The part of me who fears being falsely accused
will do anything to defend herself—
build walls of words, make dams of truths,
construct barriers out of old conversations.
She has always been this way,
certain others are judging her.
Certain they find her at fault.
Certain she must protect herself.
I would like to take her for a walk
and show her how the ice on the river
is melting. How all winter long,
the river itself was the only thing
in its own way—impeding, constricting—
doing what rivers do in the cold.
Now that the cold recedes
the river is more open, more free.
I want her to smell that alive river scent
and know that she, too, can melt.
I want her to feel the freedom of warmth.
I want to tell her that sometimes
the best way to know the innocent self
is to let it run away.
Archive for February, 2021
The Defense
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged defensiveness, melting, river on February 19, 2021| 6 Comments »
Walking Past the Mud Puddle
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dirt, friendship, lotus, mud, play on February 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »
for Michelle
Today I feel too clean to play,
but oh there was that day
when you and I
walked past the mud puddle,
all slick and ooze, a miresome mess,
and we reached our fingers into the sludge
and smeared the muck
onto each other’s faces—
thick mud, gray mud, slippery
and unctuous mud,
wide swaths of heavy mud
that slashed our cheeks,
bedecked our foreheads, mocked
our love of spotlessness.
Not war paint, but joy paint,
cool liquid earth on our skin.
Besmudged and besmirched,
we baptized each other
in the dirtiest of water,
a murky blessing,
our laughter blossoming
between us in the air,
a many-petalled prayer,
a jubilant lotus
startlingly (how?) so pure.
One Memoir
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, love, thoughts, time, truth on February 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »
these beautiful thoughts
old pages turned yellow
every word still true
Derailleur of the Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arguing, bicycle, communication, love on February 16, 2021| 2 Comments »
Because our conversation
feels like riding a bike uphill,
I think of gears. I think
of how easy it is to shift
lower, how a simple flick
of the thumb makes the impossible
possible. Where are the gears
for love? There must be better
ways to use our teeth
than biting words. There must
be a series of notched wheels
in the heart that allow us
to move forward with less force,
some mechanism to make
the chain hop from one sprocket
to another, changing the way
we engage. I want to find that gadget,
those gears, the ones that help us
hear each other, the ones
that help us say what must be said,
the simple tools that allow us
to move forward at all.
And Mean It, Too
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, love, neutrino, science on February 15, 2021| 5 Comments »
In every second, one hundred trillion neutrinos
pass through the body: One hundred trillion
subatomic particles move through us
as if we were sieves, no, as if we were nets
with holes so big that whole islands
travel through without us noticing.
It thrills me to think of the self so porous,
so leaky. Imagine if thoughts, too,
could clear us with so little friction,
so little effect. How many hopes and hurts
just today have I let stick? Imagine
them breezing through the aorta, imagine
them gliding through the brain, slipping through
the core of us, finding no purchase, no anchor.
Imagine the miracle that in any given moment
we don’t fall through our chair, our bed, the floor.
Imagine, permeable as we are, we still coalesce
enough to look at another, to see each other as whole.
We still manage to pick up the mesh of a phone,
succeed in moving our holey lips,
and hundreds of trillions of neutrinos later,
with total certainty, manage to promise a solid I love you.
Imagine, with these pervious hands
we might carry each other, might cradle
each other, might welcome each other home.
Dessert
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chocolate, cooking, daughter, dessert, love, parenting on February 14, 2021| 1 Comment »
Tonight it is cocoa powder, flour, sugar and vanilla that bring me and my daughter together. The kitchen our mixing bowl, time our whisk. The more we’re together the more we laugh. How easily distinct ingredients become a whole. Easy as following a recipe for chocolate cake, we slip into the familiar banter, the joyful two-step, the sweetness we’ve been distilling since she could first hold her own spoon. In the air, hum of the oven preheating, sound of us teasing, clang of the whisk against the glass bowl. The cake, it’s basically a delicious artifact, a testament to this scent of intimacy, like chocolate cake, only much, much richer. |
What We’re Doing Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, meaning of life, purpose on February 14, 2021| 2 Comments »
This is why we are here—
not merely to survive
but to fall in love
with the white-breasted hawk
and the rainbow fish,
with the lonely sidewalk
and the shadows of ourselves,
fall in love with the hands
of the woman wearing yellow
and the girl who loves chocolate
and the boy who loves cars
and the man who makes us want to be
a better version of ourself.
