Posted in Uncategorized, tagged insignificance, love, nature, poem, poetry on August 21, 2018| 2 Comments »
And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—
my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindles smaller than the space
between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,
comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, ekphrasis, love, lungs, poem, poetry on August 21, 2018| 2 Comments »
One Blooming
looking outside myself
for my dream, when all along
it takes my shape
Thank You Letter to My Lungs
No matter the shame,
the fear, the loss, the pain,
you bring the outside in
and then share what’s inside
with everything else,
and rhythmically, quietly,
hidden and tireless,
you stich me,
unite me
to the cloth of all that is.
How do I sometimes
ignore the communion?
And you breathe on,
barely audible prayer,
weaving me into here, here, here.
One Reason for Clarity
playing hide and seek
with myself, I always win
I always lose
The Lesson
I said to love I am lost
and she gave me
a ladder, a leaf,
a crooked blue door,
an alley I’d never
traveled before,
a room with no ceiling
three circles, some green,
bouquet of uncertainty
scent of spring,
a small red window
a straight backed chair.
Still lost? she said.
Now share.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, love, mandolin, music, poem, poetry, practice on August 9, 2018| 4 Comments »
In my heart, a mandolin
just waiting to be played—
there are music sheets,
ignore them. Doesn’t matter
if you know how to play.
What matters is you try.
What matters is you practice
tuning the strings
until you find the way
to make them sing.
What matters is that
we both know there’s
music in there just waiting
to be found and
your hands are curious,
tender.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, parenting, poem, poetry, thirst on August 6, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Like every other day, today
it is apparent that only love
will save us. Not in the grandiose
abstract way, but in the alarming
specific way. As in forgiveness, now.
As in choosing to hug instead
of fighting back. As in taking
three deep breaths before saying
something we regret. It saves us
from thirsting in the desert of our lives,
but only if we save it first by
choosing it, now in this moment
of angry words, now in this moment
of clenched thoughts, now in
this moment when we’d rather
taste venom but instead, we
pour love into our cup and
bring it to our lips and drink
and drink until once again
it is only love that makes sense,
only love that refills the cup.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, death, frost, love, poem, poetry on July 31, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Think of the frost that will crack our bones eventually
—Tom Hennen, “Love for Other Things”
Before I can love you, I hate you.
Because the frothy pink of the milkweed
and the monarch who travels thousands of miles
just to feed there. Because the dark leaves
of soybeans, millions of green hearts
per acre. Because ripe blueberries
without a hint of pucker. Because
of the touch of the man who loves me.
Because the cool breeze on my bare arms.
But to love is to open the circle
of what is beloved, to offer my attention
to the concert of crickets and crows,
to the proliferation of box elder beetles,
the weeds that infiltrate the field. Sound
of lawn mowers, jackhammers, swarm
of mosquitoes. Stench of Sulphur. Deep
snows that bury the drive.
And love says why stop there? Widen
the circle to toxic sludge. Yellow jackets.
Earwigs. Freezing sideways sleet. Men
with guns and hate in their stare. Girls
who spit disdain. And the pain
that steals sleep. And the pain
that never leaves. And the pain
that would obliterate every bright thing,
and in so doing, reveal what is most precious—
this ability to love. To love despite.
To love regardless. To love. To love
what I hate, even you, frost that will crack
my bones. Will you not be my final teacher
in how to offer my attention? Will you
not be my last great love?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dinosaurs, love, poem, poetry, time on July 8, 2018| Leave a Comment »
And again I recall how small we are,
how ninety nine percent of all species
that have ever lived are extinct,
how thin our stripe in geologic time,
how remarkable that we are here at all.
And suddenly all that matters
is that I love you—and what are the odds?
How many billion years in the making,
this rush of gratitude, this burgeoning
joy, this thrill in the sheer Cenozoic luck
to feel the concurrent burning and quenching,
the simultaneous bite and salve, the Quaternary
gift of thriving and failing at the same time?
If it feels as if it’s taken forever to get to this place,
lover, it has. Think trilobite. T-rex. Cave bear.
Wooly mammoth. Think how little time
has passed, and how lucky, how lucky we are.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, love, mother, poem, poetry, step mother on June 4, 2018| 2 Comments »
for Shawnee
This time the goodbye is in the kitchen,
me running off to the next thing,
you at the counter with morning tea
before you drive away.
I give you a hug from behind
and a kiss on your cheek and thank you
for coming to visit.
I want to tell you I love you,
but the words have never
tumbled out easily, not because
they aren’t true, but because
I don’t want to frighten you.
