and if I dare dream
let it include the facts—
the bite, the open hand
Archive for May, 2021
One Feeding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cliche, dream, reality on May 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Trying to Get It Right
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged step, tightrope, uncertainty on May 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »
after Knowing Now You’ll Never Be a Clown by Jack Ridl
I’ll never be a tight rope walker
balancing above the canyon—
no net beneath me, just angry rapids,
no strap tethering me to the tight rope
to catch me should I fall.
But could I be a tightrope walker,
I would know the art of one step at a time,
would know how to tune out everything
except the step that comes next.
Or is it that I would know
how to tune in to everything
so I might better meet the next step?
If I were a tightrope walker,
I would trust myself
know every muscle intimately,
would have faith in my reflexes,
faith in how I respond to wind,
to challenge, to fear.
Instead of all this wondering
about what should come next.
Instead of all this worry about
how to take a step.
Acceleration
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged falling, hope, icarus on May 29, 2021| 4 Comments »
Sometimes when I fall long enough,
I stop hoping I will stop falling.
In those moments, when I no longer
wish for the wings of an answer,
or for the solid ground of resolution,
such beautiful surrender
in the dropping through space,
in submitting to the weight
of what it takes to hold a soul.
I wonder if Icarus felt it, too. Perhaps,
if only for a moment, he knew
the rush of air, the thrill of not trying
to inhibit the tumble, the gift of knowing
self as free fall, the skill of giving in,
every prayer coming out as sound of wind.
First Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged childhood memory, kissing, love, remembering on May 28, 2021| 5 Comments »
Tonight, it comes back, how we’d go for walks
in the tall dry grass behind the old school.
In my memory, the field goes on and on and
it never rains and we have no idea how young
we are. Sun-drunk and heat-starved, twin ripples
of wind. Broken grass in our hair and howl
in our skin. And we believed in forever then—
perhaps we touched it those summer days,
a strand of forever, forgotten for decades,
lost amongst other eternal strands—but oh,
those hands, those parted lips, that tall, trembling grass.
Renaming the Chapter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus on May 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Rename it Year-the-Redwing-Blackbirds-Came-to-the-Yard.
Is it true they were never here before?
Or was I not here enough to hear them?
Rename it How-to-Read-Eyes-101. Or
Intro-to-Zoom. Or Age-of-the-Unmoving-Odometer.
Is that any better than COVID-19, which grates
like the righteous shouts of politicians?
Or coronavirus, which sounds like
a chorus of ventilators?
Call it Killer-of-the-Wise-Generation.
Or Bringer-of-Empty-Schoolyards.
Period-When-I-Lean-into-Uncertainty.
Time-I-Know-How-Human-We-Are.
Silver-Lining-for-Introverts.
Yet-Another-Chapter-of-Inequity.
Call it Life-Taker. World-Changer.
Pandemic. Prayer-breeder.
Loss-Bringer. Choice-Maker.
Teacher.
Again. Again.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cosmos, death, frost, garden, spring on May 25, 2021| 2 Comments »
Almost every spring, I forget them,
the six packs of cosmos starts on the porch.
All it takes is one cold night,
an innocence of frost.
By dawn, the buds slightly droop.
By noon, the leaves hang darkened and limp.
By the next day, they’re black.
And dead.
It’s a familiar story. How one night
changes everything. How one day
I’m blooming, thriving, alive,
the next all I’d grown is gone.
I used to believe all was lost.
I used to throw the whole plant away.
But I learned what is dead serves as a blanket
to protect whatever still lives.
Wait, and in days, a tiny green filigree
emerges from the base.
In a month or two, it’s a bask of blooms,
no trace of how bleak it was.
Such tender study, the cosmos.
Blame is no part of their process.
They let what’s been lost be of service.
They know they are here to grow.
One Forgiveness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgiveness, stone, transformation on May 24, 2021| 2 Comments »
how quickly
this basket of stones
becomes
a basket
of feathers
Note to My Future Self
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged future, patience, self talk, story on May 23, 2021| 2 Comments »
Please don’t tell me what will happen.
