I want to travel the desolate lands of the heart,
enter red places where nothing else grows,
where there is nowhere for either of us to hide,
some vast, unmapped space where we cannot
know what we will do next. There are canyons there
forged by currents of tears so old we no longer
remember their source. We could walk
to the canyon’s edges, stand at the cliffs,
drop our names and stories into the abyss.
What would be left of us to watch the sun setting
beyond the horizon, the sky changing from red
to blue before the irregular moons begin to rise,
one quick and bright, the other ghostly and slow?
In the midst of such barrenness, would we finally
trust just how lush, how exotic, how feral and fecund
this chance we’ve been given to be alive, to love?
Posts Tagged ‘space’
Inner Mars
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desolation, love, mars, space on December 22, 2025| 2 Comments »
Somewhere in the Universe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, daughter, family, mother, space on December 24, 2023| 20 Comments »
There is this hour when my mother
and daughter and I are side by side
shaping soft red dough into tiny balls
to add to the green spritz wreaths;
the kitchen smells of almond
and butter, and there are carols
on the stereo and it’s going to snow.
Yes, I know there are thousands
of imperfect moments,
but there is also this moment
when I find myself smiling
in a small kitchen in a narrow river valley
in a vast mountain range on a large continent
on a smallish planet in one galaxy among
the hundreds of billions that somehow
all belong to a universe that’s expanding faster
than we think it should—
and as I hum along to a medieval hymn
about how a rose is blooming,
my heart scoured, my heart full,
how is it I, too, am a chord unfolding from minor
to major amid the cold of winter?
How is it I am a rose blooming bright,
faster than I think I should,
this dark season strangely blessed?
One Potential
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged expansion, potential, self, space on February 5, 2023| 2 Comments »
as the self expands
through deep space, deep space expands
to fit in the self
Grand Scale
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, perspective, scale, small, space on October 3, 2022| 7 Comments »
Today I am grateful to remember I’m small—
a woman who lives in a deep river canyon
surrounded by fourteen-thousand foot peaks
in state the size of New Zealand
in the fourth largest country on Earth
on the fifth largest planet in our solar system
which has a radius of three billion miles
in a galaxy one hundred thousand light years in diameter
in an observable universe of ninety-three billion light years.
I sit at the end of the deep river canyon
and look at my two cupped hands.
What I can carry is so small.
What carries me is so great.
I offer it my grief.
For a moment, I am weightless.
Strange Teaching
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eternity, space, teaching on July 7, 2022| 10 Comments »
Sometimes when I forget to think
I feel in me eternity, feel big bang
and black hole and spiraling galaxy.
Feel myself as arc of swallow,
bend of river, canyon depth,
feel myself as wind, as branch,
as scent of evergreen,
as slowly spinning earth.
In those moments,
I feel the everything I am
and the everything I’m not—
a self so whole it is lost.
No me, no you, no other,
no here, no there, no when,
no need to name, no need
to understand, no need
to state things just so.
The quietest of teachings:
the erasing of the one
who wants to know.
The Inconceivable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, grief, loss, love, space on April 27, 2022| 6 Comments »
Nothing can separate us from love.
There is no way to know this
without paying a cost so great
some part of us longs to bargain
with the universe and trade back
the priceless truth. But part of us—
the part that cannot be named,
the part that wakes at dawn,
the part that sings in the darkness,
the part that wades in the infinite—
it’s not so much that this part says yes,
more that it simply expands with the truth,
much as the universe itself expands
due to a dark, mysterious energy.
Any scientist will tell you,
empty space is not nothing.
We who grieve learn
to hold that empty space
and know it as love.
I know, it’s inconceivable.
We feel how it holds us, too.
The Price of Nothing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, Art, nothing, space on June 7, 2021| 6 Comments »
for “the lucky buyer” who “went home with a certificate of authenticity” for an “immaterial sculpture” by Salvatore Garau
What could be more valuable
than nothing? The nothing that
frames “The Thinker,” the nothing
that holds every bowl,
every vase, every bust, every thought.
Let others buy the clay, the steel,
the papier-mâché. I will be satisfied
with nothing more than nothing.
Nothing pleases me. Nothing
enchants me. Nothing,
as Heisenberg says,
has a weight. Just think
of the space here beside me
where you are not.
If someone asks me why
I have a five-by-five-foot
empty space taped off in my home
with a plaque that says I Am,
it is because I am so in love
with nothing. Imagine it—
nothing, the color of happiness,
nothing, the size of love,
nothing, the shape of god.
This poem was published in Rattle’s Poet’s Respond on June 13, 2021
In Orbit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, earth, prayer, space, violence on March 26, 2021| 6 Comments »
Count the one beautiful blue and green planet.
Count it again.
Say “home,” then marvel at the taste of tears.
