from the same trumpet
emerges this song with both legs broken,
this song rising on triumphant wings
Archive for July, 2026
One Breath
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged music, paradox, trumpet on July 31, 2026| 2 Comments »
One Reflection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, garden, mirror, reflection, sunflower on July 30, 2026| 2 Comments »
standing in the garden
I gaze into the first sunflower—
mirror with a golden frame
The Dream
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged boat, dream, lock, patience, presence, rising, trust on July 29, 2026| 4 Comments »
In the small gray boat
I floated into the lock
and found myself closed in
the giant metal chamber.
Water poured down the end wall,
and I was terrified
by the roar of the spillage,
aware I had no motor,
no sail, no oars, no way
to escape the lock.
But inch by inch, foot by foot,
my boat was lifted
by the growing depths
and I was lifted with it
until the lock opened
and my boat flowed out
into new higher waters.
How is it sometimes
when we cannot imagine
what comes next,
the world shows us
how the unimaginable
happens, and all that is asked
of us is presence and patience?
Released, I still had no way
to steer the boat,
no way to navigate
toward what came next,
but the sun attached
a beam to the bow
and pulled me moment
by shining moment
into the open waves.
Newborn Soul
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged baby, conversation, newborn, seeing the self, wonder on July 28, 2026| 9 Comments »
For an hour I held
the new child in my arms,
watched her eyes flutter
open and closed and open
and closed again, held
her through the jolt
of her startle reflex,
held her as she resettled
into quiet contentment
in the unfamiliar body.
The hands know what
the mind cannot fathom.
Just two days ago, I sat
beside an old man
with bright eyes and
a thick German accent.
He told me, Most people
don’t know how wonderful
they are. My whole body
startled at his words,
aware of all the insecurity
and worry I carry, then
softened, softened, as if I, too,
were newly born, learning
for the first time
what it means to be
wonderful.
Spontaneous
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, memory, singing on July 27, 2026| 8 Comments »
Somewhere, Warren writes me in his letter,
somewhere right now the Lutherans
are singing “For the Beauty of the Earth,”
and though I am sitting on a plane as I read his words,
I am standing in the grand auditorium
with the other first sopranos in All State Choir
and our voices soar and build and rise
as the tenors and altos swell beneath us
and we weave a trill through the height
of a phrase, and my whole body has bloomed
into praise on that stage and I,
for the first time, am no longer singer
but song. Now, almost forty years later
all I have to do is trace that moment
with the softest fingers of memory and
I’m weeping in 10B, soggy with old ecstasy.
How is it such power was stored somewhere
in my cells, enough to take me from zero to puddle
in two seconds flat, and how much more
latent beauty is hiding inside this aging vessel
somewhere beneath old TV jingles and daily drivel
and heartbreaking news and yellowed layers of guilt
just waiting for me to touch it?
One on Tap
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged devotion, serving, time on July 27, 2026| Leave a Comment »
pouring time
into the shape of this question—
how do I serve life?
One Inevitable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged canyon, disaster, flash flood, flood, rain on July 25, 2026| 2 Comments »
he’s a slot canyon
just wanting to hold things close—
then, there’s all that rain
Among Strangers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, beauty, rainbow, strangers, travel on July 25, 2026| 8 Comments »
I sat for hours in concourse A,
the plane delayed, delayed again,
surrounded by a young mother
with three hungry children and two
elderly couples who played endless
rounds of go fish and men in dark suits
on their cell phones and girls filming
dances for TikTok, when I looked up
and saw out the window a double rainbow,
ridiculously pretty against the slate sky,
and not wanting to be alone in my joy,
I touched the arm of the boy beside me
and he leaped up and ran to the window,
and all of us stopped to point or smile
or make jokes about pots of gold.
We will never see each other again,
but for a moment, we stood together
at the edge of delight, and the rainbows,
they just kept getting brighter, and I thought
it couldn’t possibly get any more lovely.
And the boy smiled at me. And then it did.
One Peekaboo
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged moon, play on July 23, 2026| 4 Comments »
hoping it finds me
hiding in the shadow of the blue spruce
that glorious half-moon
The Holding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breathing, friendship, holding, mountain, tonglen on July 22, 2026| 2 Comments »
Alone, I am too small to meet
the great weight of your pain.
