I am throwing my arms open
to the unstoppable forward
rush of time, the unrelenting
flood of it, how it streams
through a moment and refuses
to stop or go back. I see my
well-made plan is like a
finely carved wooden statue,
precise in its every detail,
perfectly conceived and utterly
lifeless—an artifact.
I toss it into the flow, watch it bob
in the current like driftwood.
How alive it looks now, swirling,
whirling, riding the waves
in perfect attunement
with the roar and the swirl,
the dynamic, honest flush.
I catch a ride on it and find
myself breathless, glittering
with the thrill of not knowing
what might come next.
Posts Tagged ‘time’
All Those Impeccable Plans I Made
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged control, flood, plans, river, time on October 26, 2026| 6 Comments »
Even If I’d Rather Not Know It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, parenting, rabbit brush, seasons, time on September 12, 2026| 4 Comments »
I was gone for four days
and meanwhile the rabbit brush
in the yard have gone gold.
It’s like how my child
was just here on my lap
reading about Aslan
and Skippyjon Jones,
and now she’s across the country
reading Plato and Marcus Aurelius.
What is that scent in the air?
Complex and heavy,
both pungent and sweet,
the scent of how a season
seems to change in an instant,
when all along, the change
was here. Even now, I can
feel it on my bare arms,
the clean cold touch of winter.
It’s not even pretending to hide.
The Fall
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged sonnet, time on August 18, 2026| 14 Comments »
There is a slip of time before the foot
missteps and twists and breaks, that moment when
the bone’s still whole, the woman still upright.
And from that slip, well, then there’s only after.
After, when the bone is cast. After,
when the child has left. After, when
the callous words can’t be unsaid, the missing
ring can’t be unlost, the train can never
be unmissed. And now, and now, and now
is both before and after and a tip-
ping point on which we cannot pause or stand.
But if we did trip off the tip of time,
what would we find beneath it all? A chance
to play in the infinite? Or would we simply fall and fall and fall?
One on Tap
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged devotion, serving, time on July 27, 2026| Leave a Comment »
pouring time
into the shape of this question—
how do I serve life?
I left the ocean
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ocean, time on April 23, 2026| 13 Comments »
but the ocean followed me
to the mountains, bringing
its vastness to the day.
Sometimes it takes me a whole hour
to swim to the other side of a minute.
When I arrive, somehow dry,
at my desk in my chair,
there is salt on my skin, currents
in my breath, scent of brine
still tangled in my hair.
This Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, time on March 20, 2026| 4 Comments »
Driving past the graveyard
listening to news
as it explodes—
while we breathe
it’s never too late
to choose compassion.
One Waiting for College Admissions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged parenting, time on December 12, 2025| 2 Comments »
after Hokusai
I fall asleep, wake,
fall asleep, wake, meanwhile
the sapling becomes a great spruce
The Outing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, skiing, time on December 6, 2025| 2 Comments »
Because once I was an ocean
and now I am a mother,
because every single moment
is integral to ever after,
I give myself to this snowy hour
skiing into the woods with my daughter
and know that no matter how brief a day,
an hour lasts forever.
Too Late?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, light, love, sunset, time, timing on November 28, 2025| 7 Comments »
By the time we arrive at the cliffside
to watch the sunset, the darkness
has already come. But because
of the ink-ish sky, we see thousands
of yellow lights glitter across the harbor.
And moonlight on the water makes
the blackened surface shine. How often
do I think I’m too late, only to find I have
arrived at just the right moment,
the moment in which there is a beauty
beyond the one I knew to wish for.
Like how, when I thought it was too late
to forgive, forgiveness arrived with its
soft and generous hands. Like how when
I thought I was too late to love, love
bloomed like a sunset, radiant and blazing,
and stayed, the way sunsets never do.
Like how I believed I was here to adore the light,
I came to learn how exquisite, how
lavish, how astonishing, the dark.
Reunion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged college, friendship, reunion, time on October 28, 2025| 4 Comments »
And though it has begun to rain
and the Bernedoodle jumps and squirms
between us and though it has been
thirty three years since last I saw her,
I want to linger in the yard when I hug Susie,
and for a moment I am again eighteen
and we are snowshoeing up a fourteen-thousand-
foot peak. The winter sun is brilliant; we
are laughing and I’m exhausted and so alive,
and I am standing in a suburb as golden
leaves whirl and Susie is in velveteen pants,
her hair streaked gray, and she is not at all the same
girl I remember and also exactly the same,
meeting me with a smile, offering to carry
what is mine, speaking of gardens and knitting
and tea. And we’re on the summit of Mt. Elbert
and I wrap my arms around those girls we were.
I thank them for loving each other then,
how that love opens a door to this very moment
to create an intimacy that needed no tending,
as mullein seeds sometimes wait decades
before they bloom. I release Susie and bend
to nuzzle her puppy, a marvel of zeal and scruff.
Is it rain on my face, or tears? I take that young
girl I was by the hand. She walks inside with us.
