It’s almost here! On September 8, my newest book will be released! You can join me for a pre-release party hosted on zoom by Kayleen Asbo on Saturday, August 29, 6-7:30 p.m. mountain time. Donations accepted. Recorded.
You can pre-order the book from my local bookstore, Between the Covers, and I will personalize it for you (there’s a comments section at the final checkout for you to say who you want the book signed to). Order before September 12 when I go in to sign the books. The bookstore will ship your book to anywhere in the US the next day.
And European friends, you can also join me for a special European zoom launch with The Poetry Pharmacy on September 24 at 6 p.m. in the UK (11 a.m. mountain time) Tickets available with or without a book purchase.
When we met, we had no idea how we all, like this land, carry inside us the memory of volcano and glacier. How easily we can be fooled by the present landscape, calm and serene. Just because there are spruce here now and gentle streams doesn’t mean there wasn’t once a violent explosion of fire and ash, a long and cold scraping of ice. Here in the aftermath of upheaval, in this ongoing story of transformation, I see how our hearts have been carved wide as this high alpine basin, and even in the places where nothing yet grows, my god, it’s so beautiful.
By night, the mountain gentian closes the dark purple vase of its petals, tightening around its most vulnerable parts, protecting its nectar from cold night air, from heavy dew. Everything is at stake.
Oh woman who longs to stay open, to ever unfold, to widen your arms in an ever expansive reach, what do you have to learn from the wisdom of wildflower, from the natural systole and diastole of open and close, open and close?
How might your own growth depend on learning to wrap those well-intentioned arms around your own center and tuck in to that primary, essential embrace?
In the darkness, Lacy points us toward two stars stacked in a vertical line just above the horizon. She teaches us to see the parallelogram of a celestial teapot, then guides us to find the spout which empties out into the very center of our galaxy. Naked, we stare at the distant milky glow and know in our bones the center is not, in fact, light years away, but right here in our wood-fired hot tub in the middle of a meadow with mountains all around. Or wherever women commune, says Jessi Lu. Yes, this is the tea cup right here, a cup overflowing with laughter, tears, stories, heart, and an ancient swirl of glittering stars.
This morning I saw my hand and marveled— the smoothness of the finger pads like sandstone eroded by centuries of wind, the wrinkled cords between the pointer and the thumb like cottonwood roots rising out of the ground, the fine wrinkles in the knuckles like thin braided strands of spider silk, the splotchy spots of white below the plush heel, like small puffs of morning clouds in the desert. This hand that has held weeping children and planted beets, scraped cat vomit from the carpet and carried river stones to build a home. I stared at this hand I have known my whole life and wept for the sheer miracle of hand, how even the most familiar, intimate parts of ourselves, the parts we take most for granted, have the most to teach us about gratefulness, about how to see and meet the world.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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Hey friends, I will be away for four days, teaching remotely in the glorious San Juans at High Camp Hut with no cell, no wifi, and lots of spaciousness. I’ll be back with poems on Sunday night. In the meantime, if you are jonesing for poems, you can find them on my blog (a backlog of poems from the last 12 years or so): A Hundred Falling Veils.
Or, you can subscribe to the Ritual app on your phone and there I read a poem every day (twice!) and offer ways to think about it and also optional writing invitations. You can find that on your phone here (there is a small fee to subscribe): The Poetic Path
The cantaloupe was golden beneath its raised veins, the globe of it heavy in my hands, its musky perfume filling the hot summer air at the farmstand.
When I handed the woman my money, I was paying her not so much for this melon, but for the memory of other melons we have shared when I moaned my delight, the sweet orange flesh deliquescing in our eager mouths.
This melon was no such melon. Though we waited and waited, when I sliced in and offered you a bite, we both agreed the flesh was a bit too hard, the flavor sweet but a little flat. A fine-enough melon. But not a melon for rhapsodizing or writing an ode.
I think of Grandma Betty, how in her later years it didn’t matter what you served her, she would always declare, This is the best pie I ever had. This is the best tea I’ve ever had. This is the best. The best.
This is not the best cantaloupe I have ever had, just a substandard stand in for ecstasy. Yet here I am writing an ode to this mediocre melon, learning again how my longing for something to be different from what it is can destroy any joy found in what is here. Somehow, this fine-enough melon is bringing me to my knees at the altar of the moment, humbling me, inviting me to question how I choose to meet the world. It is, perhaps, after all, the best melon I have ever had.
Now that I know for certain she will leave me, I dare to love her more. Her room will be empty. The house no longer filled with her music. The spilling trills of her laughter too far away to hear. I have known since her birth she would leave me, but knowing is different from feeling, and her absence comes so soon. At the same time the heart lets her go, lets her go, lets her go, it leans in closer, becomes a sanctuary that knows no walls, a nest as wide as the world. At the same time I release her, I fall more deeply in love with the way she croons to her cat, with the feathery softness of her skin, with how a song is ever winging from her lips. I welcome it, this ache. These tears were always meant to be cried. This heart was always meant to break.
There in the church of poetry beneath fluorescent lights on a makeshift stage, one naked heart after another came to the mic and through words and breath they turned wound into blossom again and again until the evening became a giant bouquet of the unbearable being borne. It is a terrible gift to make beauty out of suffering, and this is the gift we most need. But what stays with me, too, was how each time a poet was called up, a woman in the middle of the audience with a voice made of equal parts midnight and salve would croon low and smooth, Let’s go, poet. Each time she spoke it, she made a red carpet out of sound, a generous path for the poet to step onto. Each time, she spoke it, I felt my whole being soften and open through the alchemy of encouragement. This, too, the gift we most need— to dare to turn toward what makes each other bleed. This, too, transforms wound into generous bloom, the gift of hearing and hailing, honoring each other’s humanness, saying yes, I see you, I see you.
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.
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.
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?
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.
