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.
Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
Newborn Soul
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged baby, conversation, newborn, seeing the self, wonder on July 28, 2026| 9 Comments »
The Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, conversation, daughter, forgiveness, knitting, love, mother, naming on June 3, 2026| 4 Comments »
I was sitting beside my mother on the couch,
knitting a blanket for my girl. My mother held
the yarn in her lap, a cloud of muted pinks.
Outside, the tall dry grasses weaved
in golden evening light. A Western Warbling Vireo
rambled on in its jumbled, warbly way. Mom spoke
of her plans for dinner the next night
and I knit two, purled six, knit two, purled six.
She guided the soft wool through her fingers,
keeping just the right amount of slack. I felt
such a tide of love for her. Wanted to tell her
I’m sorry for every time I’ve been hardened,
every time I’ve pushed her away instead
of pulling her close. I wanted to whisper
the love beyond words, some sentence true
as the sweetness I felt today sitting beside her
in the sun in the grass while we waited
for a Belted Kingfisher or Northern Yellow Warbler
to fly across the pond. But to name a feeling is so
much harder than naming a bird. So when the row
was done, I rested my head on her shoulder, closed
my eyes and nuzzled in. There was only softness
in me then. I’d like to think she translated what
I meant. Just as I knew what she was saying to me
with each length of unspooling yarn: I know
how you love me. I know your heart. I love you, too,
my girl. By the time we rose, we were held
by the dark. Even the swallows were quiet.
The Phone Call
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, friendship, phone call, refuge, respite, rest, river on March 25, 2026| 4 Comments »
While all around us the world rushes by,
our conversation becomes a wide flat rock
in the midst of the river where we can rest
long enough to see not everything
is snarl and torrent, rapid and rush.
See how the heron lands in the eddy,
how soft moss grows on rocks in the shade.
Holding up all the tumult, the peaceful.
At the edges of chaos, the beautiful.
This is why, when I call you in the middle
of the day and you answer, I almost cry.
Because the timbre of your voice is enough
to land me. I lie on the solid rock of our talk.
I rest there long enough for my own pulse
to slow, long enough dangle my ankle
into the current and think, yes,
I can swim again.
Places I Long to Go
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, fertile, inner landscape, moss on March 18, 2026| 2 Comments »
Every time we pass this spot on the dusty river trail,
my daughter gazes across the water to the other side,
shaded by cliffs, where moss grows thick and deep.
I would love to sleep on that moss, she says,
as her eyes go gauzy, her voice grows soft.
Living in high desert, as we do, mossy places are few.
As a girl, I had in my bedroom a whole wall covered
with a mural of a Japanese garden, its gray rocks
mostly covered in green. I, too, dreamed of stepping
into in a place so lush, so verdant, so alive even rocks
proved fertile ground. To find that kind of fertility inside me—
inviting what is sensual, vital, to flourish in the barren,
desiccated places in my heart—that is my new dream.
But it is not always easy to let in the dark. Not always easy
to let what is hard in me be broken down so something
might grow. There are places I long to go with my girl.
Some are nearby, just across the stream.
Some, breath close, are much harder to travel to.
One When I Feel Shoreless
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, conversation, friendship on October 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »
your voice on the phone
each word a stepping stone
toward acceptance
One Missed Opportunity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chance, conversation, love, opportunity, parenting, what matters on May 13, 2025| 3 Comments »
that would have been a great time
for me to tell you I love you,
that time when I jabbered on
about the shapes of glasses,
about the weather, the color of the tile
In Times Such as These
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, friendship, trust on May 2, 2025| 6 Comments »
In the night dark room
we sit together and speak
in tones tender enough
for anything to be said,
even vast things
that frighten us most,
even shimmery things
that surprise us,
and the night is a spindle
that twines the honesty
and courage of our words
into yarn, and trust is a needle
that uses the yarn
to stitch us together
so even when we are apart,
I can tug on one of those stitches
and, from half a country away,
I feel you tugging back.