Notice how no borders matter from here.
Remember how important they feel
when standing on a border. Once
you dreamt of being alone. Of being
far away from parking lots and grocery store lines
and men with guns and violent conviction.
Now you dream of touching someone else,
of breathing in the scent of garden dirt,
of hearing a voice without static, of lying down
in a bed, held by your own sweet gravity.
What you would do to taste a tree-ripened peach.
Give up on counting stars. Draw lines between them,
creating your own constellations:
The open hand. The river gorge. The crooked evergreen.
A semi-automatic rifle, which you re-constellate
into a small bouquet of lilies. Consider forgiveness.
Wonder how long it will take before it feels authentic.
Circling has taught you how things come around.
Remember? There was a time you didn’t think
you knew how to pray.
One Review
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged judgment, satisfaction, space, stars on July 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »
asked to rate my satisfaction
from one to five stars—
trying to submit the milky way
Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kindness, personal responsibility, perspective, poem, space, togetherness on July 19, 2020| 11 Comments »
It smacks me, sometimes,
how connected we are—
though we draw boundaries,
build walls, fight wars,
call names, and kill. All it takes
is a photo of earth from space
and I’m stunned again,
how much we are in this together.
And though we’d rather not know it,
every choice we make
affects everyone, everything else.
Perhaps this is why I weep
when the woman I’ve barely met
embroiders me a sweater
with a word she knows I’ll love
and then brings it to my home.
Because it’s proof of kindness,
a confirmation that beauty
not only exists, it will lead us to each other.
How easily two strangers
might become friends.
It can happen anywhere
on this small blue and green planet—
anywhere two people co-exist,
the invitation to be generous,
thoughtful, to think of new ways
to be good to each other.
Each kindness a bridge that spans
the world’s flaws. Each moment,
another chance to build another bridge.
It Comes Down to This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, loss of self, love, protons, science, space on February 8, 2020| 5 Comments »
Not that I want to be someone else,
just that I want to be less myself,
which is to say less the woman
who thinks she knows anything
about anything—gardening or writing
or skiing or parenting or loving—
I want to be less who I am and
more what a tree is, what a star is,
protons fused with other protons,
and the strong force that holds
particles together in the center of atoms,
and the weak force that breaks the atoms down,
and the electromagnetic force that binds
all molecules. Yes, this is how I want to meet you,
without a name, unencumbered by a me,
a collection of atoms and forces that rhyme
with you, linked as we are from the very beginning.
How easy it is then to say hello, to fall in love
with each other, the world.
Monday Night: A Portrait
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged astronaut, dinner, food, poem, poetry, prolepsis, space on January 13, 2020| 5 Comments »
You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very minute.
—Deepak Chopra
Even as she made the cauliflower soup,
she was a deep space explorer.
No one else in the room seemed to notice
she was floating. No one noticed
how gravity had no hold on her.
No, they only saw she was chopping onions,
noticed how the act made her cry. How was it
did they not hear her laughter, astonished
as she was by her own weightlessness,
by the way she could move in any direction?
Perhaps the novelty explains why
she forgot to turn off the stove,
untethered as she was to anything.
It’s a miracle she sat at the dinner table at all,
what, with the awareness that she was surrounded
by planets, spiral galaxies, black holes, moons. Yes,
miracle, she thought as she tasted the soup,
and noticed deep space not just around,
but inside her: supernovae, constellations,
interstellar dust,
the glorious, immeasurable dark.
Space Exploration
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inner journey, poem, poetry, science, space on August 11, 2019| 5 Comments »
Perhaps one day they will find the way
to take all the empty space out of our atoms—
condense us to our essence. Then
the whole of the human race would fit
inside a sugar cube. It would serve us right,
expansive buggers that we are, we who stamp
our atoms all over the earth, we who now
leave our footprints in space.
Like our electrons, we exist too many
places at once. Or, perhaps one day,
we’ll learn to embrace all that space within us,
and instead of plundering, conquering, developing out,
we’ll go in, travel in, enter grace.
Poet’s Respond in Rattle!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged math, numbers, poem, poetry, poets respond, Rattle, space, Voyager 2 on December 14, 2018| 2 Comments »
Hi friends,
the poem from a few days ago about the Voyager 2 leaving our heliosphere, “By the Numbers,” was accepted last night by Rattle.com for their series Poets Respond, poems about the news. Here is a link to the text and audio!
By the Numbers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, news, numbers, poem, poetry, space, Voyager 2 on December 11, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Two hundred ninety million.
That’s how many dollars Monsanto
was ordered to pay the dying man
when the company failed to warn him
about how the poison they made
to kill weeds would also kill him.
Two hundred ninety million.
