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Posts Tagged ‘opening’

what a year it’s been tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 31, 2011| 2 Comments »

despite snow
despite cold
though it makes no sense
this heart
still unbuttons its coat

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Take Five

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 22, 2011| 3 Comments »

the truth
enters
the room
like a cold
cold breeze—
sometimes
we’re ready
for a break
from the heat,
sometimes
it’s just
so
cold

*

it’s not
as if we
can make ourselves
fall in love
with the world,
but I’ve noticed
that when
I look up
it’s more
likely

*

it is
after all
the longest night
and even though
tomorrow
it’s only one
more minute
of light
it is one
more
minute

*

I have been praying
for openings,
and behind
every door
that opens
another door

*

with my one
minute more
I don’t know
what I’ll do—
but I hope
I remember
to
look
up

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endlessly tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 11, 2011| 2 Comments »

it is the shape of a woman,
this door, which
no matter how many times
it opens
opens again

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Dear Rumi,

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 4, 2011| 3 Comments »

Sometimes I think if the night
were clear enough and the wind
was still, I could see
through all these walls I’ve built
to protect myself—from what?—
and know how to bring them down.
And then I could be open. But tonight
the sky could not be more clear
and there’s no hint of wind
and I still feel in my heart
all the places still clenched and tight.
“Not open, dear, but opening,”
I imagine you might say, reminding me
that open is a verb, not some destination
where I might arrive—
some magical place with a beach and umbrella,
some anywhere I’ve dreamt up
that isn’t wherever I am.
I can laugh kindly at myself when I’m not crying,
or when I’m not trying too hard.
I try too hard. My friend Barbara wrote me
and told me so. My other friend,
Joan, advised me that I would be challenging
wherever I go. They both said it
with so much love that I let their words
wholly in.
The prediction tomorrow
is snow, Rumi, and I will perhaps
be so enthralled or busy with it
that I will be drawn utterly out of my thoughts
of open and opening and how.
But there I go again, planting myself
into the future as if it will be easier
to be present then than it is right now.
Right now, there’s a knocking
in the kitchen. I don’t know what it is.
A heater? The fridge?
And my own heart is knocking
against my chest like a neighbor
who is coming to borrow a cup of sugar
in the middle of the night.
I don’t know, Rumi, why I am writing to you,
except that it feels as if something
has started in my soul, something
I don’t understand. Something more
about forgetting than remembering.
And as you once said to your own teacher Shams,
“You make my raggedness silky.”
I turn to the yes I feel
when I read your words and know
that I know nothing. When I read you
it feels as if the angels that I don’t quite believe in
have come, is that them doing all that knocking?
and those walls I mentioned, well,
I can laugh at them, too, when the doors
I didn’t even know were there
begin by themselves to open.

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