Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, time on July 15, 2024| 9 Comments »
it fits too tight
said eternity
to Tuesday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, eternity, happiness, moment, mother, tenderness on January 2, 2024| 7 Comments »
Late, and I lie on the couch,
my head in mom’s lap,
eyelids heavy as she pulls
slender fingers through my hair,
and I am more loved
than lost, more soft
than strong, more flesh
than worry, more no self
than self. I am not
thinking of happiness,
which is, perhaps,
the truest kind of happiness.
The moment loses any lines
that might try to define
what a moment is
until all is suffused with eternity
and tenderness is uncontainable.
Her hands move slow
and the room is quiet
and the night is a nest
big enough to hold us all.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, resonane, self, truth on December 5, 2023| 18 Comments »
I am what continues.
—Joi Sharp
There is, perhaps you’ve felt it,
a moment when the day falls away
and your name falls away and
everything you thought you knew
falls away and for a moment
you know yourself only
as whatever it is
that continues—
your whole body abuzz
with the eternity of it—
and you quiver
as if struck by the great hand
of what is true,
becoming pure tone,
more vibration than flesh,
a human-shaped resonator
tuned to the frequency
of life itself,
and though later you might try
to dissect what happened,
in that moment you’re too abloom
to wonder how or why,
you simply are
this ecstatic unfolding
knowing the self as I am,
so alive and so infinite
you tremble like a song.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, may, mother, mother's day on May 9, 2023| 16 Comments »
May again, and the lilac buds
are swelling and the apple leaves
are on the verge of unfurling
and it’s almost Mother’s Day.
The geese have arrived,
and the hummingbirds weave
and the grosbeaks swarm the feeder.
On the counter, the succulents
you gave me two years ago
have doubled in size.
I treasure them beyond
their thick leaves—
treasure, more, perhaps,
their roots.
I am well aware
that although you are gone
I am no less your mom.
I want to praise what is infinite,
which I am best taught
through what doesn’t last.
What doesn’t last:
the body, the bloom,
the boy, the blood.
What lasts forever:
the growing, the breaking open,
the winging toward love.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, eternity, time, wine on February 2, 2023| 6 Comments »
a year later, still savoring
the tingling silky aftertaste of eternity
I sipped in a dream
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, space, teaching on July 7, 2022| 10 Comments »
Sometimes when I forget to think
I feel in me eternity, feel big bang
and black hole and spiraling galaxy.
Feel myself as arc of swallow,
bend of river, canyon depth,
feel myself as wind, as branch,
as scent of evergreen,
as slowly spinning earth.
In those moments,
I feel the everything I am
and the everything I’m not—
a self so whole it is lost.
No me, no you, no other,
no here, no there, no when,
no need to name, no need
to understand, no need
to state things just so.
The quietest of teachings:
the erasing of the one
who wants to know.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, cause and effect, daughter, eternity, mother, singing on November 15, 2021| 4 Comments »
What we do now echoes into eternity.
—Marcus Aurelius
If what we do now echoes into eternity,
then let there be more mornings such as this one
in which my mother wakes me by singing
a thin thread of melody
that praises the beauty of the day.
By breakfast, I feel the small reverberations
of her joy as they ricochet in me
chiming against loss and fear,
an unabashed gladness that rings
against the holy ribs,
that spirals inside the aortal caves,
that peals through the chasms of the hours.
By afternoon, it’s coruscating, resonating,
a bit of aural shine against the day’s ache,
helping me meet the world just
a bit more brightly.
Just think, after an eternity, how much
beauty might have come from one
simple tune sung by one open heart
willing to sing for one moment what is true.
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
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, eternity, klimt, poem, poetry, The Kiss, transience on February 28, 2018| 2 Comments »
After over a hundred years,
the blue flowers in her hair
are still as blue and the ivy
in his hair is still as green
and her face is just as soft
and serene as when she received
the kiss, the kiss that made
the whole world fall in love
with Gustav Klimt. And who
wouldn’t want to be caught
forever and ever in a golden
embrace, infinitely tender,
eternally erotic, the way
no kiss truly is? But here
they are, defying the fall,
these lovers, hanging unframed
on the wall of the Belvedere,
still passionate, lust-drowsy,
their love spilling into the halls
as the whole world around
them dissolves into shimmer,
into shine.
http://www.cnn.com/style/article/gustav-klimt-100-years/?iid=ob_lockedrail_bottomlarge
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, love, poem, poetry, tense, time on September 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I imagine the surgeon’s knife
removes the part of my brain
that discriminates present
from past and what will be.
I wake up to everything.
The apple is all at once
sapling and blossom and
sweet red weight and bruise
and white flesh and stump of tree.
The forest is all at once
ash and shade and spruce
and aspen, chopped and
old growth and song-rung
and hushed. And you and I
are innocent, red handed,
coming and lost, all alone
and interlocked, weeping
and giddy, walled in and
bare, really no different
from now, my dear.