Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘tree’

Holding Your Heart


 
I want to trace the rings of your heart
the way I would trace tree rings—
not to count them
but to honor each season of you.
I want to touch my fingertips
to your scars, want to learn
your heart’s stories, find clues
of how you became who you are.
I want to press my palms
to your heart and praise
how it is we grow,
even in disaster, even in drought,
want to praise the dark center,
the time-thick bark, the record
of the ordinary days. I want
to chart the thin slivers of your wounds
and let my hands speak love,
want to tell you in a language
of quiet touch, I see you.

Read Full Post »

Aspen at Heart


 
 
How would it be
to live like the aspen,
to know the self
as one expression
of a glorious, radiant whole,
to live in communion
instead of competition,
to be the first to come in
where damage has been done—
and oh, so much damage
has been done.
I, too, want to grow even in winter,
in cold and naked times
when growth feels impossible,
want to be at once
both soft and strong.
I, too, want to be fueled by light
so I might offer shelter
for the rest of the world.

Read Full Post »




Along the lake and down the hill,
the road dead ended into a meadow
with a wooden fence a girl could slip through,

and slip through she did,
that five-year-old version of me,
slipped through the gaps into the tall green grass

and then wandered to the lake
where the weeping willow hung over the shoreline
and she could sit beneath its shade and disappear—

or perhaps more rightly, she could show up.
As herself. Show up not as a girl who lived up the road
but as shade, as shore, as tree,

as field, as green beyond the fence.
Perhaps it only happened once or twice,
that journey past the dead end,

but forty-seven years later, I remember
the dissolution, how beneath that tree
I was no longer who I was, only more so.

How I knew myself as integral to the miracle.
There were whole decades I forgot her,
that infinite version of me.

Tonight I can tell she never left.
How did she ever fit in my limited sense of self?
What does she have to teach me now

of fences, of shadows,
of sitting quietly,
of the art of slipping through?

Read Full Post »




Though she has been shaped
by pain, she thrives.
She is like a tree, now,
that remembers its wounds
and grows differently
because of its injuries,
some of them deep,
yet is no less vigorous
as it grows new healthy wood,
as it reaches for sun,
as it grounds into the soil,
as it offers its fruit
to the world.

Read Full Post »



with a line from Charles Simic, “The Prodigal”


Glade of light on the empty stage.
She steps into it, eyes blinded.
Someone in the audience
clears a throat. Someone
scuffs a sole. Many invisible
someones make no sound at all.
She has faith they are there.
She is holding a stack of papers.
Her chest contracts, rises.
So much that happens goes unseen,
a secret cinema.
She opens her mouth
and the words fall out like leaves
releasing themselves from a tree.
With each sentence she is more bare
until only her trunk remains.
She is an aspen arriving in January,
skeleton exposed.
What no one can see
are the roots. What no one can see
is she is standing on trust.
It has taken her fifty-two years
of bursting into color and
wildly waving her branches
to finally learn how 
to stand still.
The other trees stand with her,
and though it is winter,
their roots grow wider, deeper.

Read Full Post »

Now Everlasting



 
 
The cotton is starting to fall from the trees
and already handfuls of white cover the ground.
Every year, it happens, this mid-summer snow,
and sitting here, I seem to exist in a now
that includes every summer—a now
of goose honk and bright pulse of cricket song,
deep green fields and whitewater.
I feel utterly tethered to the moment
and startlingly eternal—daughter
of blue sky and swallow flight, red cliff
and low golden light. What is forever
to the cottonwood trees if not now,
this very now when the tiny green seeds
are given fluffy white froth to travel on.
What is forever if not for this moment
of summer when I forget
whatever else I should be doing
and give myself up to scent of chokecherry,
prickle of grass, the unpredictable breeze.

Read Full Post »

Scale

The heart
is perhaps
more bonsai
than redwood—
constrained
by the size
of its container—
still, it branches,
it grows,
learns to thrive
inside,
no less
remarkable,
no less
evergreen.

Read Full Post »




It’s not forever.
When we fence a tree
down by the river,  
some slender tree
that a beaver could easily
gnaw through, the fence
only stays up until the trunk
grows big and thick,
wide enough to discourage
any who would try take it down.

Just today, I realized I’d built a fence
around me. Noticed it
only because, while routinely
clearing out,
I dismantled the fence
and took it away.
How invisible a wall can be.

What amazed me:
how enormous I’ve become—
vigorous, robust,
sturdy enough not to worry
about little bites.
I remember how, not so long ago,
I was so vulnerable.

You could hug me now,
now that the fence is gone,
though your arms wouldn’t quite reach
all the way around.
Perhaps that’s as it should be.
Part of me belongs to you.
Part of me is still growing
into the world.

Read Full Post »

From the Cottonwood

I want to hear the song in the old cottonwood tree

outside my window, the tired xylem, the weary phloem,

the rough hymn of the ancient bark. I want to know

how, despite fatigue, it continues to flourish,

to push new cells through the tips of the twigs,

how it thickens despite long drought.

I want to hear the dark lullaby of the worms

as they move through the loyal roots—

what do they know of persistence?

And the dappld shadow that continues to grow,

what might it teach me of love?

Let me be the student of the limbs

that broke off in the wind. Let me listen

and listen again. There is too much

I think I know. I’ve been singing the same

familiar songs so long I began to believe

they were gospel. Oh, how I’ve loved the psalms of green.

Let me sing them while they last. And then, may I learn

to love the song of emptiness, song of surrender,

song of whatever comes next.

Read Full Post »

Learning

Today the shadows

teach me to love

what is dim,

the sweet respite

of obscurity

when the sun

is too much

and a tree

yields its shape

so that I might slip

my clumsy heat

out of the bounds

of the vertical world

and find instead

a cool dark pool

on the ground,

as if I’m a boat

that has discovered

at last

a slim calm eddy

in which I might rest.

This is perhaps

the way we start

to meet our deaths—

sliding into the relief

of these dark, quiet

channels.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: