The pond ice gone a single day,
and already the wild geese
have returned, filling the open water
with riotous honking. Even
the backyard feels like a teaching
of how every emptiness invites
something to fill it, if not feather
then feeling. I think of how
in my most lonely moments,
some strange beauty has wandered
into my vision or woven its singular
song into my ears and I can’t help
but feel infused by life, the way
a trickle of water slowly—
almost imperceptibly—
will eventually fill a vast basin
till its water spills out the gulleys.
Perhaps you’ve felt it, too,
when you’re barren. Void of hope.
Then. A pink cloud.
An unruly clamoring of geese.
Still that barren, hopeless feeling,
but also, there it is, a single green tip
of garlic planted five months ago
that finds its way up to the sun.
Posts Tagged ‘emptiness’
How
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, emptiness, geese, life, loneliness, spring on March 17, 2025| 12 Comments »
Is
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, grief, loss, presence on October 7, 2023| 11 Comments »
On the highway, an empty space
where you are not driving. At the college,
a chair where you don’t learn.
In this room, a tall and slender empty space
where you are not. Not whistling,
not closing your eyes and humming,
not eating noodles, not reading the news.
Everywhere I am, this space you will never be.
Not in Ohio. Not in the woods with walnuts falling.
Not laughing with these new friends.
Not in these hands and not in these arms
and not in these words where you are
because you are not.
I would not fill these emptinesses
with anything else is. They are anything
but empty, these spaces of you.
Ode to the Empty Cup
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cup, emptiness, memory, thirst on May 3, 2023| 12 Comments »
There are cups on my shelf
I will never use—
cups that will never hold tea
nor water nor coffee.
It brings me such joy
they are there, though,
filled, as they are,
with memories.
Perhaps this is how
I begin to teach
the thirstiest parts of me
that a cup without something
tangible in it
is not always empty.
Exemplar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, emptiness, loss, nest on November 3, 2022| 7 Comments »
It hides in the rafters,
this tightly woven nest of grass,
brown and humble,
lined with mud.
I would like to hold
this messy vessel in my hands,
as if to hold is understand.
I would like to know
what the nest knows—
how to hold what is fragile,
how to keep life safe,
how it is to be made to be useful,
how it is to be made to be left.
How beautiful it can be
to hold emptiness.
The Inconceivable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, grief, loss, love, space on April 27, 2022| 6 Comments »
Nothing can separate us from love.
There is no way to know this
without paying a cost so great
some part of us longs to bargain
with the universe and trade back
the priceless truth. But part of us—
the part that cannot be named,
the part that wakes at dawn,
the part that sings in the darkness,
the part that wades in the infinite—
it’s not so much that this part says yes,
more that it simply expands with the truth,
much as the universe itself expands
due to a dark, mysterious energy.
Any scientist will tell you,
empty space is not nothing.
We who grieve learn
to hold that empty space
and know it as love.
I know, it’s inconceivable.
We feel how it holds us, too.
More
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aspen, emptiness, love, sunset, trees, winter on January 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Inspired by dark and naked aspen,
she’s been practicing emptiness—
perhaps you, too, have seen the way
that barren arms can better hold
the changing colors of the sky.
The less she holds, the more love
seems to fill her, pours into her
like the winter sunset, vast and brilliant.
All these years she thought the point
was to be full. Now she marvels
at how resonant she is without
so much clutter—how resounding,
the honest beating of her heart.
Taking Down the Tree
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, emptiness, poem, poetry on January 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »
the room so bare
where just hours ago
there was light—
remembering now
how to celebrate emptiness
One Soon
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anticipation, bird, blue heron, emptiness, poem, poetry on January 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »
driving past the great nests,
my mind fills in the empty air—
dozens of blue heron wings
Easter Eve
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, easter, emptiness, fullness, poem, poetry on March 31, 2018| 2 Comments »
On the table, a letter to the Easter Bunny—
the girl has written it in blue pen
thanking him for the joy he brings.
Beside the letter, two baskets
filled with empty plastic eggs.
So much inside wants to be filled. Or so
we believe. Tomorrow morning,
the baskets will be for a moment empty,
the eggs, hidden, ridiculous with candy.
Oh the things we use to stave the void!
There is beauty in barrenness—
just outside the window, the world
is trying to prove it, the field no longer
steeped in snow, yet not yet verdant
and green. And still it’s lovely, a stark,
splendor. though perhaps we need
to recalibrate to see.
Every Easter, she writes, I wake up
soooooooooo excited to find the eggs.
I think of the field, how it takes
no belief for it to fill, for it to burgeon.
And still it is no less magic. I think
of the girl, her joy in giving the Easter Bunny
her most beautiful egg, how she’s learning
the art of emptying. I hope you like it, she writes.
I tell her, I think the Easter Bunny
will cry, tears leaving my eyes, not sure
if I feel more empty, more full.