That’s how many miles
the Voyager 2 moves away
from the earth every year. And though
it was made to do so—to travel
past our sun’s magnetic field—who
could blame it for moving away
from this dying planet at
thirty-four thousand one hundred ninety-one
miles per hour. If that number were dollars
today, it would be equivalent to eight thousand dollars
in 1977 when the Voyager 2 was launched.
And eight thousand, that’s how many sacred
elephants there were on the banks
of the Six Tusker Lake in the Himalaya,
elephants who flew in the air, and sages say
the Buddha himself was once born as son
to the chief of these eight thousand elephants.
Yes, sacred and magical things happen here
on the earth, despite the greed,
despite the poison. I was seven
when the Voyager 2 left, and since then
it’s travelled eighteen and a half billion miles.
If those miles were pounds,
that would equal more than a million
large African elephants, though in all of Africa,
there are only four hundred fifteen thousand
elephants left, down from five million
just a hundred years ago. What I am saying
is that as the Voyager 2 enters interstellar space
things are strange here on Earth, and we seem
hellbent on our own destruction, but I
am so grateful to be here, still. Even as
the Voyager 2 hurtles beyond the heliosphere,
I find myself still falling in love
with the twenty-seven thousand three hundred seventy-five
days I have to live,
and the earth’s twelve thousand
species of grass, and the five thousand stars
visible to the naked eye and the two hundred six
bones in the body, all of them working to help
us run toward beauty, yes, grateful
for two hands to hold one beloved face
and, amidst all this enormity, the absolute absence
of sufficient words to say how holy, how incalculable is love,
and how marvelous, really, to stare up
into the familiar night sky and imagine
all boundaries we’re just beginning to cross.
check it out:
Permanent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, possession, space on April 30, 2017| 4 Comments »
In the corner of the closet
in permanent marker
I wrote in small letters
“this room belongs
to Rosemerry Wahtola
forever and ever, no matter
who else lives here.”
The room had been built
for me in the basement
by my father, and I loved
its orange carpet, its
subterranean dark,
the way I could close
the door and be entirely alone.
The room was not mine,
no more than the mountains
are mine, these mountains
I love for their openness,
their long trails, their cliffs,
their secret glades.
No, it is always we
who belong to the spaces
that hold us, though
they change, they mark us
invisibly, they write
on our inner walls,
as if to say you are mine,
child, forever.
When I Drop the Stubbornness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, love, marriage, poem, poetry, space on December 25, 2013| 1 Comment »
When I Drop the Stubbornness
All day I practice
noticing the space
between us, feeling
the subtle tugs, the
repulsions, the charge,
the release. Sometimes
I forget to let it happen,
try to force a nearness or
a solitude. That is when
I can feel it, how real
the space is, almost as if
you are one and I am another
and the space between us
is a third. I have noticed
that when you and I,
at the same time, allow
ourselves to lean—
is that the right word?—
perhaps it is more that we
open to that space,
then I notice how easy it is
to be for each other
as the water is for the moon,
holding entirely without
holding at all, not changing
and utterly transformed.
While Not Sleeping
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, poem, poetry, space on October 23, 2013| 4 Comments »
All night the river
touched my body,
not with its long dark
tongues of chill but with
its thousand thousand
thousand audible waves
all lapping without stopping
rearranging me. Perhaps it
is always this way. Perhaps
we are always being
changed, only we are too busy
to notice it. In the morning mirror
I looked the same, but I knew
different. Perhaps you
have felt it, too, this
absence moving through,
the space it leaves
in its wake.
Split Second Decision
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged greeting, how are you, poem, poetry, space, truth on January 10, 2013| 4 Comments »
She says, How are you?
And there is no right way
to answer this. Tell her, Fine,
and she can smile and you
can smile and move on
to the business at hand.
Or tell her, Oh, you know,
and shrug, and then ask
about her day. There are
waterfalls inside you,
steep icy roads, sirens,
tall golden grass as far
as the eye can see,
and for every moment
that you might mention
to her—when he did this or they
said that, or you knew
whatever it was that you knew—
there is all the space
between those moments,
that space perhaps even
more important than
anything that happened.
How you felt the world
dissolve before it returned.
How everything spills,
ravels, pours out. It’s truer
than anything else you know.
But how do you say this?
So you say, Fine. Or you don’t.
You say, well, there’s no way
to say what you will say.
So you open your mouth,
wondering if a black bird
or a beetle or a little lie
or your heart might fly out.
In the Middle Of It: Five Haiku
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged armageddon, beauty, dragonfly, haiku, mess, moon, space, story, surprise on June 27, 2012| 2 Comments »
balanced on a twig—
two blue dragonflies and
all that space between them
*
the story, calloused
and gnarled, inside it
red leaping blood
*
picking up the moon
like a telephone to dial
your number, of course
*
contemplating
dessert for
the Armageddon
*
opening a can
of worms to find
rose petals