I’ve peeked before at the end of a book
and know how one detail learned too soon
can ruin the entire story.
Not that I wish to be patient.
Of course, I want to know what’s coming,
but this story only works in present tense.
Even when it makes me weep,
even when I’d rather put this story down,
even when I’d like to rewrite the last scene,
please, don’t give me even a little hint.
I am not sure I believe in happy endings,
but I believe in turning the page,
in holding the weight of the book in my hands,
and racing through the text,
my eyes eager to discover what comes next.
Featured on Breakfast Poetry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged interview, language, podcast on May 22, 2021| 2 Comments »
I LOVED this conversation with Anne Marie Vivienne on her podcast Breakfast Poetry, in which we talk about several of my favorite poems (St. Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell and In the Belly of the Whale by Dan Albergotti) and narrating our own lives, meeting what life brings to our door, and finding joy in the devotion of language. It’s available for your listening here:
Lesson from the Coyote Willows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged showing up, willows on May 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Only when it rains do coyote willows
turn their brightest red, as they do
today in the drizzle and gray, and oh,
how I fall in love with them now,
these slender stems that know
how to regenerate from brokenness,
bringing their brilliant vermillion
to the dim of the day.
Let us live this way. When it is dark,
let us find what is brightest in us
and share it with the soggy world,
a thicket of grace in the midst of gloom,
not fancy, but rampant and so deeply willing
to share radiance, to dazzle, to blaze.
Global Slowing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged geology, love, mothering, parrenting, time on May 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
It goes so fast, they say,
and clearly they don’t mean
today, which moves at the speed
of tectonic plates, not today
when holding a child
means not holding
that child because
they refuse to be held.
Sometimes, being a mother
is to move at the rate
of fear, the rate
of betrayal, the rate
of loss. Today,
to be a mother
is be ancient
oceanic crust that creeps
at ten centimeters a year.
Someday, perhaps tomorrow,
love will again be meteor,
but today it’s intense heat
at the core. It’s the slow scrape
of two great plates,
something cool
waiting to be warmed.
Returning Again to That Evening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bodies, coronavirus, friendship on May 20, 2021| Leave a Comment »
In the picture, we are laughing,
snuggled onto a bench in a bar,
falling all over each other, a heap of joy.
Julie is as always the most solid of us—
a mischievous, wicked and grinning foundation
for whatever we pile on.
Rachel leans on Julie, her head flung back,
her dark curls ribboning down her shoulders,
eyes closed, her smile dreamy and fixed in an eternal
air of happiness. And I have nearly
collapsed on her chest, my face contorted
in laughter that is forever about to burst.
We are like puppies, squirmy and vulnerable,
our bodies unguarded and innocent,
cuddling and twisting and vining
around each other, knowing ourselves
as skin and warmth and tumble of love.
We knew nothing then of how our own bodies
would become weapons, how bursts of breath
charged with laughter would be perilous,
how dangerous our bodies would become.
Staring at the photo, I ache
for the sweet wine of connection,
the benediction of touch, the wild joy
of curling into each other, animals that we are,
staying safe by keeping each other close.
May 19, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, daily life, daughter, mother, quiet on May 19, 2021| 6 Comments »
Will I remember this day with its greening of grass,
its blooming of apple blossom, its stilling of pond?
Will I remember the sweetness of my daughter
not leaving the house for school on a Wednesday
because her classes are all online? Will I remember
how she comes to snuggle on the couch during lunch
and pinches my cheeks and teases me about my ugly feet?
Will I remember the terrible yellow sticky casings
of the cottonwood seeds, how they glue to the hood
of my car that rarely moves from the drive? Or
the lavender in the garden that always looks
grey and dead before it erupts into fragrant life?
