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.
On Inauguration Day, Amy Serves Me Tea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, brokenness, inauguration, tea on January 21, 2025| 13 Comments »
The clay mug had clearly been broken,
even shattered, then reassembled
with a clear amber glue that allowed
me to see winter sunlight shining through
its walls when I lifted the mug to sip
the rich black tea. I swear, the drink
was even more delicious served
in a vessel so thoughtfully remade.
All day I thought of broken things.
All day I thought of repair. All day
I thought of ways to make beauty
out of what looks, for a time, like despair.
Steadfast
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, connection, freedom, inauguration, resilience, voice on January 19, 2025| 12 Comments »
Though a cold
wind is howling,
we’re not birds
without wings—
and as long as we
have voices
let us sing together,
sing of freedom,
sing what’s true,
let us sing.
- “birds without wings” is from John Lewis’s speech, January 9, 2005, at the Kennedy Center, at a choral tribute honoring Dr. Martin Luther King
In a Dangerous Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, bones, commitment, love, presidency, ribs, skeleton on January 19, 2025| 12 Comments »
I think of the bones
of the unsung rib cage,
the way they protect
the heart. How bone,
too, is living, how it constantly
renews and remakes itself.
I think of how ribs engage
with other ribs
to expand, to contract,
and because they do
their solid work,
they allow the heart to float.
This is what I want to do:
to be a rib in this body
of our country,
to make a safe space for love.
There is so much now
that needs protection.
I want to be that flexible,
that committed to what’s vital,
that unwilling to yield.
And Then, All at Once, Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, silence, song, winter on January 18, 2025| 8 Comments »
in the barren cottonwood tree
dozens of birds, all of them still,
as if, like me, they are enthralled
doubtful they could ever improve
on all this glorious silence
I, Who Did Not Die That Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, death, love, parts, resilience on January 17, 2025| 23 Comments »
“I, who did not die …”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist”
I, who did not die that day,
also died. Not all of me,
but part of me: The part
who believed I could change things
beyond my control.
The part who believed
any of us can save someone else.
What a terrible freedom to know
what I cannot do. The part
who did not die is the part
who loves—loves what was,
loves what is now, loves as long
as I am able to love.
The part who did not die
is the part who still thrills to see
the twitchy-nosed bunny
streak across the grass
and the near-full moon that bathes
me in cold blue light. The part
who still lives is not afraid to grieve
and lets herself be turned
toward fear and learns,
learns to meet even heartache
with wonder. Like a tree, I grow
from the soil of all I have lost.
I, who did not die that day,
am still being taught how to touch
the wound and let myself be sung
by the part still wildly alive.
Carpe Diem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged carpe diem, connection, love, reality on January 15, 2025| 14 Comments »
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
—Wendell Berry, 1993, I
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?
One for My Daughter, Made of Water
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, river, rules, water on January 14, 2025| 4 Comments »
the river must follow its channel,
but every cloud can tell you
water also flows up
The One Great Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being held, belonging, holding on January 13, 2025| 7 Comments »
There are so many ways to hold and be held.
—James Crews, “The World Loves You Back”
Assume belonging.
—Augusta Kantra
There are so many ways to hold and be held.
Like the way the white and black cat holds my lap
even as I hold her small weight.
Like the way a woman holds a canyon in her heart—
its red rock cliffs and snow-thick spruce—
even as the canyon holds her.
And when I hold silence and offer it my whole attention,
I feel how silence holds me,
cradles me with such profound nothing
it becomes everything.
What if we assume we belong?
Then we might find we are held
by strands of birdsong, by the even beat
of eagle’s wings, by the blue moonlight
that reflects off the snow.
I spent so much time worrying
about how to fit in, changing
how I dressed, how I spoke, what I did.
I somehow didn’t learn until recently
real belonging asks nothing of me
except I offer myself exactly as I am.
I become more myself when I trust I am held
as much by shadow as by light,
held by the one shared breath, by the one
infinite song, held by soil, held by sky,
held even by the human longing to be held,
held by the one great story
from which our lives cannot be unwritten.
How We Are Held
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, broken, connection, held, holding, love on January 12, 2025| 7 Comments »
When my arms were the most empty,
when my hands were unable to hold anything
and I was most unselved,
that was when I felt the most gathered up
by love. An immeasurable and wildly precise love.
Even when I wanted to push love away.
Even when I felt too broken to be found.
I felt love gather all my pieces.
Not to fix them.
Not to put them back together.
Love simply held every shattered thought
and every ruined dream and cradled me
just as I was. Not because I deserved it.
Just because that is what love does.
I am learning to trust this feeling of belonging
to the world, broken as it is, broken as I am,
learning to trust I need not do a thing to belong.
I do not know how it all works
or why I was able to receive it.
But I can’t unknow this unfathomable truth:
how love holds us when we cannot
hold anything, gentle as silence,
fierce as a flood, true as the breaking itself.
The way the ocean forever holds every wave.
The way the shore forever changes to hold the ocean.
Evergreen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, memory, tree on January 12, 2025| 8 Comments »
Skiing up the railroad grade
we pause to catch our breath
and from somewhere in the woods
a tree speaks to us in a spruce language
we can’t interpret,
and I am again a young girl
at the edge of the forest,
believing I understand the trees,
the way they call to me,
primal and true.
How did I ever forget?