to grow a heart from lake water and an old
junk yard, from an empty classroom
and cheap novels bought at the second
hand store, two-liter bottles of diet coke
and a dusty dead-end road. There was more,
of course. An old plaid couch with a squeaky spring.
The spiraling cord of an old telephone. A rusty pan
with cornbread made with Mavis’s fresh eggs.
The breathing weight of my newborn girl.
What hasn’t gone into the growing of this heart?
An old red truck. The pinnately compound leaves
of Jacob’s Ladder. But it is the unpetaling
that astonishes now, how all the stories
of my becoming—all the particulars
that seemed so essential—begin to drop
No, not drop, exactly. It’s just that I nourish
these stories less as I turn my attention
toward the vastness from which all arose—
and in this turning, discover how the more
the heart is undone, the more
the heart can grow.
Posts Tagged ‘heart’
We could say it took me my whole life
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growing, growth, heart, particulars, unlearning, vastness on September 16, 2025| 4 Comments »
The Holding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, heart, holding, pain, pond on September 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The way the shore holds the pond,
that is how I want to hold
the pain in my heart, honoring
how vital it is. How it is home
to things with hard shells and sharp
claws and also to beings with gossamer
wings. To drain it would be to lose
my aliveness. To become barren,
cracked, dry. I can’t say I love
the spider-like skaters that streak
across the top, nor the thick gray muck
that lines the bottom. But I love
the green rushes that rim the edges,
the red-stemmed willows, the wild
iris. It is no easy thing to hold pain,
but I look how vibrant the pond shore is.
This alive is how I want to live.
Intergalactic Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, galaxy, heart, love on May 6, 2025| 4 Comments »
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, and if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—The Gospel of Thomas, verse 70
There is a galaxy in my heart,
a vastness that surprises me
each time I dare look—
my god, it’s so much larger
than I could ever explore.
Filled with dark things that defy
investigation and dead places
where nothing can live and brilliant
places so radiant I’m unable to look
straight on. There is a galaxy
in my heart so expansive it sometimes
frightens me—what does it mean
to not know my own bounds?
What if I never live into my capacity to love?
There is a galaxy in my heart
that knows itself by spiraling,
swirling out from its own center,
and forming new stars.
Did I ever believe it was limited
to hold only so much?
The galaxy in my heart
invites me to remember
I am made of mystery, and
whatever theories I have
of how and who I love
are always being changed.
Even now, it stuns me,
how galaxies sometimes merge.
Imagine, if your galaxy
and my galaxy come together,
my god, how much vaster
our hearts can become.
One Ever-Changing Pressure
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, heart, singing on April 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »
bless the accordion heart—
whether it opens or closes
it’s all a chance to sing
Letter to My Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, empathy, heart, imitation, mockingbird, song on March 8, 2025| 6 Comments »
Once I was embarrassed
you were a mockingbird.
I wished you were more
hermit thrush, more meadowlark,
more cliff swallow in the canyon,
heck, even wished you were
robin or wren.
At last I’m coming to see
the gift of learning another’s song,
letting it pierce you, own you,
then braiding it with your own tune,
to sing back to the world
as one.
Since You’re Gone
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged couch, ekphrasis, heart, love, missing on January 26, 2025| 6 Comments »
My heart is like a well-used couch,
the kind with a dent where your body
once curled in, the cushions threadbare
from years of use; the kind of couch
that remembers every time you gave
it your weight, that recalls every story
that spilled from your mouth,
your words now woven into its upholstery.
Since you’re gone, the picture of me looks
like less like a picture of me and more
like a picture of where you used to be.
Thank You Letter to My Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratefulness, heart, open, vulnerability on January 5, 2025| 4 Comments »
Thank you, heart for breaking open
every time you hear of the throbbing
ache of war. The devastation of hunger.
The agony of humans choosing
to hurt each other. May you always break.
May you never grow callous enough
that you listen to news of bombs
and betrayals as if you are listening
to the weather report. Thank you,
heart, for letting yourself be stunned
by joy at the slightest of beauties—
by the stilting gray hop of the bunny,
the pink pucker of grapefruit,
the crimson blush of amaryllis
as the tepals burgeon against the green bud.
Though the mind longs to organize,
you thrive on surprising me. Like the way
you rise up for the same rain I once reviled.
Like the way you crave the silence
that once I feared. Like the ways
you have taught me to love the parts of me
I once thought were unloveable.
For all the times I have forgotten
to say thank you, forgive me.
I am still learning. I will forget how to love,
will forget to thank you again.
But here, on the edge of who I will be,
here I am, open as I know how,
gratefulness growing, pushing
against my own green.
Allium sativum
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, garlic, growth, heart on August 8, 2024| 8 Comments »
Not unlike the garlic
bulbs pulled today
from garden soil,
the heart, too,
is lumpy, misshapen,
filled with strong
and good intentions.
Never quite what
I dream—but hey,
it’s not nothing
to grow where
there is no light.
It’s not nothing
to grow at all.
Dactylography
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, fingerprint, heart, love on November 7, 2023| 6 Comments »
Just when you think you know who you are,
you take a closer look at your heart
and notice it is marked
with the whorls and loops and arches
of everyone you’ve ever loved
and everyone who has ever loved you—
those who left you, who broke you,
and those who still charm and nourish you.
As if the heart’s reason for being
is simply to be shaped and reshaped
by the hands of the world.
As if the detectives of love
could visit your heart
with their fingerprint powder
and lifting tape and unfold the mystery
of how you became who you are,
fashioned by the uniqueness of others,
discovering your heart
is not a crime scene at all,
but a rare and incomparable work of art.
How the World Goes On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, love, milkweed, softness, survival on October 2, 2023| 10 Comments »
There’s the burr that relies on brittle prickers,
the cheat grass with sharp and spiky barbs,
and then there’s the milkweed
that attaches its seeds to gossamer fluff
and spills forth in an ecstasy of diaphanous floss,
white puffs of wish-downy, dream-gauzy,
breeze-easy lushness. Oh, heart,
this, too, is what survival looks like—
an almost impossible softness
that gathers light in silky froth,
that entrusts itself to the wind.