after “Stone” by Charles Simic
I cannot make them out,
these strange writings
on my inner walls.
Each time I feel closer
to deciphering the marks,
it’s as if they rearrange
themselves into new
more mysterious lines.
Some part of me deeply
wants to read them,
to know their secrets.
She takes out her eraser,
her pencil, and begins
the translations again.
Some part of me sits
easily in the midst of all
I do not understand.
She watches the swallows
trace shapes in the air
with the dark inky tips
of their wings.
Posts Tagged ‘language’
Soul Searching
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, soul, swallow, translation, unknowing on July 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Untranslatable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, language, silence on July 8, 2026| 4 Comments »
The language of grief is silence.
—Maggie Anderson, “What Grief Does”
No one can translate the language of grief.
No verbs properly express how it collapses
past, present and future into a single tense
in which all becomes unswimmable wave
and at the same time immovable stone.
No way to explain how in my grief lexicon
the word cello can only be spoken in sob.
How the single word shadow is somehow
an entire prayer, equal parts praise and lament.
How there are as many translations for loss
as there are losses, and each phrase mutates
into infinite local dialects spoken fluently only
by the individual who grieves. So perhaps
it is true, the language of grief is silence—
a mother tongue we are all gifted from birth.
Though sometimes the language of grief is wail.
Sometimes sniffle. Howl. Murmur. Hum.
So different, this language, for everyone.
And every moment, a new nuance unfolds.
It’s a wonder we understand each other at all.
Except we do. We share it, this language
we can’t possibly translate and yet we know its
expressions by heart. For this, we offer each other
our ears, knowing full well we can never
wholly understand, knowing full well it matters
that we listen anyway to gurgle, moan, silence, cry.
The Arrival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hospitality, kindness, language, travel on June 5, 2026| 2 Comments »
After I drove six hours
she welcomed me at the door
of her home
with a pair of slippers
and a glass of water—
there are many languages
I want to learn to speak fluently.
Kindness, most of all.
Sometimes When You Don’t Know What to Say
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, ineffable, language, paradox, silence on June 1, 2026| 8 Comments »
It’s because to try to describe this feeling is
to render it instantly dull, flat.
It’s like when you see a rock on the bottom
of the river—all shimmering and bright—
but the moment you bring it to the air
to share it, what seemed precious
becomes cloudy, mundane, a dumb lump,
the stuff of filler in a suburban parking lot.
And so you learn to be quiet, to let your syllables
float away like dry leaves. What is heaviest
stays. Does not wash away. Is polished by friction, years.
Sometimes you meet others in the river. What shines
shines. Together you stare, stunned by the damn beauty.
Maybe you hold hands. Watch the light as it plays.
Shh
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, lilac, scent, silence on May 23, 2026| 1 Comment »
So soft and sweet the scent
of this lilac’s first bloom
I stop trying to praise it
and instead breathe it in—
the eager vibration
of hummingbird wings
says everything.
The Reflection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, language, mirror, reflection, tick on March 31, 2026| 6 Comments »
It was late evening. I was sitting on the couch, the purple one my husband made, when I felt the small tickle traveling from my forearm to my wrist. Not wearing my glasses, I held out my arm for my husband to look. “What is it?” I asked. “A tick,” he said, his voice flat, matter of fact. He pinched it in his fingers, then took it to the counter and crushed it with the bottom of a water glass. I had had a good day, listening to a woman speak about how she could still be compassionate toward her mother after years of abuse. I had gone to a dinner in honor of my husband for difficult work well done. I was proud of him and said kind and true things about how I had seen him grow. The skin where the tick had been continued to tickle. In fact, I felt the light prickle of tick legs walking on almost every part of my body. I had to take everything off. I stood in front of the mirror and saw what wasn’t there. No tick. Nor the body I once had. It was not easy to look. I asked my eyes to remember it is possible to say something compassionate, something matter of fact, something true.
One Humbling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged humbling, insufficiency, language, writing on August 11, 2025| 6 Comments »
writing for four years
still not able to fully describe
that one moment
Noticing the Noticing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, holding, infinite, language, meditation, paradox on June 17, 2025| 6 Comments »
When I am most still,
there is something that holds me—
not a being, but a voice,
no, not a voice, but a transmission.
Not really a transmission, no, but a place
with gradations of color, almost like sky at dawn.
Well, no, not a place. More a placelessness.
A placelessness that holds me.
Yes. A placelessness. That holds me.
Or rather, a placelessness that is me.
And is also all that I’m not.
Oh, these words that try so hard to say something true.
They feel so small as they leave my mouth.
Like I’m tossing out tiny pebbles
into the pool of the infinite.
I stare at the tiny ripples they make,
in awe of their insufficiency.
Which is to say I’m in awe
of all that does not ripple.
With awe comes stillness.
The kind of stillness that invites me.
Invites me to notice how utterly I am held.
Water Speak
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goodbye, language, lovers, river, water on April 25, 2025| 4 Comments »
When you say goodbye
fill each syllable with the sound
of the river as it kisses the shore
just beyond our window,
then, no matter what words you say,
I will hear the unending waves,
will smell the musty,
earthy scent on my skin
long after the words are gone.
There is home in the way
your words cling to me
like water beads on my skin.
