Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, escape, poem, poetry, reality on December 4, 2018| Leave a Comment »
and we will go
to the haiku cottage
in the mountains
where there are no roads
and there are no pens
and there we let ourselves
be written, the seasons
will shape our syllables,
the moon shall be
our cutting word,
and every time we think
we know what line comes next
we will thrill at how new
the world can be, sliding,
escaping, unswirling,
and calling follow me,
bring only wonder,
follow me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blood test, escape, medicine, poem, poetry, reality on September 13, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daydream, poem, poetry, reality on December 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »
While sautéing onions
in the warm kitchen
I find myself on a tire swing
arcing through fields
of night—
is it the sound of crickets
or the pungent scent
that makes me cry?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, Geppetto, love, Pinocchio, poem, poetry, reality on September 2, 2015| 3 Comments »
Oh Geppetto, I could have told
those real boys always break your heart.
It always starts as a dream come true.
They cannot help it that they are real.
Oh the real girls, they’re no better,
all of us with our built in yearnings,
our essential fragilities.
I would not have tried to dissuade you.
A real love is better than one with strings,
regardless how strange and scary it gets.
Still, I would have loved to have warned you.
Not that it helps. Just because
sometimes it’s better to face
what is real together.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged black friday, darkness, poem, poetry, reality on November 28, 2014| 2 Comments »
Oh America, get out of the mall.
Get out of the box stores, the boutiques
and fast food drive thrus. I don’t know
where else you might go … a forest,
perhaps, or over to your friend’s kitchen
where there is a cup of tea and an empty chair
near the window where, if you look
out into the snow-filled yard you might just see
how lovely that light is as it escapes
one more time, one more time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged illusion, perspective, poem, poetry, reality, villanelle on January 25, 2014| 2 Comments »
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein
Am I a woman dreaming she’s a bear?
Or bear who’s dreaming she’s a woman, lost?
I cannot find the answer anywhere.
One thing’s for sure, the bear is not aware
she might be dreaming. She is hungry, cross.
Am I a woman dreaming she’s a bear?
The woman, on the other hand, she cares
if it’s dream. Are these her teeth? Her paws?
She cannot find the answer anywhere.
The she-bear lifts her nostrils to the air
and sniffs. She feels the edge of coming frost.
Am I a woman dreaming she’s a bear?
The woman falls down to her knees and stares,
confused by her wide footprints in the moss.
She cannot find the answer anywhere.
It’s time to sleep? It’s time to wake? I swear
I cannot say. Are these my hands? Or claws?
Am I a woman dreaming she’s a bear?
I cannot find the answer anywhere.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged perception, poem, reality, Rilke on January 19, 2013| 2 Comments »
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, poem I,1 from “Book of a Monastic Life”)
We are lonely,
the tea and me
and nine o’clock.
So I ask Rilke
to join us. He tells me,
just as the sun
leaps over the mesa
and enters the window,
that nothing has ever
been real without
my beholding it.
I sit a long,
long time considering
his words. Not the sun?
Not the tea? Not
the gray moth?
The Holocaust?
He tells me this:
All becoming
has needed me.
Looking over the white field
to the blue spruce in the grove
I do not hear
one of them fall.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ego, maggots, poem, pretense, reality on January 14, 2013| 3 Comments »
My current contemplation is how universal it is for all of us to want to feel good about ourselves and how we edit the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to that end.
—Sally Estes
Covered in maggots, white and grey,
and tiny granules of poison. No one
wants to remember it this way. It doesn’t
matter if they were real or metaphorical.
The maggots did not wing into butterflies.
The poison was poison. You groveled
and cried. If we can’t be the hero,
we sometimes thrive on becoming
the narrator. It suits our pride. Say:
It happened in someone else’s staircase.
Say: I was younger then. Say: No, they
were ladybugs. Say: It was sand.
But you remember. They were white
and gray, the color of snow on the side
of the highway. Their bodies were soft.
And the poison, it pitted like small stones
into your knees, your bare knees.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adios drama, blossoming, growth, haiku, poem, reality on January 10, 2012| 5 Comments »
we are like roses
in winter—we should not be
blooming but we are
*
when I don’t need the
storm, I fold it up and put
it in my pocket
