she’d been before.
And what if, as his parents had pushed,
Rilke had joined the military
and turned his back on poetry?
And what if he had not gotten himself expelled
from trade school so he could go on
to study literature and art?
What would have become of the woman
a hundred years later
had she not found his poem
and learned from him to love the dark?
Here’s a version of that poem that saved me, “You Darkness, That I Come From,” read by Meryl Streep.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, help, present on November 22, 2020| 6 Comments »
After wrapping the present,
mom would pull ribbon from a roll
and wrap it around the gift.
She’d tie a knot at the top,
then ask for my finger
to hold the ribbon in place
while she fashioned the double knot.
Eventually I learned what Mom knew—
it’s not hard to tie a ribbon alone.
Still, the loan of a finger is lovely.
Lovelier still, partnership.
This is what you do for me.
Though you’re far away,
sometimes when I find myself trying
to, oh, wrap things up,
I feel, perhaps, an invisible hand
reaching in to help where I most need it.
How much easier the work is then,
such a gift, to meet the present together.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being alive, food, pumpkin on November 22, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Praise the pumpkin
with its orange flesh—
how it softens
and sweetens as it cooks.
Praise the way it lends
its rich and earthy density
to pie and bread, curry and soup.
The body responds
with a something akin to joy—
tethered by humble pleasure
to exactly this moment,
as if a flavor could help us
know god—
as if a taste could help us
become who we are.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, friendship, grace, laughter, memory on November 21, 2020| 4 Comments »
Though I sit alone
on my couch at home,
I’m somehow also sitting
with Rachel and Julie
and it’s summer and
we’re laughing, laughing
until we tumble
into each other’s laps,
laughing as we collapse
into a puppy pile of giggles,
laughing because it feels
so good to laugh—
even now I laugh aloud
with no memory of why
we were laughing then,
but many years later,
it’s still contagious.
Sometimes we tumble
so wholly into the grace
of a moment
that it opens in us forever,
continuously blooms
and spreads its perfume
like night-blooming jasmine,
christens everything
with its fragrance,
even this empty room,
even this tired woman
now so surprisingly awake.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged very silly on November 20, 2020| 3 Comments »
We become what we think about.
—Earl Nightingale
So let’s say I think of the Regent of Ridiculousness
who, both alluring and alliterative,
insists on eloping with elephants
and reading only far-fetched philosophers.
Such a Ridiculous Regent, perhaps does not exist,
except that I think about him, and so,
perhaps as Earl Nightingale suggest,
I become him, become an exuberant exhibitionist,
a giggling goof who spontaneously translates Transylvanian—
that’s Romanian. I’d write this all off as irrational,
except already I’m feeling rather regent-ish, certainly ridiculous,
and it’s only line twelve of the poem.
Imagine, dear reader, you, too,
are right now becoming ridiculous,
addicted to alliterative allusions. Sorry!
Tomorrow we might think more therious thoughts.
But for today, rollicking ridiculousness!
For today, suntem regenți ai ridicolului!
For today, may we be viscounts of vivacity,
prime ministers of playfulness, marquesses of mirth,
and duchesses of delight!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ferocity, praise, self awareness, wind on November 18, 2020| 2 Comments »
Today when the wind
wrests branches from trees,
cartwheels the watering can
snatches my peace,
I search in me
for a way to praise it,
praise a force strong enough
to rip trees from the earth,
push a ship cross the sea,
and shred what I think I know.
There is in me
a vehement storm
that I have tamed
for fifty years.
Is it any wonder
the wind makes me nervous—
not that I don’t know
how to relate to it,
but oh, because
I do.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, childhood, library, reading on November 17, 2020| 6 Comments »
Off the hot street and down
the narrow stairwell,
I entered the smell of books—
a musty scent of paper and ink.
How I loved entering the stacks,
shelves taller than I was.
Loved running my hands
along hardcover spines
wondering at the worlds inside.
I was allowed twelve thin books,
that meant twelve chances
to travel to realms where monkeys
stole hats and the Whangdoodle snoozed.
Twelve chapters in which I
was no longer an awkward girl
but a baker in an old village
or a mouse in an attic befriending a girl
who was something like me,
or at least like the girl I wished I could be,
a girl who was brave, a girl
who couldn’t help but stumble
every single time
into happily ever after.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged angel, cake, failure, impatience, patience, personal responsibility on November 16, 2020| 9 Comments »
I suspected I shouldn’t
open the oven door
ten minutes before
the timer went off.
Is it a sin if you don’t
know the rule?
The cake looked perfect,
when I checked,
but ten minutes later
the puff of white had fallen,
fallen like Lucifer,
fallen into a dense sponge
from which it would never
again rise. Oh angel food cake,
victim of my impatience,
we ate you anyway,
served you with strawberry fluff,
and you, like a true angel,
stayed sweet. It was no fault
of your own that you fell.
How often am I responsible
for the so called failures
of others? How often
do I, in my excitement,
cause more harm than good?
Praise the fallen angel food cake,
that still, though compact,
offered itself to the birthday.
Praise what is good
that insists on its own goodness,
despite adverse circumstance.
Let me remember
the graceful botch,
the redeemable flop,
the crumb yet moist, so tasty.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consequences, daughter, mother on November 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
for my mother
Because you are the morning song,
I sing dawn into the sleepy room.
Because you are a prayer,
I have psalms for hands, vespers for feet,
and there is holiness in the spatula,
devotion in the chair,
faith in sirens, in old vases.
If there are cranberries in my thoughts,
it is because you are the sugar
that taught them not to be afraid
of their own sharpness.
And the white and red petunias
that flutter inside my hope
are there because you planted them
decades ago.
I didn’t know all these years
that I was being made—
but because you are the abacus
I am the calculus of possibility.
Because you are the basket
I’ve learned to weave.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged car, engine, kindness, power on November 13, 2020| 6 Comments »
Kindness went out and got itself
a new engine—a four-hundred horsepower
twin turbo 3.3 liter V-6 engine.
Something with real oomph.
Something that provides a bit of giddy-up
when the loving gets tough. Turns out
kindness likes horsepower.
A lot of horsepower. Plus it sprung
for direct fuel injection to maximize
its power output. Everyone thinks
kindness prefers things quiet and calm,
but kindness is ready for action—
ready to take on the world,
ready to travel every back road,
every highway, every main street
and get this ever-loving show on the road.
There’s a whole lot of loving to do.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 13, 2020| 2 Comments »
for Jude
From this high rooftop
reciting poems
into the night—
waiting to hear
the poem of you
on your rooftop
calling back.