Dawn light not yet arrived,
and the dream still so alive in the body—
the astonishment of flight
still rising like a tide in the blood.
Are the blankets real?
Or the weightlessness?
How is the wind still tangling my hair
even as the cat curls warm at my side?
What is this gravity?
For a while, I lie between worlds,
one steady, the other wildly free.
Even grounded, my body can’t unknow it,
ecstasy.
Posts Tagged ‘reality’
Carpe Diem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged carpe diem, connection, love, reality on January 15, 2025| 14 Comments »
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
—Wendell Berry, 1993, I
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?
Toward Peace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, change, peace, reality, transition on June 10, 2024| 5 Comments »
Perhaps some part of me still believes
peace is a destination,
a place we arrive, ideally together.
I notice how shiny it is, this belief,
like a flower made of crystal,
beautiful, but lifeless,
devoid of the dust and scuff
that come from living a real day.
Meanwhile, there is this invitation
to grow into peace the way real flowers grow—
in the dirt. With blight and drought,
beetles and hail.
Meanwhile this invitation
to live in the tangle of fear and failure,
to be humbled by my own inner wars
and wonder how to find a living peace
right here, the peace that arrives
when we take just one step through the mess
toward compassion and notice
as our foot rises our heart also rises
and in that lifted moment
still scraping along in the dirt,
there is a peace so real we become light,
become the momentum that is the change.
Midnight Storm
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dreams vs. reality, lover, nightmare, reality, sleep, storm on January 27, 2024| 4 Comments »
heart thumping fast
as windshield wipers
attempting to keep
the vision clear
in a hurricane,
oh love,
lay your sleep-warm hand
on my sleep-warm leg,
remind me what is dream,
what is real
So Real, the Dream
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cable car, dream, love, reality, san francisco, trust on November 23, 2022| 6 Comments »
In the dream, it was clear,
I am the cable car
and love itself is the cable
beneath the streets,
that pulls me along
up the steepest of hills,
requiring nothing
except I hold on.
Though I can’t see it, it’s there.
Though I must sometimes let go,
I must always return to holding it.
When I woke,
the dream was fuzzy,
but the truth no less clear:
love has carried me.
All day I marvel
at the strength of the cable.
All day I am grateful
for love beyond understanding:
invisible love, powerful love,
a continuous unbroken loop.
Even now, I hear it
singing in its motion,
song of constancy,
song of trust.
One Feeding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cliche, dream, reality on May 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »
A Letter to the Woman in My Calendar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged calendar, Corona Virus, fiction, reality, self, writing on April 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Dear Other Version of Myself,
In my calendar, it’s April second
and you are going to an event tonight
at a bookstore in another town
where the people will gather
and hug each other and taste
each other’s wine. You live in a world
that no longer exists, and every day
I try to reconcile it—how you
had plans to go camping next weekend,
how you were going to go to the theater
with no mask, no gloves,
no sense of your body as a weapon.
Every day, your life, which once was my life,
seems increasingly impossible.
Every day, these two worlds are farther apart—
the one in which you were getting on a plane
to visit your mother
and the one in which I put on rubber gloves
to go to the post office box.
I remember how seldom you washed
your hands for fear that someone you love
would die. I remember what it was like
to hug my friends with no worry
of harming them, to go to a restaurant,
to plan for a day past tomorrow.
Dear Moment That Wasn’t What I Thought It Was,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, psychology, reality, truth on February 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Thank you for blessing me with reality,
for showing me when I’m guilty
of what my friend calls cognitive slippage.
It’s like stuffing a big scoop of wasabi into my mouth,
thinking it’s guacamole. The mind believes
what it wants to believe until it’s shown otherwise.
Thank you for demonstrating how sometimes
I disconnect from the facts—especially when
emotions are involved. Like when I think
I’m a pool of warm soothing water
another could enter, but really, I’m a woman
made of bone and corpuscles. Little can I hold.
I always thought imagination was a gift,
but not, perhaps, when it puts me at odds with what’s true.
Dear moment, I want to be attentive. When you pull out the rug
from beneath my thoughts, I want to be the rug.
And when you poke my theories full of holes, I want
to be the hand that pokes, the fresh air that rushes in.
While Stopped at the Intersection, I Consider
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
One Blood Test
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blood test, escape, medicine, poem, poetry, reality on September 13, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Transportation
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?
What She Said to the Belly of the Whale
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.
My Shoulders, My Lungs, My Sense of Safety
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, intimidation, poem, reality, security on May 17, 2015| 2 Comments »
In the dream, it was a man.
He pretended it was an embrace,
squeezing me as he did.
Getting dressed this morning,
still feeling the places he crushed
Black Friday
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.
Changing Perspective
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.
Reading the Book of Hours
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.
You Won’t Want to Read This
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.
two
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