Perhaps there is some wave of presence
that will carry such stillness forward, a current
of quiet, a tide of tenderness that will insist
on itself for years to come. How forgettable
it all is—and how cherished—this swooping of swallows,
this opening of iris. How necessary, this holding
my daughter while the dark pool of night curls around us,
this cradling each other as we say nothing at all.
Another Reason to Be Kinder
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kindness, news, tenderness, war on May 17, 2021| 2 Comments »
Somewhere I’ve never been
reaches across the ocean
and wrenches my thoughts.
I don’t try to push it away.
I let the ache in,
let sorrow do its terrible
work. It slices in
deeper than I want it to,
but I do not resist.
All day I think of the small child
being pulled from the rubble.
All day I think of the many hands
reaching for the small frightened body.
All day, I am softened by
grief, ravaged into tenderness.
Amnesia
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgetting, morning, waking up on May 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »
So lucky sometimes,
like today, to wake
and say to the world
I love you.
On these mornings,
almost impossible
to remember it is ever
any other way—
impossible to believe
I could wake and say
anything besides
thank you, I am grateful,
good morning blue sky,
good morning old limbs.
Wild Iris
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, flowers, friendship, pond, wild iris on May 15, 2021| 2 Comments »
From a handful of wild iris
planted years ago,
dozens of slender spears
and stems now rise beside the pond—
their pale purple flags
wave in allegiance to spring
and each other.
They know how to grow
not just up but to the side,
how to send out lateral roots
that will someday be new blooms.
Old friends are like rhizomes—
connected by invisible roots,
resilient, perceiving the light as good,
but knowing, too, how essential
to grow through the dark.
Walking up the Fall Creek Road, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, meeting the self, walking on May 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
I see my old self walking down.
She doesn’t have a mask in her pocket.
She doesn’t move to walk six feet away.
She leans in to hug me, as if it were the most natural,
ordinary thing to do. She looks offended
when I offer her an elbow.
She doesn’t yet know how a virus
will use genome origami to infect and replicate
inside host cells with terrible efficiency.
She doesn’t know the schools will close
and the stores will close and the streets will close
and the doors will close and it will all happen
in a week. She doesn’t know her daughter
will cry herself to sleep each night for weeks.
She doesn’t know her son will slip
into a darkness and rage she will try to carry.
How the days of her calendar will empty.
How pixilated her life will become.
How the hospital won’t let visitors in .
How she will miss her mother, her father, her friends.
How millions and millions will die.
And that’s just the health of it.
Part of me wants to tell her what’s coming.
I don’t.
Part of me wants to hug her back,
and I can’t quite explain why I do.
Because innocence.
Because she will be here soon.
Five Poems Published Today in ONE ART
Posted in Uncategorized on May 14, 2021| 2 Comments »
I love this journal and I’m so grateful to have them publish my work!!
Over a Year Later, I Grieve
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, friendship, Heartbeat, loss, singing on May 13, 2021| 2 Comments »
for Heartbeat, singing together since 1994
Every week we sang, sang blues
and ballads, folk songs,
rounds, pop songs, jazz,
love songs, chants. And we
didn’t just sing, we touched
and hugged, leaned in and loved,
ran our fingers through the waves
of each other’s hair, laughed till we peed,
and jostled and shoved and teased
and offered tissues and kissed cheeks
and brought the shared melodic air
into our bodies and returned it
into the room in currents of ecstatic song.
Oh we sang, how we sang, as if
singing were a life raft that kept us afloat
on the aching broken world.
Now, I sing alone in the kitchen.
Sometimes I’m haunted by the part
I sing—a harmony line unanchored
by the melody. With no tonic,
the tune feels off. There is so much
that’s missing, that’s lost.
Sometimes I make up a new song
and sing about what is here.
Good morning, hummingbird.
Good morning, loneliness. Good
morning big empty room.
The air holds the notes like shimmering drops
that sometimes leak out of my eyes
when I think of how we sang, the music
a life raft, and your voices, my friends, the oars.