A week before winter solstice,
we explore in our room a spilling
of low-angled sun, a deep pool
of light the darkness has not
yet devoured. Our bodies,
pale pilgrims traversing the night,
wade in, then dive, surprised
by this warm, naked hour.
Our hearts have been wrecked,
but we yet survive, washed up
like flotsam on this radiant
shore, this place we’ve known
thousands of days before.
But somehow, today,
this bright measure of sun
helps us more truly arrive—
sometimes it’s the unremarkable
gifts that keep us alive.
Posts Tagged ‘sun’
December 14
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged light, nakedness, sun, survival, warmth, winter solstice on December 15, 2025| 11 Comments »
Morning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, grief, loss, sun on July 7, 2025| 6 Comments »
By the time I realized
I was dreaming of him,
it was too late.
Already, the dream
was vanishing like night,
like dew.
For an hour I lay there,
eyes closed, grasping
at glimpses. Losing them.
All I was left with:
He was happy.
So was I.
Finally, I opened my eyes
to this world where
he is not. And yet.
The sun was here warming
the bed. More truly, the sun
was not physically here.
The sun is somewhere
far, far, far away,
but that doesn’t stop it
from transforming
the whole room.
How Do I Ever Forget It?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, evening, light, sun on May 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »
That moment that opens
when the evening light
makes the whole field glow
so everything is luminous,
every blade, every leaf, every stone,
even the weeds, even the carcasses,
even the ones who are watching—
not to forget we can also be cruel,
can kill, can lie, can betray,
but oh, we can also be as receptive
as a field in the golden hour,
letting light pour through us until
we, too, are that radiant, that generous,
that willing to be in service to beauty.
Shining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple tree, light, long marriage, love, sun on May 16, 2025| 13 Comments »
Have you seen the way the sun
spills only the teensiest fraction
of its light into the crabapple tree
and yet that is enough to transform
the petals from plain flat white
into radiant luminosity? Sometimes
love does this, too—I am thinking
of the way a woman can wake up
beside another human for thirty-some years,
perhaps she thinks she knows that person,
perhaps she really does, and then,
one morning, she sees them anew,
shining, gleaming even—not
just some trick of the light but
some magic love offers us,
the chance to witness how our
partner is changing, to marvel
at their ongoing becoming, to know
afresh just how lucky we are.
Commingling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, desire, floating, pleasure, pond, sensuality, sun on January 22, 2025| 14 Comments »
What if our flesh commingled became the mother of light and sound, the vast word, the ocean forgotten at birth?
—James Tipton, “What If, When We Held Each Other”
I love it when I float on the pond in summer
like a human water lily,
the top of me sun-drunk and heat-buzzed,
seduced by shine, blossoming into blaze,
the rest of me held by the cool and swoony dark.
It’s like having two lovers at once—
one playful, one taciturn—
both of them tracing the shape of me
in the way only they know how,
both of them enticing me to fall in love
with having a form that shivers and stipples
and craves and longs to be found.
I desire them both,
the one that invites me deeper in,
the one that bids me rise.
The one that caresses with liquid tongues,
the one that strokes me hot and bright.
How I love to have a body then,
nakedly alive, enticed by sky,
embraced by the deep,
blissed and beguiled by the kiss of it all,
the one original kiss that links me back
to the miracle of being become flesh.
How good it is then to be limb and skin.
How good to be a nexus of firing nerves.
How shameless I am as I beg the world,
touch me, please, touch me,
please, make me yours.
After Many Weeks of Sun
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, rain, sun on June 15, 2024| 8 Comments »
I woke to rain,
in love with rain,
and the rain made its
soft rain music on the roof
and I listened to rain
in the rain-soaked dark
until my dreams were rain
and my waking was rain
and the morning was rain, rain, rain—
scent of rain in my lungs,
shine of rain in my eyes,
and the green song of rain in the grass,
and I gave my whole self to the rain
not thinking of anything else I had lost,
only rain in my thoughts,
only rain until I thought of you
and then somehow you were the rain.
In Case You Don’t Know Already
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brilliance, daughter, love, mother, power, sun on February 14, 2024| 10 Comments »
—for my daughter
One day you will wake
and discover you are a sun,
radiant, fueled by your own core,
capable of luminosity so great
you blaze through lightyears of darkness.
You will know your own power
and it will never occur to you
not to trust it, not to share it.
You will not be able to forget
your own magnitude.
Nor will such glory be a burden.
You will simply shine
because that is who you are.
No need to apologize.
No reason to be jealous
of any other sun,
of any other star.
On that day,
you will see how it is
you have always been a sun,
even in the darkest days.
Then, you were also the clouds
and the great shadow
that made you stop
believing in your light.
You are, in fact,
what makes the day itself—
you are that integral,
that crucial,
that bright.
On the Winter Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, light, opening, solstice, sun on December 21, 2023| 9 Comments »
Let’s reach toward each other
with gazes gentle
as midwinter sun—
with a seeing so generous
we can’t help but turn
toward the other
to let ourselves be seen.
There are many reasons
to close, to shut down.
But when we meet
with such light in our eyes,
then we open together
like December dahlias,
soft and many petalled,
open like bird song
after a long, mute night.
Letter to Myself in the Future
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged quiet, self care, sun, winter on December 11, 2023| 6 Comments »
I want to give you this quiet hour
spent outside in the winter sun,
the slipknot of the breeze almost not there,
the sky an incandescent blue,
the river a murmur in its growing ice,
the dried grass barely a rustle.
How warm it is, even midwinter.
What I most want to give you
is not this hour, but the memory
of how you said yes to it,
how you set aside the phone,
how you turned off the screen,
how you let the book stay on the shelf
and did not touch the piano keys.
Remember sweetheart, how it felt
to slip between the cracks of the day
right into the fullness of being,
how you were so welcomed
by the air, by the light.
You could do it again,
slide out of your self.
Become wind.
Become the light.
Terce
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, hope, light, prayer, sun on October 11, 2023| 9 Comments »
It’s the light this morning
that opens me. How is it
a certain changing angle of gold
can make the heart leap up
all nimble and sprightly and eager to praise
as if it’s never before seen such beauty,
as if it doesn’t happen every day,
this radiance that reaches
through space to find us
wherever we happen to stand
on this unlikely planet.
I don’t know how it is the light
works as a luminous key to unguard me
and swing wide my gates,
but on this morning filled with news
that makes me shutter, shut down,
close off and clench,
this stroke of light, it’s everything.