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Posts Tagged ‘summer’

The Clearing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 11, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
I want to give myself to life
as completely as the corn lilies rising
from the floor of this clearing.
 
All summer they have practiced
growing from tightness
into an ecstasy of green unfolding.
 
Where have I yet to unfold?
So often I clench around my fear
so long I no longer notice I’m clenching.
 
But here at tree line, there is not
one corn lily still trapped in its tightness,
all of them, now unfurled,
 
beginning their push toward goldening,
toward falling back to the earth,
toward moldering toward nothing.
 
That utterly, I want to give myself.
Want to become the clearing.

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Growing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 25, 2025| 3 Comments »

                  for James & Brad


In late July, if you’re lucky, you wander
through the flower gardens your friends
have been nurturing for years—red beds
of bee balm and yellow mounds of St. John’s Wort,
long purple spears of butterfly bush
and thick golden stands of rudbeckia,
and all around you the buzzing, the humming,
the pollinators thrumming, the weaving
of bees and the braiding of birds
and somehow, standing in this thriving place
so lovingly tended and mindfully grown,
you are flooded with admiration for your friends
so great you disappear into the fullness
and emerge with new roots of your own,
one more living thing shaped by the care
and kindness they bring to the world.

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1990

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 10, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
That was the summer I picked up a sex worker
on East Colfax, confusing her upturned thumb
for hitchhiking. Imagine her surprise
when she got into my mom’s silver Volvo and saw me,
a girl of twenty in a pink dress I wore
for my theater internship that day.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, “just down the road.”
This is how I remember it. I warned her
how dangerous that part of town could be
before she told me how her pimp would beat her.
I think we both shocked each other.
She couldn’t imagine why I had picked her up.
To this day, I am grateful she never let me go.

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This

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 2, 2024| 5 Comments »



Walking mid-summer
in the warm summer rain
there is summer in my
step and summer in my skin,
summer in the scent of soil
and summer in my blood
and there is nothing else
I’m searching for but to walk
in the rain in the summery world
with summer in each stride
and in each breath summer
and a summer breeze with its
warm summer touch and it’s
summer, mygod, I’m alive,
and it’s summer right now,
and I, no stranger to winter,
say yes, I say yes, yes to summer.

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Poem Not Really About Spinach

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 1, 2024| 2 Comments »


 
 
Already bolted and wilting
in the heat, the spinach
is past prime and yet
on this first day of August
I’m able to pull two pounds
of triangular leaves
into my bowl, enough
for a generous pan
of creamy saag paneer.
Sometimes it’s not
too late. Sometimes
the world waits for us.
Sure, the stakes are low tonight,
but sometimes we get a glimpse
that things we thought
were lost are not lost
at all, not yet—just taste
that bright and earthy
green, so full of comfort,
so humble, so good.

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How Things Change

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 25, 2024| 10 Comments »


 
 
Between when the hummingbirds come
and when too soon they leave,
we sit in the warm dusk and watch
as broadtails and black chins dart
and dive, defend and chase—
the feeder a loud, competitive zone
where small feathered bodies block
and jostle, crowd and race—
almost impossible to imagine
five months back when this deck
was a still, chilly silent place.
That’s how it is with transformation.
The first thing that must go is the self
who doesn’t believe it can happen.

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More

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 7, 2024| 6 Comments »



 
 
Like scratching
an itch
past the point
of satisfaction,
I fall in love
with golden slant
of low-angled light
that floods the field
on this summer night
till every part of me
is raw.

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Swimming Lessons

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 12, 2024| 6 Comments »


 
 
How scared they were that first day,
the ones who had never before put their faces
into the cold blue water of the pool.
Goosebumps rose on their tiny limbs,
mine, too, as we shivered in the shallow end.
I’d take their hands and we’d move in a circle,
Ring around the rosies—
Their little voices rang out with lisp and shine.
Pocket full of posies—
scent of chlorine and sun screen and
Ashes, ashes, we all fall—
 
Years later, afraid of a much different
deep end, I notice who is holding
my hands. Sometimes we sing
while we meet what we fear.
It makes it easier as we all fall down.

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Sunday Afternoon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 27, 2023| 7 Comments »


Balanced together on a paddleboard
my daughter and I float across the pond.
Already we’ve splashed and tipped
and swum and squealed. Already
we’ve followed dozens of blue dragonflies
with our eyes and greeted
the crawdads that cling to the reeds.
We’ve wrestled and tussled
and dunked and dried and now
we lie on our backs and glide
in the late August sun
and warmth seeps into our skin.
She tells me stories, and my eyes are closed,
and I think, This is why I am alive.
And if the moment is somehow made sweeter
because we’ve been intimate with death,
that is something seen only in retrospect.
In the moment, we are sunbeam and story
and the tickle of damselflies
that land on our skin. We are the aimless drift
from light to light.

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These Hot Days

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 27, 2023| 6 Comments »


And when at last
the breeze comes
on the breath of night,
the whole body sings
with the chill of it—
craves the cool lick
of sharp tongues
on the skin, the bite
of the distant storm.
Touch me here,
says my flesh,
as if I’ve been waiting
all day for my lover—
here, touch me here.
And it feels so good
when the wind slips in
and does what a breeze will do,
but the wanting—
I notice how it, too,
has something
painfully beautiful
to teach me.

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