Because there are no clear instructions,
I follow what rises up in me to do.
I fall deeper into love with you.
I look at old pictures.
I don’t look at old pictures.
I talk about you. I say nothing.
I walk. I sit. I lie in the grass
and let the earth hold me.
I lie on the sidewalk, dissolve
into sky. I cry. I don’t cry.
I ask the world to help me stay open.
I ask again, please, let me feel it all.
I fall deeper in love with the people
still living. I fall deeper in love
with the world that is left—
this world with its spring
and its war and its mornings,
this world with its fruits
that ripen and rot and reseed,
this world that insists
we keep our eyes wide,
this world that opens
when our eyes are closed.
Because there are no clear instructions,
I learn to turn toward the love that is here,
though sometimes what is here is what’s not.
There are infinite ways to do this right.
That is the only way.
Posts Tagged ‘paradox’
Meeting Your Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, grief, love, paradox on March 15, 2022| 6 Comments »
For When People Ask
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged feelings, grief, joy, paradox, singing on March 13, 2022| 15 Comments »
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands the swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.
*
by the way, friends, if you are aware of a word in another language that means okay/not okay, gosh, I would love to know it
One Made in the Benevolent Dark
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bee, darkness, dream, honey, paradox on February 18, 2022| 4 Comments »
from sweet nectar
and bitter pollen
all the honey
Making the Gingerbread House
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, garden, gingerbread house, grief, kitchen, mother, paradox, rose on January 3, 2022| 4 Comments »
Your sister and I finished
this year’s gingerbread house—
not a duplex this time,
nor two condos connected
by a gingerbread bridge.
It’s a single house with angled walls
like in the Jan Brett illustrations.
How can I be so happy and so sad
at the same time?
It’s like being a rose
that has lost all its petals and yet
is in full petalled bloom.
There is, in every moment,
an opening that appears—
and I find I often stand
in the threshold, one foot
in now and the other
with you in eternity.
Then the kitchen
is not only a kitchen.
but a garden.
And every gardener knows
she must grow first herself.
And the baker knows
everything she makes
is made to disappear
in its prime.
And so it is on this night
of decorating gingerbread,
your sister and I use bright candies
and thin pretzel sticks to make
a one-room house
unlike any we’ve made before.
And we laugh. And I miss you.
My petals drift across the floor.
My petals open into wider bloom.
Made to Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, love, paradox on April 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »
That love is complicated
is no surprise—
consider the human heart
pumps blood to almost
seventy-five trillion cells,
and if we were to stretch
out our blood vessel system,
it would extend over
sixty thousand miles.
Of course, things
get tangled and messy.
And perhaps, love is also
not so complicated.
Perhaps it’s as easy
as waking up in the night
and feeling the darkness hold us.
As effortless as sipping
sweet licorice tea
and letting it warm the body.
As inclusive as the lily’s white perfume
that touches the whole room.
Yes, perhaps loving is as instinctive
as the human heart that beats
over a hundred thousand times a day—
not because we ask it to,
not because we try,
but because that’s what
it was made to do.
Hankering
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arugula, bitterness, food, paradox on June 30, 2020| 2 Comments »
Today again I thank the arugula
for the way it teaches me
that sharpness, too, is what
draws us in, that we come
not just to forgive
but to crave what is bitter,
what bites us back.
Docetaxel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cancer, friendship, healing, paradox, tree on January 28, 2020| 2 Comments »
The yew can live to be over two thousand years old—
a sacred tree that grows large enough for forty people
to stand inside it. Today, its ancient power fits
in a clear plastic bag the size of two fists and it drips
through a clear plastic tube into the chest of my friend.
In three days, she will not want to move. She will not
want to eat. She will wonder if it’s all worth it.
It will last a week. So strange that a plant
that causes death when consumed will help
to save her life. Her hair has been gone for weeks.
But today, on her last day of chemo, I marvel
at how she is being infused with evergreen
in the hopes that she will transmogrify, carry
in her the mystery that grows in the bark of the tree.
When a yew branch touches the ground, it takes root.
Sprouts again. Let her body know this secret. Amen.
Missing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cat, hope, loss, paradox, poem, poetry, science on December 28, 2019| 2 Comments »
Hope is, perhaps, a quantum thing,
a paradox, like Schrödinger’s cat,
simultaneously alive and dead.
Today, I wandered the snowy field
and the icy banks and the shadowed wood,
calling the name of my sweet gray cat.
If I could find her now, I’d see
she’s either alive or dead.
But in this moment of uncertainty,
she’s both alive and dead to me.
I’m tugged by both possibilities as I wade
through tall dry grass. Oh damn that hope,
and bless it, too, how just a candle-measure
opposes a whole tower of unfounded certainty,
sends me out into the blizzard
calling her name, listening.
Strange Bedmates
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged celebration, death, grief, knitting, paradox, poem, poetry on April 3, 2019| 4 Comments »
grief and celebration
share the same bed—
one keeps stealing the blanket
the other
keeps knitting a beautiful new one
One Impasse
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, paradox, poem, poetry, vulnerability, writing on September 12, 2018| Leave a Comment »