The Gift of Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, friendship, pomegranate, self-discovery on November 19, 2024| 8 Comments »
There is that moment when,
after tugging and twisting,
the thick rind of the pomegranate
simply splits in half to reveal
the deep red seeds snuggled inside.
That’s what it’s like when you
meet me with your rich laugh
and gentle questions,
and whatever tough skin
I’ve developed cracks and gives,
and though there’s a moment
of shock at the opening,
I’m astonished myself
to see the treasure hiding within—
how could I not have known?
For this we need each other.
There are parts of ourselves
we could never see alone.
It’s the Forgettable Moments I Miss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cars, conversation, garden, grief, ordinary on October 22, 2024| 10 Comments »
I want to be in the garden
with you again,
hands in the dirt,
maybe listening
to cottonwood leaves
spreading rumors
of fall, but maybe
not even listening.
I want a moment
so mundane, just
pulling bindweed,
nodding and humming absently
as you talk about race cars,
a moment so unmemorable
I forget how damn precious
every single moment is;
I want a moment I take
for granted, want to
be bored or even fussy
standing beside you,
the beets too small
to harvest, your voice
rambling on about pole positions
and pit stop strategies,
and me utterly clueless
I would ever look back
and long to hear you
wax on about balancing fuel loads,
worn tires, soft compounds,
anything, anything at all.
Lately, Art Says, I’ve Been Thinking About Clumps,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art Goodtimes, clump, conversation, friendship, life on June 30, 2024| 6 Comments »
and for hours we drive through clumps
of mountains called ranges, clumps
of cars we call traffic, clumps of homes
we call towns. We speak in clumps
called subjects as we laugh in clumps
called laughter tokens. And sometimes
we’re silent in a flexible clump called silence.
I think of clumps of grief and clumps of joy,
clumps of celebration and clumps of time
when I forgot to wonder what comes next.
How many clumps does it take to screw
in a lightbulb? How many clumps make a day?
Something so satisfying about the clump.
Humble as dirt on the roots of a tree. Natural
as tufts of wheatgrass in the field.
Creative as a clump of atoms that, when infused
with heat from the sun, become a petunia.
Clumps of words make a sentence. Clumps
of notes create song. Clumps of time
build a friendship. And what is peace
but a clump of moments when we choose
not to fight? What is age but a clump
of memories? What is love but a clump
of surrenders? What is now but a chance
to be alive in this wondrous clump we call our life?
for Art Goodtimes
After I Told Them About Our Two Daughters, They Asked If We Had More Children
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, difficult conversation, loss, what is unsaid on March 10, 2024| 13 Comments »
today’s poem mentions suicide–I mention this so you can choose if you wish to read it
There’s no easy way to say it.
I told them. Our son died.
They were sitting across
from us, our new neighbors,
afternoon sun streaming
into the room with low spring gold.
Their grandson sat on our floor,
a teaspoon the only toy I had for him.
He mouthed it with quiet joy.
Was it an accident? she asked.
He chose to take his own life, I said.
The words hung in the air
like dust that sparkles
then seems to disappear.
What I did not say:
Once we sat on this couch
and read books, watched Peter Pan,
built pirate forts with pillows, searched
for Waldo and snuggled when it rained.
Once he, too, chewed on my teaspoons,
before he built computers and
took AP Statistics and helped me buy a Ford.
They murmured, I’m sorry,
because that’s what people say
when there is nothing else to say.
I realized I needed nothing more.
When the talk soon turned
to bonfires and building permits,
I did not mind. It was enough
to have acknowledged he was here.
What I did not say, but somehow said:
Just because he’s dead
doesn’t mean he’s gone.
We have three children—
two daughters and a son.
In Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, identity, language, love, words on January 25, 2024| 12 Comments »
The sound of your voice
enters me and becomes me—
becomes synapse, becomes pulse,
becomes blood, becomes breath.
And in this way, the more I listen to you,
the more I become you.
It is no small thing to converse.
Sometimes I swim in the wild honey
of your words. Sometimes I break
on their jagged shores.