The Need for Absence
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged absence, emptiness, poem, poetry, shoveling, snow on January 7, 2018| 4 Comments »
For an hour and a half, my son and I
create emptiness. All those places
where there was snow
on the drive and the walk,
we shovel them until there’s a long,
sinewy swath of absence.
It is deeply satisfying,
this moving of matter
from one place to another,
creating a path, a way.
When we are done, we lean
on our shovels and revel
in what is missing. We high five
and smile and feel as if we’ve really
accomplished something together.
How oddly full I feel
after this effort of emptying.
How many paths in me
are waiting to be exposed?
December 20
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, emptiness, light, poem, poetry, winter solstice on December 21, 2017| Leave a Comment »
One of the rooms
in the longest night
has an empty chair
and an open book—
and in the book
is an empty page
full of light—
if you read it
long enough
you might forget
what an hour is,
or night,
forget all stories
besides this one,
older than scripture,
where everything
is possible.
One the Day After
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cat, death, emptiness, loss, poem, poetry on October 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Hymn to What’s Bare
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, fall, poem, poetry, soul, wind on October 21, 2017| 2 Comments »
Last night’s wind scoured
the trees and stripped
their boughs—
it is easy in today’s calm
to wish my soul had been out
in the woods last night.
Emptiness reveals more
than all the gold, all design.
Still Life
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, movement, poem, poetry, still life, tree on November 6, 2015| 3 Comments »
No leaves on the trees
beside the ditch,
and the first snow
outlines in white what remains
in their absence.
What remains is
the dark gesture of tree,
thrust and jut and extend.
Just this morning,
Meredith taught me
to see the movement
in what appears to be still—
even a brown jar,
she says, suggests twist
and elongate and turn.
I wonder if I could be still
like that, still enough
that the snow might settle
on me, though I’m reach
and wrestle and brawl.
This is our practice,
to move at the same time
toward quietude, toward swirl;
to be the scaffolding that holds up
the miracle; to be shine and rise and fall.
Two Nearlys
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, poem, poetry, wanting, words on June 14, 2015| 1 Comment »
Two Nearlys
these empty hands—
there was a time
they grasped for emptiness
*
just before the words
there’s the chance to say nothing—
trees don’t have this problem
Canticle
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, poem, poetry, save on August 26, 2014| 4 Comments »
It’s always something else
we wish would save us—
the right words, for instance,
especially spoken on the right lips.
Or perhaps the temporary shine
inside the generous glass of wine.
And if not that, then friendship.
Or an altar. The sun or a song or a kiss.
But somehow in our hearts
there is always an empty chair,
some sense that someone or something
else is supposed to be here,
even if the room is light. Even when
the rightest words are found.
Even if the wine tastes of melon and grass.
Oh that emptiness. That emptiness
is a chance to ask ourselves, really ask,
who is the one who thinks she needs
to be saved? Sometimes I watch her
slip right through the cracks.
She takes her cross with her,
her books, her prayer mat,
her musts, her beads, her shame,
and what remains is everything.
Well, Sometimes Just a Little White Out Might Be Nice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, failure, poem, poetry on August 25, 2014| 1 Comment »
I used to have it, the longing
to be cleaned out, to become
like the school room before
the students arrive on the first day
of school—the desks polished,
the dry erase board perfectly white,
no un-erasable traces of old problems
and schedules and conjugations.
I longed to be even cleaner than that—
to be emptied. To be like the room
without furniture. Or perhaps even
to be like the vacant lot after
the building had been torn down.
Call it a second chance. Or a third.
A clean slate. We have so many ways
to speak of starting over. And of course
I believed I’d do it all better this time.
And then one day I stopped believing
in the sanctity of the eraser. What
great teachers, all these perfect failures.
One day I could feel it, how
the life I wanted to live was nowhere
near as beautiful, as full, as rich
the life that wants to live me.
The Unfilling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, emptiness, loss of self, poem, poetry, surrender on September 29, 2013| 5 Comments »
Gold, gold, gold, gone.
This is the season of surrender.
The time for release has come.
Aflame! Then emptiness.
It happens so fast.
I notice the no rising up
in my throat, and notice, too,
how it has no effect on what is.
How quickly the invitation to change
becomes the change.
Emptiness everywhere.
Again, I find myself
the student of yes.
I know I will learn
to find it beautiful, the emptiness.
Already, I feel it doing its slow
unselving work inside me.
Oh wind, do to me what you do
to the trees. Take me and shake me
and loosen my hold on whatever gold
I would grasp. Oh October, teach me
how this, too, is a beginning.
Four Emptinesses
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, emptiness, haiku, openness, poem on March 9, 2013| 2 Comments »
not only the aspen
wear nothing, not only
the sky
*
shoveling
the walk, making a path
for the sun
*
the rose does not try
to re-adhere fallen petals—
still this impulse to fix
*
in the sky, a door,
in the door, a sky, in the
sky a door