Beyond words is the language
of leaf with its speckle and rustle
and moldering scent, is the language
of sunlight which even now burns
its praise into my wrinkling skin.
Is the language of cloud
with its unraveling syntax
that dissolves into unconjugatable sky.
Sometimes I can decipher
the secret tongue that whispers
its song into everything—
you are here, then you’re gone,
but you’re never really gone,
see, it’s all here, it’s all here.
Archive for October, 2024
Translation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged impermanence, language, permanence on October 31, 2024| 2 Comments »
And in This Way, He Still Lives
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, dad, kindness, legacy on October 30, 2024| 21 Comments »
for my dad
There was that time that he bought
a television for the woman who came
to the house to clean while he and mom were sick.
She had mentioned offhand hers had broken.
He was like that. Would take smoked salmon
for the men and women at the firehouse.
Would make certificates for people
to honor kind things they had done.
It was as if he could read the small thought bubbles
that appear above people’s heads,
the ones we read in cartoons
but can’t see in real life,
the ones that say what they really need,
and then he’d offer a kindness.
Not that he was a saint.
My god, could he get angry.
Not that he looked for people to care for,
more that he really looked at the people
who came across his path.
This is how I want him to live on in me,
his hands guiding mine to give.
Consecration
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged altar, breath, sacred, song on October 29, 2024| 11 Comments »
Even a song can be an altar,
a place to bring an offering—
as on this anxious day
when I can’t stop giving my heart
to love songs for the broken world.
And perhaps the breath, too, is an altar
on which the song is placed,
which would mean what is sacred
might be ever flowing through us,
a space where we might meet the divine.
To believe this doesn’t change
the song, but it changes everything
about the singer.
Filling in the Bubble on the Ballot
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged America, election, reproductive rights, voting, women's rights on October 28, 2024| 9 Comments »
I imagine the small oval
is the center of a flower
that I link through black ink
to the life of my daughter
and her daughter and her daughter
and their bodies and their voices,
and their choices and their power;
it’s a pool I fill with hope,
it’s a note in a rising tune,
a pupil widening in the dark,
a moon that I make new.
New Eyes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, change, perspective, temple on October 27, 2024| 4 Comments »
If the body is a temple,
then I want to remind myself
the grotto, too, is a temple,
a holy chamber carved
by nature and time,
a sanctuary
where song echoes and rises
in a place that’s been scoured,
ravaged, worn.
The meadow, too, is a temple,
with a giant blue dome of sky
made more holy by its expansiveness.
Let my prayer be not to change my body
but to change the way I see it.
Let me look in the mirror and see there
a grotto, a meadow, a temple,
a being who is learning new prayers
as she’s shaped and reshaped
by the world.
Inner Dance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, dance, paradox, stillness on October 26, 2024| 8 Comments »
Dancing inside me is the one
who has spent her whole life dancing,
the one who leaps up
the moment the music begins
and starts to twirl and leap
and give herself over to moving
in any way her feet
and arms and shoulders and spine
want to move. Sometimes
she needs no music at all,
just moves for the wild joy of moving.
She is just starting to notice
the other woman inside,
the one who looks more
as if she’s standing still.
The one who whose movements rhyme
with limestone, whose eyes are clear
as deep mountain lakes.
Only recently has she
begun to see
this, too, is
dancing.
The Opening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, light, night, opening, opposition on October 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
I feel it before dawn—
the longing not only for light
but for the vast embrace
of the dark,
the way it links me
to the farthest reachings
of the universe,
the way it holds
each dull planet,
each luminous star,
holds me with no question,
no reservation,
holds all I love
and all I have yet
to learn to love.
With each breath
I bring it into my body,
small sips of dark,
great gulps of dark.
Inside me it swirls
with my love of light,
and this is how the certainties
of the heart are erased—
when I love and ache
in two directions at once—
and what’s left
is so raw, so open,
so alive.
One Hearing My Daughter Laugh
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, laughter, transformation on October 24, 2024| 4 Comments »
just when I think
I’m made of sludge
you candle me
On Waking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, seamlessness, unself, waking on October 23, 2024| 9 Comments »
In that vast land
that exists between dream
and waking, there is no I
and no other-than-I.
There are no borders,
no citizens, no factions,
no right side, no wrong side,
a realm of pure openness
where I am not aligned
with any feelings or beliefs,
where I am wholly breath and being.
How would it be to bring
such openness into the day?
To fly across the lines
of I and not-I
the way a bird flies
between countries,
across state lines,
across fence lines.
To know the self as unself,
as seamless, undivided,
even as it pours the coffee,
even as it drives past
the signs in the yards,
even as it watches the news.
It’s the Forgettable Moments I Miss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cars, conversation, garden, grief, ordinary on October 22, 2024| 10 Comments »
I want to be in the garden
with you again,
hands in the dirt,
maybe listening
to cottonwood leaves
spreading rumors
of fall, but maybe
not even listening.
I want a moment
so mundane, just
pulling bindweed,
nodding and humming absently
as you talk about race cars,
a moment so unmemorable
I forget how damn precious
every single moment is;
I want a moment I take
for granted, want to
be bored or even fussy
standing beside you,
the beets too small
to harvest, your voice
rambling on about pole positions
and pit stop strategies,
and me utterly clueless
I would ever look back
and long to hear you
wax on about balancing fuel loads,
worn tires, soft compounds,
anything, anything at all.
