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Archive for November, 2022

On the Anniversary of My Father’s Death, I Go to the Shakespeare Garden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 22, 2022| 10 Comments »



A whole garden of begonias
blesses me this day,
this double-edged day
in which I find myself
in a long and generous park
with my husband and daughter,
and I also find myself
in a small room one year ago
when I last heard your voice,
when I last felt you squeeze my hand.
How strange and honest it is,
this living in two days at once.
Why was I drawn to walk
to this unfamiliar place
where thousands of white
and red begonias bloom,
undeterred by longer nights,
by shade?
You loved this flower.
For you, every flower,
no matter its real name,
was begonia.
I meet the coincidence
as if it’s a generous sign
you still guide me
in ways I do not understand.
Each begonia petal is a key
to pick the locks of my rational mind.
Today, the doors of love
are visible everywhere.
I open them every time
and all the world’s begonia.

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Ode to the Unfolded Fortune Cookies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 21, 2022| 2 Comments »


            after a visit to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company in Ross Alley


Oh thin wafer—
crispy, round
and not very sweet—
you ask us to eat you
not for the message you bring
but for the simple pleasure
of eating you.
You seem to suggest
we look beyond
the white paper strip
and look instead
to this scrap of infinity
we stand in,
a moment
still waiting to be written.
Such fortune.

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Interview with Raghu Markus

Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2022| 7 Comments »

Speaking about silence? A paradox, of course, but a joyful exploration. I had the chance to join the thoughtful Raghu Markus on the Be Here Now Network for Mind Rolling, an hour-long podcast in which we speak about poetry as a spiritual path, meeting loss, transformation and trust, and being a “wide-open listener,” a term he used that i absolutely love–how might we become more wide-open listeners? We read lots of poems, many of mine, plus Raghu reads several by Stephen Levine–such a treat. 

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Ode to the Sigh

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 20, 2022| 13 Comments »


 
Smallest of songs,
you give voice
to the breath,
a wordless expression
of sorrow or happiness.
You seem to say,
Yes, that’s how it is,
a quiet doorway
that leads to acceptance.
You soften. You smooth.
You signal a feeling
that’s moving through.
You change silence
the way moonlight
changes a room—
so slightly, and yet
from the edge of perception,
you say to me,
Sweetheart,
pay attention.

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Quince

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 18, 2022| 6 Comments »


for Christie


Shaggy and mottled,
lumpy as an old woman’s thighs,
five quince recline in the shallow bowl
and all day I marvel
as the delicate scent opens,
exotic and fragrant,
like guava, like honey,
like citrus, vanilla.
Every year my friend
harvests me quince from her tree,
and every year they somehow
astonish me again.
As if I didn’t know.
As if their sweetness is new.
Perhaps the annual forgetting is a gift,
because what joy
in falling in love with them
again each year,
their bright yellow scent,
the honest perfume of friendship,
the thrill in their ripening.

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What No One Knew Tonight

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 18, 2022| 4 Comments »


for Shushana Castle

Anyone with a link
could watch the pixels of her
as they streamed through the ether,
but no one in the world knew she wore oud,
a musky, pungent, smoky scent
that comes from the agar tree.
A scent said to carry prayers.
A scent said to bring serenity.
A scent derived from resin
that appears only when the heartwood of agar
has been infected by fungus, attacked.
It is not lost on her she wears
the perfume of a wounded heart—
rich and heavy, warm and animalistic.
It fills her nose with an olfactory story
that says, I have survived, and damned
if I won’t make of the wound something sweet.
She dons the gift like a secret worn on her sleeve—
something anyone could perceive
if only they come close enough—
there’s so much more than what one can see.

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Reading with Jon Lee & Sandra Gill

Posted in Uncategorized on November 18, 2022| 2 Comments »

I learned more about my own poems by watching ASL interpreter Joe Moore bring them into their face & hands and body. What a gift to watch them and another interpreter, too, Nico, accompany me, Sandra Gill and Jon Lee in an evening of poems that touch on family, history, tradition, connection, love, loss and opening. My own poems, starting around 1:05:00, focus on grief and gratefulness. I am so grateful for Kari Gunter-Seymour who curated this program and to Stuart’s Opera House for hosting Spoken & Heard on November 17, 2022.

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Once Upon a Night

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 17, 2022| 7 Comments »


 
 
In the living room after dinner, my daughter
plays Tchaikovsky on Alexa
and dances every character in Sleeping Beauty—
Aurora, the prince, the evil fairy,
the lilac fairy, the bluebird, the jewels—
she leaps and lifts, she jumps
and twirls and raises her arms
with a delicate twist of each wrist.
She is more wing than limb,
more song than blood,
more frolic than bone.
To watch her is holy business
 as she learns to make each step beautiful.

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Unsolid

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 16, 2022| 11 Comments »




After I’ve spent a whole day being stone,
my daughter plays our song on the stereo
and my body is whirlwind, a column of air
spinning round and round, gaining momentum,
and what once was sandstone in me is now dervish,
is dust devil, is momentary phenomenon,
and I barely recall what it’s like to be dense
as I sing and my arms rise and twirl
and I swirl through the room around my girl
thrilling in being this woman on this night,
this spinning delight, this whirling release,
short lived, perhaps, but oh for this twinkling,
I’m windborne, I’m dancing across the horizon
and the wind says, remember, remember this.

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Randomized

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 14, 2022| 9 Comments »

I feel like I’m this experiment called Joi.
            —Joi Sharp


Now that we’re calling this life an experiment,
it’s suddenly more fun to notice
what makes a Rosemerry angry?
How does a Rosemerry learn?
Can we make her annoyed?
What if we frustrate her with insurance claims?
With slow traffic? With politics?
With fill in the blank?
What conditions help her forgive?
How quickly might a Rosemerry
be moved to tears?
What makes her want to cast blame?
What if she meets guilt in a crowded room?
What if she has nowhere to hide?  
What makes her feel small?
What makes her feel vast?
How does a Rosemerry
heal from a wound?
What happens when she is infused with love?
What if it’s more than she can hold?
What inspires a Rosemerry to laugh?
What if she deviates from her thoughts?
If we minimize the variables,
can we predict what brings her peace?
If we control confounding factors,
can we repeat our findings?
Faced with the data,
can she still embrace the unknown?
Can she stay open to possibility?
Lose her attachment to outcomes?
Such a curious subject,
elusive as a song.
What if we change the stimulus again?
Who is she now?

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