It’s almost always sunny just before
it snows—just before the sky turns grey
then meets the earth in giant swaths
of blue turned clouds turned snow turned drift,
and haven’t you sometimes wanted
to do that, too—to shift in an instant
from warm to cool, from blue to gray,
to know yourself as the opposite
of what you are, just as a day does,
an entirely new syntax unspooling
in swirling verbs and whirling predicates
so complex you forget who the subject is—
haven’t you wanted to flurry, to blizzard,
to white out until there were no tracks
like sentences left for you to follow?
Posts Tagged ‘change’
Clean Slate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, language, snow, weather on January 29, 2021| 2 Comments »
Bonfire in the Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, fire, new year, transformation on December 24, 2020| 6 Comments »
I throw in any tallies
I’ve been keeping,
the ones that record
who did what and when.
I throw in all the letters
I wrote in my head but didn’t send.
I throw in tickets I didn’t buy
to places I didn’t visit.
I throw in all those expectations
I had for myself and the world last year
and countless lists of things I thought I should do.
I love watching them ignite,
turn into embers, to ash.
I love the space they leave behind
where anything can happen.
Self-Portrait as Subordinate Clause
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, eternity, fall, grammar on September 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »
and when
the larkspur
petals fall and when
the fall begins to sing
and when the song weaves
through the loss and when
the loss dyes
everything, when
everything is
emptier and emptiness
is whole somehow, when
whole is what a life
does, when life is
what is now, when
now is
ever changing
and changing knows
no end, when
any ending
I might seek is
just another
when
Transformation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, prayer, rain, storm, transformation on July 17, 2020| 9 Comments »
You need a rainstorm.
—Paula Lepp
I need a rainstorm
on the inside, the kind
that relentlessly pours,
the kind that rearranges
everything, leaves nothing
untouched. I need a deluge
that drowns out any voices
that would offer easy answers.
I need a cloudburst to flood
everything I think I know,
that carries me until I, too, am current.
Have I gotten so dry inside,
so brittle and sure?
Give me a gulley washer,
the kind that scours
and remakes its path as it flows.
I want it, and yet
when I feel the first drops
I scramble for the umbrella,
as if it would do any good.
There it is, petrichor—
earthy fragrance of change.
The big rain will come when it comes.
There will be no stopping it then.
On My Father’s 76th Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, dad, daughter, father, love on July 5, 2020| 5 Comments »
Already he’s lived a dozen years longer
than any other man in his bloodline.
One died of malaria. The rest of heart attacks.
Not one of them knew how to show love.
Sometimes a river changes its course—
perhaps slowly, eroding over centuries.
Perhaps all at once in a mighty flush,
as after a flood or an ice-floe.
I want to ask him how change happened in him—
how the impulse toward anger
rechanneled into tenderness,
into patience, into a willingness to be vulnerable.
I want to believe the same might happen for the world—
that by tending our hearts more carefully,
we might jump the banks of what seemed possible.
We are all of us here to be changed.
It Takes (Almost) Everything
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, stillness, wind on June 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
The wind, every day now, the
wind, the wind, the clamorous
wind, it lifts my dress and whips
my hair, the riotous wind, it
steals my words, unwinds my thoughts, the
demanding wind, the wilding wind, wind
that spreads fire, wind that unbranches the
cottonwood trees, the wind, the wind unlayers
me, invites me to find someplace still in me,
the wind, the relentless wind.
Thirsty
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, drought, rain on May 31, 2020| Leave a Comment »
At last, the rain,
a furious rain,
that turned into
tiny fists of hail,
shredding leaves
and pummeling
everything it met,
it rained as if
one day, charged
with intensity,
might change
a hundred days
of drought—
and, oh, the world after,
bruised and shining, still thirsty.
Olfactory
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, february, friendship, healing, Kyra Kopestonksky, perfume, scent, spring on February 26, 2020| Leave a Comment »
for Kyra
February ends with the fragrance of change—
not quite the fresh earthy scent of rain,
but no longer the white sterility of winter.
It’s the damp aroma of long dead grass
and the must of soil as it starts to unfreeze,
the bright tang of Gemini distilled from the sky
and the hint that someday there will be green.
This is the perfume I imagine you wearing today
as you move from the darkest hours of fear
into the chapter of healing. Yes, I smell it
as I hug you, the scent of making room for the world,
the scent of resilience, of beauty yet to come.
If Only All Change Were So Easy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, poem, poetry, rain, transformation on July 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Redefinition
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, kilogram, love, poem, poetry, science on May 20, 2019| 2 Comments »
Darling, they’ve redefined the kilogram.
Once it was a thing. A real thing:
a platinum-iridium cylinder
weighing 2.2 pounds. A thing they kept
in France in a high-security vault. A thing
they could compare to other such weights
kept in vaults all around the world.
As if to lock a thing up is to keep it
from changing. Forever.
Now we know better.
Every thing changes. It’s the nature
of things. Even prototypes lose atoms,
no matter how sterile the room
in which they’re kept.
The loss may be only the weight
of a single eyelash that no longer
bats itself at time.
Over time, it matters.
Now, understanding the volatile nature of things,
they’ve made the kilogram an idea—
a simple truth—by tying its definition
to Planck’s constant. How the world loves
a constant.
Darling, know that I am a thing.
I have wanted to be constant,
unwavering, true, but I lose things.
I gain things. I change innumerable
times a day. I am never the same woman
as I was yesterday. Each time we speak,
I swell, I leak. I will always love you
not the same. There is more at work than gravity.
It’s the way the heart is made.
I want to make you promises.
Like constancy. Like forever.
I promise that I’ll change.
Like the old kilogram. Like weather.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/13/world/kilo-measurement-scli-intl/index.html