for all poetry friends
I am perhaps the crow
who, parched, unable to fly,
arrives at the pitcher
and realizes
I cannot reach the water.
But in this story,
there are no pebbles nearby.
In this story,
there are other crows
who arrive, each
with pebbles they drop
into the pitcher.
You, my friends,
are the crows.
Your words
are the pebbles.
And slowly, sweet miracle,
the water rises.
Posts Tagged ‘ars poetica’
Thank You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aesop, ars poetica, crow, fable, friendship, save on March 30, 2021| 4 Comments »
We Are All God’s Poems
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, communion, god on March 7, 2021| 2 Comments »
I want to read the poem of you—
want to hold in my breath
your intimate rhythms
want to translate in my lungs
the silences between your stanzas,
want to feel in my heart
the sharp tug of your turns,
the communion of your inner rhymes.
I want to follow
the ever-emerging form of you,
want to know which words
are appearing even now
in the divine cursive
that writes us all,
want to wander in your ambiguities,
wonder about your secrets,
marvel at your beauty,
be wrestled by your oppositions.
I want to recite your lines
again and again and again
so your stories
are the allusions that inspire
the emerging poem of me.
This is the poem in which I admit
every poem has the potential
to break open the heart—
imagine the size of the book.
This is the poem in which I remember
the heart was made to break open.
Song of the Blank Page
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, blank, paper, woman, writing on February 11, 2021| 4 Comments »
What a woman really needs
is a blank sheet of paper,
which takes trees, of course,
softwood coniferous are best—
pines, firs, spruce, hemlock.
Their long fibers produce the strongest paper
able to hold the most difficult words.
And the tree needs sunlight, clean air, water.
And the tree must be cut using a chainsaw,
harvester, feller buncher. Must be moved
with a skidder or a forwarder.
Must be transported to the sawmill on a truck:
So many machines run by so many
human hands attached to human limbs
with human hearts and human hurts
and human hopes.
And of course, the woman
needs a pen for writing on the paper—
the ink no longer coming from soot
but from pigment including a solvent, a binder,
and a plethora of additives
such as chelating and drying agents—
a complex concoction suited to giving clarity
to complex thoughts.
She needs a room. Or a closet. A counter?
Or simply entry to an inner place
where there are no other voices
asking for help or offering help either.
A space where the predominant voice
she hears is her own—or perhaps,
more truly, the voice she is ripening into,
the voice that emerges when she lets the blank page
know more than she does, lets it lead her
on cursive paths that cross themselves often
but move her ever forward.
And then, with that clean sheet full of memories,
that pen with its synthesized balance,
that room with its impossible blessing,
she might at last meet what she really needs most,
that part of herself she will forever
continue to wonder about, that self
that reaches for her, that asks her to wrestle,
invites her to see what else she might find
in all that abundant blank.
Solstice Surrender
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, solstice, surrender, trojan horse on December 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The night is a poem
with verbs of shadow
and nouns of deep,
a poem I never tire
of reading, a poem
that writes itself
into my thoughts,
enters my imagination
like a Trojan Horse—
when its dark ink
overcomes me,
you’d almost think
I was happy
for the ambush,
you’d almost think
I flung wide the gates
on purpose
knowing full well
how the story
would end.
One Long Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, blank, writing on September 13, 2020| 2 Comments »
hovering over
the generous blank
the pen wonders how to improve
on all that potential—
oasis without a trail
Wanting to Get It Right
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, journey, path, perspective, walking on August 24, 2020| 2 Comments »
Who is this woman so concerned with arrivals?
Doesn’t she know we are writing about paths?
What is her rush to get to the meadow?
What does she think she will find there?
She missed the sunflowers in the garden,
a whole row of luscious bright yellow bloom.
She missed the chatter of the chipmunk,
the hot scent of rabbit brush almost like sage,
the mica glistening like crushed starlight beneath her feet.
She is like one of those trucks on the highway,
a blur, a roar, an impersonal thundering.
Oh, see, now that she thinks she’s arrived somewhere,
now she starts noticing the field,
the crunch of dry grass, the dirt, her own short shadow.
Funny, she looks lost, standing there with her pen and paper,
her longing to find something worthwhile to say.