We are here to fall into unmanageable love—
to love beyond reason, beyond
fact, beyond certainty. We are here
to lose all our ideas about love
and know it as the next choice
we make, the next word
we say, the next invitation
we offer ourselves.
We are here to love
the world and each other
the way whales love water,
the way blue loves a peacock,
the way night blooming jasmine
loves night.
The Woman Who Wears Only Solids Remembers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, clothes, life, youth on February 12, 2021| 2 Comments »
That was the year I only bought clothes imported from Bali—
baggy pants in a geometric black-and-white print,
long swishy flowery skirts in bright blues
and thin dresses with intricate knot designs.
I don’t know what became of them all—
Good Will, I suppose. Not that I want them back,
but I miss the girl who felt like a treasure in them,
who wore them lightly, who danced and ran in them,
who twirled in the middle of a field
so the fabric would ripple out and would fall down
in the grass and not worry about the stains.
I miss the girl who shrugged out of those clothes
every time she was near an alpine lake,
slipping nakedly into the icy clear water.
I miss how she wore her life back then,
like something exotic, something beautiful,
something new she couldn’t wait to try on.
Song of the Blank Page
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, blank, paper, woman, writing on February 11, 2021| 4 Comments »
What a woman really needs
is a blank sheet of paper,
which takes trees, of course,
softwood coniferous are best—
pines, firs, spruce, hemlock.
Their long fibers produce the strongest paper
able to hold the most difficult words.
And the tree needs sunlight, clean air, water.
And the tree must be cut using a chainsaw,
harvester, feller buncher. Must be moved
with a skidder or a forwarder.
Must be transported to the sawmill on a truck:
So many machines run by so many
human hands attached to human limbs
with human hearts and human hurts
and human hopes.
And of course, the woman
needs a pen for writing on the paper—
the ink no longer coming from soot
but from pigment including a solvent, a binder,
and a plethora of additives
such as chelating and drying agents—
a complex concoction suited to giving clarity
to complex thoughts.
She needs a room. Or a closet. A counter?
Or simply entry to an inner place
where there are no other voices
asking for help or offering help either.
A space where the predominant voice
she hears is her own—or perhaps,
more truly, the voice she is ripening into,
the voice that emerges when she lets the blank page
know more than she does, lets it lead her
on cursive paths that cross themselves often
but move her ever forward.
And then, with that clean sheet full of memories,
that pen with its synthesized balance,
that room with its impossible blessing,
she might at last meet what she really needs most,
that part of herself she will forever
continue to wonder about, that self
that reaches for her, that asks her to wrestle,
invites her to see what else she might find
in all that abundant blank.
Ode to the Bic Lighter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged childhood, fire, light on February 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »
My first lighter I found in a parking lot—
a smooth red plastic tube that fit
in my pocket. I knew playing with fire
was dangerous. I knew I wanted
to learn how. I remember trying again
and again to get the right purchase
with my thumb on the serrated sparkwheel.
I rolled and rolled until my skin was raw,
until at last the brief flame sputtered then died.
It wasn’t long before it came second nature—
the smooth flick needed to produce a spark,
the slight pressure on the red tongue
to maintain steady flame.
I learned how it burns
to be lit up too long,
but once you know how to make light,
how easy it is to bring it with you
everywhere you go.
This poem is published in the wonderful ONE ART Poetry Journal