Loving, I want to turn toward you.
Aching, I want to turn away.
But yesterday I rested for a time
on a wide gray rock in an alpine cirque.
In my stillness I felt how surely
I was cradled by the world so much
vaster than I. There, surrounded
by greatness, I invited your pain
into my heart and held you there in me.
I breathed in your ache, my ache,
and felt us both surrounded
by vast fields of wildflowers,
by the deep green shoulders
of sheer gray cliffs. I envisioned
I was breathing out love, but more truly,
I was being breathed by the mountain,
or perhaps by life itself.
The weight of the pain was no less,
but I knew it as a blessing,
a gravitational force magnetizing you and me.
What a gift to hold the weight together,
to know in my whole being
how miraculously we are held.
Kinship
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cat, connection, daughter, loneliness, pet, touch on July 21, 2026| 4 Comments »
after Jane Hirshfield
Oh look, I say to the cat
You have a soup belly.
I jiggle and wiggle her soft, floppy middle.
She does not love it.
I get it, I say to her. Sometimes
I don’t want to be touched either.
More truly, I do want to be touched,
but only in the way I want to be touched.
The cat holds her paws midair, frozen there,
as if not yet sure if to attack or relax.
She chooses relax. I choose
to massage between her ears.
She nuzzles her small skull into my palm.
I know, I say to the cat. I miss her, too.
We both know she’d rather be with my daughter.
We both feel the absence here.
We sit a long time like this, the cat nuzzling,
me dragging my fingertips forward and back,
forward and back.
With her body, she shows me
just where and how much to touch her.
When I move to rise, she lashes out with a claw
to keep me in place beside her.
In this way, I study my life.
How to hold. How to let go.
Loneliness wears a haunting perfume,
resinous, sweet, full of laughter
and silence. What a gift, I say to the cat,
to miss her together.
I cross the room. The cat follows to where I sit next.
Later, she leads me to her bowl. I follow.
The Possible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loss of the separate self, love, spaciousness, surrender on July 20, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Starting here, I want to remember
the spaciousness that emerges in me
when my heart knows itself as an expression
of the one great heart. In those moments,
when the I slips away and the we is all,
when love is unbound from the walls
of my chest and expands across mountains
and deserts and oceans and returns
with the peaks and tide in each breath,
then the rightest parts of my being unclench
themselves, as if all the bars of the inner prison
dissolve and what’s left is freedom
to love beyond judgment, beyond should
and should not, beyond how my one small heart
is capable of loving. I remember the first time
I felt love carry me through a moment
I knew I could not meet alone. Since that time,
I am learning to trust that the heart of all hearts
can rise up in any moment to illumine the path
I do not yet see is possible. Since that time,
I am still surprised but not surprised when
the spaciousness opens me again
to loving what feels impossible to love.
The Clearing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clearing, river, slowness on July 20, 2026| 6 Comments »
Already the river is lighter in color,
less brown, less turbid, more
translucent. Just yesterday
the currents were thick with mud
and logs, needles and sticks
and bits of once-living debris.
Now that the furious flood has lost
its force, the gravel and sand
have begun their settling.
Whatever was floating now rests
on the banks and all that is left
suspended in the water
is what is most fine.
Soon, even that will sink
and the water will be clear again.
I, too, have felt the gift of slowing,
how it invites a sedimentation
of all I try to carry—the silt of my stories,
the muck of the world.
Like a river, the more calm I am,
the more clear I can become.
No magic, just a matter of physics.
How natural it is, the clearing.
Soul Searching
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, soul, swallow, translation, unknowing on July 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »
after “Stone” by Charles Simic
I cannot make them out,
these strange writings
on my inner walls.
Each time I feel closer
to deciphering the marks,
it’s as if they rearrange
themselves into new
more mysterious lines.
Some part of me deeply
wants to read them,
to know their secrets.
She takes out her eraser,
her pencil, and begins
the translations again.
Some part of me sits
easily in the midst of all
I do not understand.
She watches the swallows
trace shapes in the air
with the dark inky tips
of their wings.