Calendaring
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, fall, leaves, missing, time on October 5, 2025| 4 Comments »
since I last held you
I measure the days
in fallen leaves—
great brown mounds
beneath empty branches
Sitting with My Husband at the Wedding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged marriage, tear, time, wedding on September 22, 2025| 6 Comments »
Watching the bride
and her father walk
the long distance
from the house
to the benches
in the grass,
I don’t even try
to hide my tears,
fat and warm,
my whole being aware
of how big it is
to give one’s life
to another,
and with her
every step,
my own
wedding comes
closer until
it is me
in a white dress
on the arm
of my father,
my husband
the man at the end
of the aisle,
my own lips
speaking till death
do us part,
my eyes glittering,
spilling, wet—
how sweet now
when the man
on my left
offers me his tissue
and somehow
with his kindness
and a wrinkled hand,
I touch those tears
thirty years ago.
Multitudes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, hiking, self, time on September 7, 2025| 2 Comments »
Over twenty years ago I walked
this same trail to Hope Lake
and crossed the same creeks
and picked my way through
the same talus which is always
falling in the path. I gathered
ripe raspberries and stared
at the red peaks all around.
Who was I then? A stranger
with my same name. I don’t
blame her for not knowing
she was young. As we climb,
I hold her hand. We don’t
say anything, I don’t want
to scare her. And who is that,
waiting for us at the edge?
Some future version of me
I can’t quite make out, but
her arms are open. Her smile
says she were expecting us.
And though it’s about to rain,
we all slip out of our clothes
to slip into the deep blue lake.
Quick, I say to all my selves,
and as one, we enter in.
Long after we leave the lake,
inside me, they continue to swim.
A Scrap in Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dahlia, flower, garden, time on September 6, 2025| 5 Comments »
Something about the relentless beauty
of the dahlias this year makes me forget
lists and calls and news and aches as
I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,
watching them bloom in real time, not
wanting to miss a moment of the long stems
rising, the red color deepening then fading
from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse
begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening
again, and now a hundred years pass,
now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden
bed is gone and the fence is gone and
the trees and the ditch and the home
are gone, and there’s no way to know
this was once a place where dahlias grew.
Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you
to come stand here with me to watch
the dahlias open themselves to the sun,
each petal a hymn to the present,
a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time
we might put in a vase and marvel as
all around it the whole world spins.
The Uptight Scheduler Writes to James Crews
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged james crews, relaxing, schedule, time on July 26, 2025| 15 Comments »
Remember the morning when you and I
were leading a retreat in the old white church
with the bell that still works and it was nine oh three,
and you turned to me and said,
Let’s give folks a little more time to settle.
And I, who had been longing to ring that old bell
since eight fifty six so we could start on time,
well, I sat down at the gingham cloth covered table
and leaned back and stretched my legs,
let my empty hands rest in my empty lap
and a spaciousness entered my limbs
the way the scent of coffee fills the kitchen.
I felt it all day—a new looseness inside the hours.
There are moments when we are ready,
perhaps, to learn a new way to meet a day,
and you, on that morning, with your quiet voice
and unhurried step, you gave the one-sentence sermon
I most needed to hear. Time went from constraint to gift.
All around us people chatted and laughed.
I didn’t fixate on nine oh four and nine oh five.
Instead, I opened like a clock without a hand
and became part of that happy, eager noise.
Just Before We Say Goodbye
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hiking, letting go, mother, presence, time on July 22, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The song we’ve been singing
is gone from the air.
We walk in satisfied silence now.
And it’s beautiful,
the trail lined with sego lilies
and purple fireweed.
This morning’s raindrops
cling to leaves.
How easy it is in this moment
to believe in forever,
the wild roses
endlessly blooming,
the sound of your footsteps
keeping time in front of mine.
U PICK
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged innocence, joy, news, strawberries, time on June 22, 2025| 6 Comments »
STRAWBERRIES, said the roadside sign,
big red letters on a white-washed board.
We followed the signs to the farmer’s field
and wandered into long green rows,
one stiff blue carton my hands. Such blessing
to kneel on the ground and gather
ripe red sweetness with our fingertips,
to pull the small fruits into our mouths
and hum as their sun-warmed flesh turned
to juice on our tongues. How simple
to smile, thinking of nothing but finding
the deepest red berries, praising
our backroad luck. Oh innocent minutes
spent only in joy, forgetting for a moment
how everything is fragile. Later, the news
came crashing in. Such difficult news.
But for those moments, we lived in such
generous sweetness, such abundant
red sweetness, such wholly shared sweetness,
the kind of sweetness so real that while
you’re in it, you slip out of time
and mistake sweetness for eternity.
The Big Self Watches the Small Self
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged abundance, parts of self, scarcity, third person, time on June 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Look at her, checking her watch again,
worried there’s not enough time. Not
enough minutes or hours to do all the urgent
or beautiful things she longs to do—
a list that unspools out of each second—
all those things she is certain must be done.
She how she squirms, how she bites her lip,
as if her unease will make time open up
like a peony. Oh sweetheart who I have lived
with for years, who I have sometimes mistaken
for myself, I see you. It is so easy right now
to be easy with you, a relief, really, not to judge you
for your worry, but to love you for how deeply
you care, how much you want to be in service.
There is a time outside of time in which
you exist, this timelessness from which
I am watching you–imagine a lake
with no shore. A night with no dawn.
A self with no sense of where she might end.
One Way Through
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged the moment, time on May 5, 2025| 2 Comments »
like a sentry
at the gate of forever,
this moment
Poem in Which You Are Storm, I Am Meadow
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, love, meadow, snow, time, transformation on February 17, 2025| 6 Comments »
By noon
the snow
that changed
the world
from brown
to white
in just
a day
seems gone—
the meadow
however, remembers
the gift.
Come spring,
there will
be green.