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Posts Tagged ‘paradox’

So Good

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 16, 2026| Leave a Comment »


 
In a world of bests, good is a relief. Best invites an argument; good is just a suggestion.
—Melissa Kirsch, “What’s Good” in The New York Times, March 14, 2026
 
 
This morning I slip out of my good bed
into my good green slippers. I drink good coffee
and play a good game of chase with my nephews.
They are good, good boys. I take a good long drive
with my good old friend and we arrive in a town
I have loved for years full of good memories 
and good people. There we eat a good dinner
and then spend a night sharing poems. 
I’m grateful for the poems that make me ache,
because it’s good to bear what’s bad together. 
It’s not easy. But real. Real good. The kind of good
that makes your whole body hum, that makes 
your hands clap and your heart stretch wide, 
feeling so good, so good, even as you cry. 

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In Broad Daylight

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 26, 2026| 7 Comments »


 
 
I take my rage to the river.
A heron flies into the wind.
I let myself be opened
by the great gray wings
and the great gray sky
and the great gray largeness of water,
not to rid myself of rage
but to become a clearer channel
to meet the chest-scouring,
scab-clawing, cell-screaming,
throat-burning fury of rage
and remind my heart I can
know all this rage, can be
feral with rage and still
keep on loving the world.

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Once I Wanted Only Openness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 11, 2026| Leave a Comment »


 
 
Every day I tend it again,
this fence around our hearts.
I rebuild it each time I say no
to things that would take me away
from you. I rebuild it each time
I choose to be right here.
I rebuild it and thrill in the rebuilding,
each post of the fence is a love letter,
this fence I once tried to burn.

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All This

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 11, 2026| 6 Comments »


                  after the killing of Renee Nicole Good
 
 
Into the woods I carried
my broken open heart,
knowing it rhymed with millions
of other broken open hearts,
and there, in the silence
of spruce trees and new snow
and cloudless blue sky, the heart
gaped with its relentless ache.
I so deeply loved the world and
I was so terribly upset by the world.
All this. All this. The snow was
impossibly peaceful. It softened
every broken rock, broken stick.
I felt, at the same time,
the raw wound of injustice
and the infinitude of primeval
peace, both of them saying,
remember, remember, remember.

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At the End of the Year

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 1, 2026| 10 Comments »

Just after midnight
we stand beside the stove
holding each other,
your thumb slowly relearning
the portal of my spine.
Satie’s first Gymopédie
slips stepwise through the room,
the tune like starlight emerging
after a storm blew down all the trees.
We are almost, but not quite, still.
How little movement it takes,
plus an opening in the mind,
to know the body as dancing.
How little beauty it takes
to know a sad moment  
as a moment both sad and beautiful.
And what of a year? What of a life?
How much beauty can we bring
with the days we are given?
How would the years change
if we believed we were not
just moving through them,
but dancing?

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On Her Birthday, a Thank You Letter to Emily Dickinson

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 11, 2025| 9 Comments »


Dec. 10, 1830-May 15, 1886
 
 
Dear Emily, your words expressed
the weather of the soul—
the hailstorm no less right than sun—
the heart has room for all—
 
you understood how anguish
is what opens best the heart—
the sadder our circumstance,
the more we speak with stars.
 
And as I am a wanderer,
your poems are the pasture—
they help me ground myself on earth
but nod to something vaster—

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One at the Same Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 12, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
even wearing a real smile
what is heartbroken
still heartbroken
 
  

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Strange

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 8, 2025| 9 Comments »

So darn ugly, the quince,
pockmarked and shriveling,
lumpy and mottled,
sloughing their thin gray fuzz,
but from across the room,
I smell them, intensely sweet,
exotic and milky, rose-like,
honeyed, apple-ish.
They’re like a bowl of painful
memories I’d rather not look at
and yet find myself nose-deep
in them by choice, astonished
at how complex it all is.
Ache. Beauty. Repulsion.
Desire. What most moves us
is seldom simple. Or perhaps
it is simple as this: The world
is full of the strangest gifts.
Like the scent of the quince
floral and tart. Like that
memory I once ran from
that now is treasure
to my heart.

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Placing Attention

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 23, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
Today it was so clear.
It’s not all about the wounds
but the waking.
I took my broken heart outside
into the autumn air,
inhaled the scent of dying grass
and dying leaves and felt so alive
as the wind ravaged my untied hair.
Outside, I closed my eyes and went in.
In my ears, the roar of galvanized leaves.
On my face, unclouded sun.
And inside, such unnameable vastness
even now I stutter in wonder.

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When Feeling Alone

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
If there is a door in aloneness,
I want to be brave enough
to stand in aloneness and not
try to walk through that door
in a fruitless attempt to escape
the discomfort of feeling alone.
How many times have I rushed
to try to make things feel okay
instead of staying with the ache?
If there is a door in aloneness,
perhaps it is fashioned
from being vulnerable enough
to feel alone, to surrender to this,
and then it’s not so much
that the door opens, more
that aloneness itself becomes
the key to encountering
an infinite communion.
All along there was nothing
to do and no one to be.
All along, everything was here.
 

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