Should we tell her it’s okay,
that the lack of arrival could be her new point A?
And everywhere she looks, a new path.
Ars Poetica
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged answer, ars poetica, blank, question, truth on August 11, 2020| 8 Comments »
All these years of wandering,
toward what? On a blank page,
where are the secrets hidden?
How many mysterious paths?
If there is a truth, perhaps it, too, is blank.
If there is way, perhaps it, too, is wandering.
Sometimes I just want the answer.
Always it comes back to this:
An orbit. A spiral. A mobius trip.
A boundary curve where the question
is its own topology, where the question
is its own astonishing arrival.
Proxy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, despair, news, writing on July 13, 2020| 9 Comments »
The woman who knows what to write
did not show up today. Perhaps she’s gone
hiking amongst the blue larkspur, or
maybe she’s pulling weeds in the garden.
Perhaps she got a job as a counselor or a priest,
or decided to run for political office.
I wish she’d show up again. Sometimes
it’s not easy to face the blank, to believe
there are any words worth writing. Like today,
when I read about how the abandoned fracking wells
are leaking pollutants. How today will be
the first federal execution in seventeen years.
How there are still children at the border
still crying, “¡Mami!” and “¡Papá!”
Perhaps she was simply so sad
that she went to sit in a corner, quietly,
not to forget, but to find the strength to meet it.
Perhaps she is, even now, trying to conjure
the words that might actually make a difference.
Once Upon A
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, friendship, relationships, story on May 28, 2020| 4 Comments »
Because you are the porch,
I am the rocking chair.
Because you are the pen,
I am the unfinished poem.
In the conversation of what happens next,
I am always the pause.
I am always the pause
and you the verb.
And if there should be a run on sentence
that jogged right through the
end of the story, way past the end,
well, I would not be the period.
But I would be ever after.
And I would be the one still listening after that.
Bouquet from the Utah Border
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, camping, haiku on May 25, 2020| 2 Comments »
making up songs
as I set up the tent—
or a song making up me?
*
beside the lake
rowing the memory
of a blue boat
*
bald eagle dives into the lake
then rises quickly
in its beak, a heavy poem
*
sitting with a blade of grass
until it reads me a story—
once upon this morning
*
laughter in darkness—
this, too,
a kind of campfire
*
hiking through ponderosa
a subplot wonders
if it could become the main story
*
cold, clear night—
spiking my tea
with Cassiopeia
*
third morning camping—
waking up in a chapter
written before this one
But It Took Over an Hour to Get There
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, cat, ideas, writer's block on January 24, 2020| 7 Comments »
This morning the new kitten played with a hair tie
for twenty minutes, kicking it under the table,
swatting it across the room, catching it on a nail
and tossing it into the air. Meanwhile, I tried
to do the same thing with an idea—tried
to bat at it, swipe at it, fling it across the room
and then chase it and pounce on it again.
But that’s not what happened. The idea
sat dead on the desk. I barely even looked at it.
I let my paws make tea instead. And then
went to Facebook. Then vacuumed the room.
Then stared at the idea and wondered why
it hadn’t moved. Boring idea. Dumb idea.
Why did it just sit there, lifeless as a hair tie?
Eventually the kitten, exhausted from frolic,
curled down for a nap. I sat back in the chair,
wondered at what I might learn from the cat.
Picked up the idea again. Gave it a whack. And darned
if it didn’t take on some life as my nose
nudged it into new places. Curious, my whole body
readied to pounce, my tail swishing behind my back.
*Yes, friends, we’ve gotten a new kitten, Tamale.
The Girl Who Sat and Read in the Weeping Willow Tree
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, becoming, poem, poetry, reading, tree on January 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Even then she was becoming
a dreamer, a lover of bark,
a student of solitude. Even then
she noticed how there were places
and moods that words couldn’t touch—
even then she felt the joy in trying anyway.
The Poem Tries
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alabama, ars poetica, augusta kantra, meditation, poem, poetry on December 9, 2019| 2 Comments »
Let yourself be danced.
—Augusta Kantra
The poem sits down to be written.
Instead, it stares at the bay.
There’s a highway in the distance
that could take it all the way to California.
