Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, invitation, poem, poetry, rain on April 7, 2018| 7 Comments »
Today it was the puddle
that woke up my heart,
the way it received the sky
and remade it in smeary mirrors
of grays beneath my feet.
How at first, I tried so hard to avoid it,
and then, once my feet were wet,
I could see it only as a way to play,
an invitation for joy. To splash
in the clouds. To splash for the pleasure
of splashing. To splash until
I could no longer recognize her, that part
of me who longed to stay safe, stay dry.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, gardening, poem, poetry, silence on May 14, 2017| 2 Comments »
Digging there in the dirt
with small seeds
in your hands
you hear the wind
high in the cottonwoods,
you hear the silence
sown inside the wind,
and the quieter
you are, you hear
perhaps, within you
a call like the geese
that aren’t flying
overhead, a startling
call, an almost
strangled sound
that, if you heard it,
might almost
wake you up.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, love, poem, poetry, sleep, tenderness on February 27, 2015| 4 Comments »
I like my body in the mornings
when the light has not yet stolen the room,
and when you, in darkness, turn your length
toward my length and bend your body
to match the curve of my spine.
I like the warmth our bodies find,
I like your legs bowed into mine,
your feet like a tangle of roots about my feet.
I like my neck when it’s touched by your breath,
and I like my waist when your hand rests there.
And my belly, I like how soft it is, like sweet dough rising.
So tender, this drowsy, dreamy, yielding state
when we are more flesh than name, more limb than thought,
more breath than what we know.
And the darkness holds us quietly,
your body, my body, oh how we linger,
indulgent, our boundaries blurred,
while all around us, even inside us,
the world with its edges and certainties
begins to dawn.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, grace, life, poem, spring, weed on March 13, 2013| 4 Comments »
Spring comes to the sidewalk
in the longer days of March.
The sun warms the slab, and beneath
it the seeds of old weeds start to stir.
They are tiny. And who knows how,
but in the dark, they begin to grow
and put down roots and,
though it seems unlikely,
begin to push through the concrete itself.
First a hairline crack. This fissure is somehow
sufficient to provide light and water enough.
Soon there are tendrils, then whole leaves,
then the yellow blooms of new weeds.
What is it in us that knows to push?
I, too, have wintered in a dark, thick cast, one
of my own making. Cramped and dormant,
I had stopped believing in hope.
But it was not hope that cracked the shell.
Nor was it anything that I did.
It was life’s longing for itself.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, imperfect, knowing the self, love, poem, poetry on October 10, 2012| 2 Comments »
with thanks to Rita Robinson
Even considering
the sputtering sky
and the caving between
my shoulder blades
where my heart
should fill the body’s cage,
despite the lack
of song today
and regardless
of angry voices
that scuffle
and riddle
the gutters outside,
even then I read
in a letter her closing words,
so much love here
right now, she says,
for you, for us,
and slowly,
as if just awakening
in a foreign country
in a too short bed
surrounded by
unfamiliar sounds
and slants of shadow
and assaulted with
exotic scents,
I hint by hint
come to
recognize myself,
and know
with irrational
and utter certainty
she’s right.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, buddha, pears on September 23, 2011| 3 Comments »
Until you can see, literally, that everybody is the Buddha, then you are not seeing things the way they are.
—Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing
First I quarter, then core them,
the red-skinned pears, then slice them
into slender white wings to dry. The fruit
in the box is misshapen, lumpy and mottled,
brown scarred in spots, some shriveling.
But ripeness has brought a warm tide of gold
to their skin, and in my hands, beside the knife,
it is easy to find them beautiful. I am thinking
about how today I heard a teacher of mine
suggest that everyone, everyone is a Buddha,
and I wonder if he could also mean me.
Could I unknow myself to the point where
I, too, am Buddha? It is easier, somehow,
to believe in everyone else. The scent of
autumn weaves through the kitchen air
as the pear sugars concentrate on the racks.
And Herbie Hancock undoes the scales
on the stereo, while Joni Mitchell sings
of … I do not know what, but I feel I would
follow her voice anywhere she would sing me.
Surely Joni Mitchell is a Buddha, and surely
Herbie Hancock, too. I can tell by the way
they loosen the notes from grasp of where
I expect they will go. I try to harmonize, but
they elude me. It is late. Or rather,
it is early morning and it is easier now—
perhaps from exhaustion—to laugh at myself,
to belt out loud and off key and make up words
to unfamiliar songs. It is not embarrassment I feel,
though I’ve often been embarrassed before—rather
I wear a sense that the pieces don’t quite fit together,
that the world is unsettled and breaking apart,
and that I am a part of the mess. But I don’t
feel a need to fix it, nor myself, I suppose,
surely not now when my hands are sticky with pear juice,
slicing the white flesh pound after beautiful, mottled pound.
