Dawn light not yet arrived,
and the dream still so alive in the body—
the astonishment of flight
still rising like a tide in the blood.
Are the blankets real?
Or the weightlessness?
How is the wind still tangling my hair
even as the cat curls warm at my side?
What is this gravity?
For a while, I lie between worlds,
one steady, the other wildly free.
Even grounded, my body can’t unknow it,
ecstasy.
Archive for January, 2025
Stage 4
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cancer, honesty, Kyra Kopestonksky, music, surrender on January 29, 2025| 6 Comments »
for K
Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. J. Macy and A. Barrows, “Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29”
Oh friend, as life batters you,
again, you make music—
not the music you’ve practiced,
not the gentle strains of hope
you longed to share,
but a naked ringing.
Oh, how you teach me.
There is so much goodness
in fear when it is shared truly—
not the innocence of a lullaby,
but the brutal shine of a gong.
How essential and urgent it is,
your song, my bell.
You change my ideas of what
it means to be strong—
not that we don’t get battered,
but that we let ourselves feel
and meet such moments
unrelentingly, beautifully real.
What You Couldn’t Have Seen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged appearance vs. reality, grief, survival, walking on January 29, 2025| 6 Comments »
I put on my shoes, friend,
the way I always do, and
opened the door and stepped
into the cold.
If you had seen me,
it would have looked
so normal. Like a woman
stepping out of her home.
Even the part where I talked
to the stars. Everybody
talks to stars sometimes,
right? What you couldn’t have seen
was how every step was an edge.
Sometimes, right there
outside the front door, I
slipped off the cliffs of the known.
It was years before
the ground was even again.
Though truly, sometimes
the cliffs are still there,
and I fall off again.
Isn’t it strange?
It looks just like I’m walking.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
One Stifled
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged freedom, restraint, river, singing, voice on January 27, 2025| 8 Comments »
this winter
I’ve turned into a river
beneath the ice, so much song
Since You’re Gone
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged couch, ekphrasis, heart, love, missing on January 26, 2025| 6 Comments »
My heart is like a well-used couch,
the kind with a dent where your body
once curled in, the cushions threadbare
from years of use; the kind of couch
that remembers every time you gave
it your weight, that recalls every story
that spilled from your mouth,
your words now woven into its upholstery.
Since you’re gone, the picture of me looks
like less like a picture of me and more
like a picture of where you used to be.
Instead of Losing Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, love, madness, purpose, singing on January 25, 2025| 16 Comments »
for K., Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.
After all the hours of dressing up
and combing our hair and trying
to show our best face to the world,
we find ourselves bare, naked,
haunted, and painfully, wondrously clear,
full of visions and limitations, aware
of the great invitation to be kind. And
if we’re lucky, we burn with hope.
It isn’t safe, this life. Don’t let anyone
tell you otherwise. But if you are able,
as you listen to the screaming, sing.
Sing through the walls. Sing of miracles,
healing and light. Sing. Because when
all else is ash, still, we can sing. We can sing.
What It Takes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged disconnect, growth, love, separation, wings on January 25, 2025| 2 Comments »
I say I love you, but what I mean is
there is deep sky between us I don’t know
how to travel, and there is no map, no path,
and it’s cold, and I don’t know how
to fly, but when I say I love you, I mean
somehow despite these too solid bones,
a raven-sharp wisdom is clawing through me,
and though it hurts I feel them swelling
beneath my skin, these determined wings.
Tale of Two Moments
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, death, love, memory, mortality, mother, parenting on January 24, 2025| 2 Comments »
Holding my girl
on the couch,
came a moment
so tender because
I remembered
I will die—
what grace when,
minutes later,
lost in the bliss
of her warmth,
came a moment
so tender because
I forgot.
Commingling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, desire, floating, pleasure, pond, sensuality, sun on January 22, 2025| 14 Comments »
What if our flesh commingled became the mother of light and sound, the vast word, the ocean forgotten at birth?
—James Tipton, “What If, When We Held Each Other”
I love it when I float on the pond in summer
like a human water lily,
the top of me sun-drunk and heat-buzzed,
seduced by shine, blossoming into blaze,
the rest of me held by the cool and swoony dark.
It’s like having two lovers at once—
one playful, one taciturn—
both of them tracing the shape of me
in the way only they know how,
both of them enticing me to fall in love
with having a form that shivers and stipples
and craves and longs to be found.
I desire them both,
the one that invites me deeper in,
the one that bids me rise.
The one that caresses with liquid tongues,
the one that strokes me hot and bright.
How I love to have a body then,
nakedly alive, enticed by sky,
embraced by the deep,
blissed and beguiled by the kiss of it all,
the one original kiss that links me back
to the miracle of being become flesh.
How good it is then to be limb and skin.
How good to be a nexus of firing nerves.
How shameless I am as I beg the world,
touch me, please, touch me,
please, make me yours.
How
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, prayer, resistance on January 22, 2025| 17 Comments »
A little context: if you have ever been in a class with me, you likely know I often joke (except I’m not joking) that EVERYTHING has something to teach us … except ticks. So. In these days when I find myself faced with things I really really do not want to turn toward, I have finally done what I swore I would never do. I wrote a poem about ticks. I consider this practice.
*
I pray to keep falling in love with everyone I meet.
—Mark Nepo, from “In Love with the World”
Not the tick, no.
Surely it is not sacred.
Do not try to tell me so.
Repulsive tiny blood suckers.
I do not wish to be impressed
by their survival, do not want
to respect how they have thrived
since the first flowering plants
arrived on earth over
one hundred million years ago.
I do not want to praise
their hard protective shells, nor how
efficiently they swell,
nor the ease with which they sense
moisture, heat, vibration.
Rather to vilify what disgusts me.
Repulsive little carriers of sickness.
Vile little vectors of disease.
What joy is there in knowing
a tick is so effective and good
at doing what a tick was made to do?
Could it be greater than the perverse joy
I get from my hatred? It is clear
my repulsion does not affect the tick.
Oh, clenched heart. Oh, clenched fist.
Where is the line between what I love
and what I resist?
Is it true there is holiness in everything?
How do I wound myself
when my heart and hand are closed?
Let my prayer not be to fall in love,
but to open to the prayer I do not yet know.