The poem doesn’t want to go to California.
It wants to be present, just here,
on the sandy bank beside the driftwood.
It wants to find its inner poem.
It wants to get out of its own way,
to obey its emerging form.
Instead, it watches the tall grass
getting danced by the wind.
It sighs. The poem wants to know
what it doesn’t know yet.
And the poem wants to be good.
Dammit. It tries to lower its standards,
then judges, compares and tries to fix itself.
It lists. It sits cross legged till its legs
fall asleep. It is a book of sorrows,
a tree of anxiety, a wave of failure.
It’s a cage of empty lines. How
did it get into this straight jacket?
The poem gives up. It stares at the bay.
Watches the grasses sway. Notices
how the wind blows its hair,
lifts its hands. The poem doesn’t know
why it’s weeping. In that moment,
the poem is danced.
For Your Thoughts?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, money, penny, poem, poetry on November 5, 2019| 6 Comments »
This year it costs 1.8 cents to make a penny.
It is, perhaps, similar to spending an hour
on an eleven-line poem that very few people
will read. And still, they mint the penny.
And still, I write the poem. Because
tradition. Because poems and pennies
are easy to spend. Because sometimes
the small things make life better—
something to wish on, something
valuable beyond its surface, something
humble to catch the light.
How Many Pencils Would It Take?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, pencil, poem, poetry, science, story on September 8, 2019| 2 Comments »
The pencil, it turns out,
has never contained lead.
It’s always been graphite—
a form of solid carbon.
How much of what we think
we know is just a mistaken story
passed on for centuries?
And the human body, it turns out,
contains enough carbon
for 9,000 pencils—
that is a fact of the world,
a fact like the distance
from earth to the moon,
a fact like 99 percent of all human DNA
is the same. I’d like to think I will use up
my pencils, one every three days,
writing the story of what it is
to be alive here, to fall in love,
to disagree, to fail, to try again.
I want to write of healing,
write of the autumn air,
how it touches everything
with its cool transparency.
Write of how we are here
to revel in beauty, to find ourselves
in each other, to serve a story greater
than the one we know how to write,
serve the story that even now
is writing us.
One While Reading Rumi
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, love, poem, poetry, Rumi on September 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The Big Lesson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, learning, poem, poetry, teaching on August 5, 2019| 14 Comments »
I’m still learning.
—Michelangelo, on his deathbed
Sometimes I feel as if
I missed something.
Something big. The sermon
that would forge a love affair
with the divine.
The history lesson
that would teach me
how to forgive myself.
The webinar that would train
me in doing the right thing
at the right time. If only
I had read the right book
or met the right coach
or drunk the right tea. If only.
I don’t believe it, not really,
though sometimes
I wish it were as easy
as auditing a class.
Perhaps that is why
I write poems.
I’m taking notes.
Because sometimes
the truth slips into them.
Because it’s surprisingly easy
to forget.
On Walt Whitman’s 200th Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, poem, poetry, spider, Walt Whitman on May 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »
When you wrote of the spider
launching through vacant space,
reeling from one sphere of meaning
to another, you didn’t know then
that you wrote that poem for me.
Two centuries later, this woman
reads about the bridges we are all
trying to form, and Walt, damned
if that wasn’t filament coming out
through your electric fingers.
https://poets.org/poem/noiseless-patient-spider
One Heroic
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, friendship, phyllis k, poem, poetry on April 4, 2019| 2 Comments »
for Phyllis
in the long darkness
she makes lanterns of poems
guides us one light at a time
Emily in Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, emily dickinson, love, maria popova, poem, poetry on March 6, 2019| 2 Comments »
We are the only poets, and everyone else is prose.
—Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert
It is perhaps an inner drum,
the meter of the soul
that sometimes finds a resonance
inside another’s halls—
an inner song, an inner scheme
that rhymes with someone else’s,
a dream that scans like heartbeats
inside the other’s pulse.
Yes in this world of counterfeit,
such thrill to find a poem
that redefines Circumference—
and curious, leads us home.
for more on the love letters and life-changing love of Emily Dickinson, read the fabulous Brain Pickings by Maria Popova,
https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/emily-dickinson-love-letters?e=ea2d3e439a