Eco-Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eco-grief, grief, hiking, mountains on July 17, 2026| 4 Comments »
My favorite alpine skinny dipping hole
a dry rock bed, an inverted monument
to drought—
as if I needed one more reminder
of how fragile it is, this world,
how parched our hearts
can become.
On the long hike home
I swim in the seriousness
of what is not here,
remember how it felt to slip
into the snowmelt,
how my whole being shivered in elation,
how the earth itself was so alive.
One Rhythmicity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged humanity, pulse, rain, rhythm on July 16, 2026| Leave a Comment »
same fingertips pattering on the grand timpani?
erratic rain on the roof, the red steady pulse inside me
Entranced
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, life, spider on July 15, 2026| 2 Comments »
It scared me and thrilled me, the quick spider,
a gentle light gray, like midnight midsummer
in Finland. It was unusually large
for this part of the world where spiders
tend to be smaller than a dime. But this
spider had long, elegant legs,
I carefully gathered it in tissue.
You belong out here, I said, as I walked it to the lawn.
Slow as you please, it let out a length of dragline silk
to dangle from my hand like a pendulum.
Two nights ago, I held in my arms a newborn girl,
eyelashes barely visible, little bubbles forming
between slightly parted lips, her eyes moving
in sleep. What could be in the dreams of a three-
day-old child? I cradled her head in one hand,
her whole body in the other, astonished by how
much preciousness fits in a being so small.
All around us, so many kinds of beautiful lives.
And inside us, so many invisible strands of astonishing
elasticity and tensile strength that weave us together
through the chaos, beauty to beauty to bittersweet beauty
to innocent beauty to unlikely beauty to beauty.
And I Can’t Stop Listening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, growing up, mother, parenting on July 14, 2026| 2 Comments »
for Vivian on her 18th birthday
like six thousand five hundred seventy notes
springing out of the steps of the scales
into new surprising arrangements
she is becoming
her own ecstatic soundtrack
The Loud Dawn Crow Writes to Rosemerry on the Day She’s Trying to Sleep In
Posted in Uncategorized on July 13, 2026| 13 Comments »
I love your big green yard,
love walking in your low cut grass
in the early morning when it’s
dew-lush and cool. Love
seeing my sister crows across the lawn.
Of course, I call out to them.
That’s what we crows do.
That’s what you do, too, honey,
when you walk down the street,
say hello, even to strangers,
because that’s what intelligent,
social beings do.
And those big juicy worms
you grow here? Five out of five stars.
Would recommend.
Of course, I want all my friends
to know where to find them.
To sing is to survive, sweetheart.
And the sun’s up. Time to live loud.
Come walk barefoot in the cool, wet grass.
Feels so good, doesn’t it, the earth so moist,
the dawn light so soft.
Doesn’t it just make you want to sing?
Unlikely Saint
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chipmunk, curiosity, descrimination, frustration, judgment, new lens on July 12, 2026| 13 Comments »
after Muriel Rukeyser
Because two years ago,
another chipmunk ate all our birdseed;
because that same chipmunk
ate all sixty of my sunflower sprouts—
munched the entire row to the ground;
because that same chipmunk
devoured every bright-faced pansy;
because some part of me believes
that what I have planted should grow
for my pleasure and not for yours;
for this, I have decided to despise you,
little chipmunk that took up residency
last week beneath my porch.
I see you dart across the boards,
cheeks full of something,
then empty-cheeked running the other way.
You leap up onto my window sash to watch me
in my rooms. You scurry into the shadows.
Scowling, I point you out to my daughter.
She says, Oh, how cute! I think, Cute?
What? Little vermin isn’t cute.
Except you are. Except your soft, pocket-sized body
and small rounded ears are the actual definition
of cute. Except when I watch you stand straight-spined
on your back legs, front paws held at your chest
as if in prayer, little St. Chipmunk, I soften.
Except when I see your cheeks bulging
five times their normal size stuffed with seeds,
I laugh out loud. In my eagerness to revile you,
I had let myself not see you. I wasn’t interested
in your survival, your story. I wanted only to erase,
to other. To see you beyond what I expect to see
is the sort of transformation that could not have happened
if I were alone. Generosity is how we save each other.
How long would I have gone on in my clenching?
The taste of conceit is bitter.
I had filled my cheeks with it. How sweet it is now,
added to the mix, the taste of curiosity.