Strange to feel I must hold you at a distance
in order to keep you close,
like a mother bird
who monitors her nestling
from a neighboring tree.
I never was one of the mothers
who worry about fatal things:
car crashes, avalanche, infectious disease.
I worry more about the most
terrible thing that could happen,
that you could be alive and not know how
much I love you, fiercely, unfoldingly,
worry my longing
to keep you at ease could
make you feel pushed away.
Driving from the house,
it is not the sun in my eyes
that makes them leak,
it’s this knowing that I
have made for you a nest
in my heart where I hold you,
but perhaps what you needed all these years
was for me to hold your real hand,
to wrap my real arms around
where your wings would be.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, mother, mother's day, parenting, poem, poetry on May 13, 2018| Leave a Comment »
She looks so happy with her new baby, all coo
and smile and jiggle and swing.
I smile at her, and think of everything
I do not tell her. How the child will grow up
to break her heart over and over. How
she will give him more love
than she knew she had, and it will not
be enough. How he will hate her
for holding a line. How she must hold it,
still. How she will come to doubt herself.
How all of us are broken, no
matter how hard we’ve worked to be
whole, and how none of us can
carry the other, no matter how
much we long to. How she will
beg her own heart, Stay open,
stay open. And how some wise friend
may someday say to her,
Shut down your big heart
at many a time. It needs to rest
while you are awake.
And she will know perhaps by then
the truth of love, how it is never
what we imagined. How
big a risk it is to love. How
everything depends on this. And how
she will weep, someday, watching
another young mother in the park,
cooing at her baby, remembering
how simple it seemed, and how
perhaps it is still that simple,
a mother, a child, a big world to explore.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anna akhmatova, ars poetica, love, modigliani, poem, poetry on April 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »
When I met Amadeo Modigliani,
I knew of hunger
what did I know of love?
I was in Paris. On my honeymoon.
As my new husband met with other women
i met with Amadeo, an impoverished Italian Jew.
His paintings not yet famous.
We would walk Parisian streets
in the warm summer rain
and snuggle under his black umbrella
and recite by heart poems from Verlaine together.
He begged me, don’t go back to Russia.
Russia? I said, where is that? It’s Russiya.
Don’t go back to Russiya, Anna.
I did.
That winter he wrote me in Petrograd:
Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise;
You are obsessively part of me.
I knew it was true,
that he was more myself
than my own familiar hands.
Back in Petrograd,
I would touch my lips in the mirror
and say my own name
and believe my voice was his.
I think of Lot’s wife.
How they told her not to turn,
to not look at Sodom, her home
even as it was being destroyed
but how could she not
turn to the green fields where she had sung,
turn to the bed where her children
were made, turn to the place
of her blood?
When I turned back to Paris
because his love felt like home
even though i knew it would be destroyed,
I was not transformed into salt
but into chalk, black chalk, his chalk on paper.
I did not know then
how that I would come
to treasure his vision,
how I would tape his drawing
on the wall in every house
i ever lived in so I could live again
between those lines in a time
of wild honey, scent of beeswax candles,
his amber eyes.
Amedeo always drew me naked
in long spare lines—
Always from memory when he was alone.
With me, his hands
were too busy for chalk.
He’d slip off my dress,
and in my breast,
he’d visit my beloved Russian steppes,
in my waist, he buried himself
in Siberian snow,
and between my thighs,
he was baptized again and again
in the floodwaters of the Neva River.
They’d not yet made
a corset that will fit me—
how could it when I
am all of Russia?
Oh I loved him. Wrote him poems.
Left red roses strewn on his studio floor.
How airy the light was then.
How I loved being what they would later call me,
polovina monakhini, half nun,
polovina shlyukha, half whore.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, hummingbird, love, poem, poetry, trust on April 23, 2018| 2 Comments »
How do they do it,
the broad-tailed hummingbirds,
arriving at my window
the same day every year,
welcome as spring,
reliable as moon.
And what part of me
thrills in their predictability?
And what part says,
a tad too triumphantly,
See, here’s proof,
things come back.
I hear the small birds
before I see them,
their wingtips trilling,
I’ve read how the feathers
that make the sound wear down
from use. By midwinter,
you can barely hear
their bright hum at all until,
preparing to breed,
they grow new feathers again.
How do they do it,
grow feathers at just the right time?
I want to linger in the small
miracle of it, these ears still learning
how to hear and this heart still
astonished at the timing
of the world, how life just knows
when to return, when to grow.