Some words become pillars that hold up
what is possible.
Others are wrecking balls
that turn to rubble all I thought I knew.
How fleeting it is, any grasp
of who we are. This is why,
hour after month after year
I welcome your words—
I like what they do.
Even when they are not easy to hear,
I love who I become
when I listen to you.
Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, daughter, mother on December 10, 2023| 8 Comments »
Sometimes you spill your fears
into the room and there is no place on earth
then more holy as your words unfurl like curls
of incense in fractaled unspiraling,
each sob, each murmur a tendril of smoke
I follow until it disappears.
How I treasure these times
when you let me meet all of you.
When I leave, I look the same,
the scent of truth clinging to my skin.
But I am rearranged within.
Into the Questions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, conversation, love, love your enemy, pain, tenderness on November 3, 2023| 13 Comments »
I needed today the soft voice of the man
from Bethlehem saying,
Put yourself in the pain of others.
Not in their shoes, but in their pain.
I needed to see his eyes
when he said it is olive picking season
and the families are too afraid
to go to the orchards.
I needed to hear it is the hardest
his life has ever been,
needed to hear his fear, his anger,
his willingness to wonder
again and again,
What does it mean to love your enemy?
I needed to see the open face
of the man in Israel as he listened,
needed to hear his gentle tone
as he rejected the phrase us vs. them.
Needed to hear the resolve in his voice
as he called for creating an us together.
And because in the arms of terror
these two men find ways to love,
I invite a war into my heart
and imagine myself on both sides,
imagine the ache that fuels the rage.
I don’t have to imagine fear, distrust.
It is in all of us, this war,
not somewhere far away.
It is for all of us to ask in every interface,
How do I love my enemy?
How do we become an us?
Beyond Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, heart, hiding, language, mask on August 7, 2023| 17 Comments »
There was a time I believed
we need to tell each other who we are
so you can know me, so I can know you.
Now, I see how words, too,
can be like little masks, little disguises
we can use to hide.
I don’t want to hide anymore.
I want to find the most naked words—
words with no ribbons, no sparkle,
no paint—and speak in the barest
of tongues. I want to speak with you
blood to blood, breath to breath,
grief to grief, fear to fear.
I want to know you and be known
by whatever it is that resonates
inside the words—
a raw and vibrant IS, IS, IS
that pulses between us
like a common heartbeat—
the way two living heart cells
from two different people,
when placed together in a petri dish,
will find a shared rhythm
and sustain it. This is how
I want to meet you—
two silences becoming one silence,
infinite beings, one life.
Leaving the Theater after Mission Impossible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, fear, movie, possibility on July 14, 2023| 2 Comments »
I am suddenly wildly sure
my life is very possible.
I am not asked to leap off cliffs
on a motorcycle or land a parachute
on a runaway train. Not expected
to pickpocket diabolical masterminds.
Not forced to drive a car backwards
down a long set of stairs in a crowded city
while handcuffed to someone else.
In fact, all I’m asked to do
is have a few conversations that,
upon reflection,
don’t seem so difficult to have after all.
Just one word in front of another.
No guns, no swords, no knives.
No one chasing me with a pipe.
All I need are a few well-placed adjectives,
like sorry, like grateful.
A few true nouns,
like connection. Like love.
One Late-Night Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, friendship, time on April 26, 2023| 2 Comments »
as if we had eternity
we spend it together
this hour
Walking with KC on Christmas Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, conversation, family, heartache, paradox, sharing, walking on December 26, 2022| 4 Comments »
This, too, is Christmas, the quiet
walk on the quiet road in the quiet air.
The only carol here—
unending verses of river.
The only gifts we brought—
our attention, our trust.
This feast is for the heart.
There is a generosity to the sunshine
no candle could equal.
It’s a deep sweetness
to be wrapped in blue sky,
a deep sweetness
to share heartache, exhaustion—
something I would never wish for anyone,
and yet, this Christmas day,
the sharing of it,
such a beautiful present.