The Fence Post to the Mist
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allegory, allowing, ephemeral, impermanence, mist on October 21, 2024| 11 Comments »
Show me again
how you do that trick,
the one where you roll,
where you lift,
where you disappear.
One Driving Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, highway on October 20, 2024| 10 Comments »
long grey hem of highway
each yellow dash a stitch
I’m ripping out
Antidote for fear of not being good enough
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, insufficiency, nike on October 19, 2024| 10 Comments »
Sometimes, afraid I am not good enough,
I lie on the grass
back heavy against the earth
and I swallow the sun
in great brilliant gulps
as if it is medicine,
the kind I never got as a child,
the kind that tastes like
whatever it is that makes
strawberries ripen,
whatever it is that makes
feathers grow,
whatever it is that erases
any thoughts of insufficiency
until all that remains
is a human lying in the grass,
a barest smile on my lips.
No wings sprouting from
my shoulders, no magic
transformation. Just
the softening that comes with
giving my body to the earth,
giving my all to the sun
until it overrides every other impulse.
Nothing magical about it
unless you count
all the sunlight dribbling like praise
down my chin.
On the Long Drive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attention, miracle, red-tailed hawk, sacred on October 18, 2024| 9 Comments »
In the cottonwood tree
beside the road
sat the red-tailed hawk
on a barren branch,
utterly still,
and though they are common,
hulking and bulky,
that didn’t stop me
from thrilling
in its whitish breast,
its short, hooked beak,
the branch an altar—
slender and dark,
and though I passed it
in seconds,
seconds are all it takes
for whatever is sacred in me
to be called to
by what’s sacred
in the world.
Hours later,
I still wonder why
the heart leaps up so.
I don’t know, but
that is perhaps itself
the miracle—
that some part of us
knows how to fall in love
with a bird on branch,
its body still,
while all around it
the wind.
What Is Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, larkspur, loving the world on October 16, 2024| 2 Comments »
Midsummer, she stood in the midst
of deep blue delphinium
and did not move. Stood
until she became delphinium.
Till she petalled and pollened
and blued. Oh joy in the flesh
that forgets it is bound to an I.
Joy in the flesh that remembers
it’s part of it all. Months later,
she returns to the stems, tall
and brown and dead.
Did she really believe
things would not change?
This is the way she learns
what she wants the most:
To be open to falling in love
with the world as it is—
beyond hope, beyond wish,
beyond memory.
To not mistake love
for the object of love.
To stand in the midst
of what is brittle and gone
and fall in love with
exactly what is here.
Subtraction
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, biology, leaves, photosynthesis, trees on October 15, 2024| 7 Comments »
For months now, the days darken.
This signals the trees to stop making chlorophyll,
and, in its absence, other pigments in the leaves
can be seen. Yellow flavonols. Orange carotenoids.
Red anthocyanins. They adorn each tree
with such radiance, such honest treasure—
a beauty that was always there
concealed beneath the green.
Touch me, I want to say to the darkness.
or perhaps more truly, I say to the self,
be touched, be touched as if you are a tree.
Let what you know of yourself break down.
What hidden gold might be revealed then?
What amber? What astonishing vermillion?
In the Garden in October
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, gratefulness, snap pea, tenderness on October 14, 2024| 8 Comments »
Though the vines are almost all brittle and dried,
somehow I find four perfect sugar snap peas
at the top of the fence. Not tough. Not pale
with age, but sweet and crisp and stringless,
and I pull them into my mouth with delight
as if I am eating the word yes. Aren’t they amazing?
I say, holding the last snap pea up to the sunflowers
where they hang heavy and dead on their stalks.
I want to offer this pea to the world like a small proof
of pleasure—some evidence that life persists
despite cold, despite exhaustion,
though the light itself seems to be failing,
but here, look in my hand, this testament to tenderness
so full of spring, so unfathomable, so here.
Just a Thing?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, object, objective correlative, ring on October 13, 2024| 6 Comments »
I’ve worn it since the day he died,
this ring that was my son’s.
A simple band—not flashy.
Plain silver inlaid with white.
I touch it when I think of him.
I think of him when I touch it.
My thumb has memorized
it’s smoothness, its edges.
I know it now as well
as once I knew his cheek.
I wear its secrets,
and do not ask it to tell.
One winter, I lost the ring.
It felt like losing him again.
I know. It’s just a thing.
But it’s not. It was his ring.
Three Teachers at the End of the Writing Retreat
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, history, hug, teaching on October 13, 2024| 7 Comments »
for Uche and Jon
In a trio of ecstatic days
measured in boisterous laughter
and hours of impassioned conversations,
there was also that moment when,
at the end of a brilliant night,
we stood behind the stage,
our students still raucous
and basking in each other’s shine,
and we wrapped our arms around each other
and bowed our heads till they touched,
brow to brow to brow,
a moment so brief one could easily
miss it, but this, too, is history—
the quiet breath, the words
we didn’t have to say, the pressure
of our hands against each other’s backs,
the sweetness of standing out of the light,
tired and nodding to the beauty
pulsing all around us.