This is how I remember
where I am from.
Evergreen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, memory, tree on January 12, 2025| 8 Comments »
Skiing up the railroad grade
we pause to catch our breath
and from somewhere in the woods
a tree speaks to us in a spruce language
we can’t interpret,
and I am again a young girl
at the edge of the forest,
believing I understand the trees,
the way they call to me,
primal and true.
How did I ever forget?
Translation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged impermanence, language, permanence on October 31, 2024| 2 Comments »
Beyond words is the language
of leaf with its speckle and rustle
and moldering scent, is the language
of sunlight which even now burns
its praise into my wrinkling skin.
Is the language of cloud
with its unraveling syntax
that dissolves into unconjugatable sky.
Sometimes I can decipher
the secret tongue that whispers
its song into everything—
you are here, then you’re gone,
but you’re never really gone,
see, it’s all here, it’s all here.
On This Day Twenty Years After You Were Born
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birth, garden, grief, language, silence on September 12, 2024| 15 Comments »
I dug in the garden. For hours.
Hands deep in the dirt
where once your hands
dug, too. Pulled carrots.
Potatoes. Onions.
Held them up to the air
and marveled at what grows
in the dark. Asked you questions.
As always, you didn’t answer.
Or perhaps it’s truer to say
I do not know how
to interpret the language
of rain, the message
of the white seed that landed
in my hand, the significance
of the hummingbird moth
drinking from bright red nasturtiums.
But I am learning the language of silence.
Same language the earth speaks.
Same language we spoke while you
were still forming inside me. Such
an intimate tongue. Such generous
conversation. All day I practice
speaking it with you. All day
I practice listening.
Puhpowee
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged force, language, love, mushrooms, naming, words on June 4, 2024| 11 Comments »
—etymology from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In Anishinaabe, there’s a word
for “the force which causes mushrooms
to push up from the earth overnight,”
and I wonder if it’s the same force
that changes the grapes into wine,
that turns an acquaintance into a beloved,
that gathers a handful of notes from a scale
and constellates them
into a tune that scores our lives.
What is the force that moves through us,
that charges the world with becoming?
As much as I love the naming of it,
I love, too, the mystery,
the unspeakable wonder of it,
how the brain is humbled into blathering,
I love the bumbling that happens when our logic
tries to explain the miracle, and the heart
becomes like a blonde morel
that rises up through rocks, through duff.
It says nothing, but oh, how it feels the force.
As I Walked Out the Door
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift, language, resilience, Wendy Videlock, word on May 3, 2024| 8 Comments »
for Wendy
Into my hand, she pressed
a smooth rock she’d painted copper.
In all capital letters, turquoise and navy,
she’d written the word RESILIENCE.
Beneath it she’d drawn a lopsided helix.
I thought of her own spiraling with death.
Two years later, she volunteers
to teach in schools and dances
before breakfast every morning
with her husband in their living room.
She finds compassion for tough neighbors
and welcomes the wayward into her home.
She knows in every cell
the definition of resilience,
and so when she offered me
resilience on a rock,
I felt it, the full invitation
to be both grounded and vital,
to be both solid and springing,
the chance to be both the anchor
and the hand that reaches as if to say
come on, let’s leap, I’ll show you how.
Talking with Andrea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, friendship, grace, language, praise on March 5, 2024| 12 Comments »
I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
—Anne Lamott
With every cell, I listened
to her familiar voice,
her thoughtful silences,
her precision with verbs,
and though we spoke
of showerheads and
grocery shopping,
elections, underbellies and
standing beneath the moon,
we spoke only of grace, every
sentence somehow stitched
with the most stripped-down
kind of praise, the kind
that doesn’t sparkle,
doesn’t sing, doesn’t
shimmy, doesn’t offer
sweet perfume, the kind
of praise that is so naked,
so plain, so bare
there is nothing at all
between us and the
sheer magnificent truth
that we are here.
I long to name such aliveness,
at once composed
and uncontainable,
but it slips my attempts—
it’s like trying to fit a dress
on a sunbeam.
But I felt it, how
as we spoke I went
from being stone
to being sky. Oh glory,
with my everything,
I felt it.
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.
Tinder
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, fire, language, morning on January 8, 2024| 8 Comments »
Sometimes, long before the sun rises,
you whisper good morning,
and it’s as if you’ve built a small fire
in the hearth of predawn,
each syllable a small flame
leaping up in the dark,
a welcome kindling.
It takes so little to fill the room
with warmth, with light.
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.
On Language
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, grammar, language on March 17, 2023| 6 Comments »
You, language, that rises
out of quiet air, from where?
How syllable? How syntax?
From whence come gifts
of fricative and nasal,
glide and vowel? From where
these translations of mood
into ooo and thhhh
and mmmmm and ah?
Sweet miracle, language,
the kindness of phonemes
the sweet generosity
of grammar—glorious
as a cherry tree in spring—
that teaches us to say
I am, you are, we have been,
we will be, we are going
to be, we might, we are;
all those truths spilling
from our mouths
that escape the known
like petals that form,
then flutter away
from the bough
into silence.
One Attempt
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, language, loss, missing, sky on July 3, 2022| 4 Comments »
like trying to contain the sky
in the word blue—
saying I miss you