Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, poem, poetry, self, tree on March 17, 2017| Leave a Comment »
When climbing the inner branches
of the largest spruce we can find,
and finding the prickly lattice
an easier ladder than we imagined,
we might climb high enough
that we forget if we are climbing
to get away from or to move toward,
might climb long enough
that at last it is neither tree
nor land nor sky that feels
like home, but our own
limbs as they find the next place
to step, to pull up, to rest.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, movement, poem, poetry, still life, tree on November 6, 2015| 3 Comments »
No leaves on the trees
beside the ditch,
and the first snow
outlines in white what remains
in their absence.
What remains is
the dark gesture of tree,
thrust and jut and extend.
Just this morning,
Meredith taught me
to see the movement
in what appears to be still—
even a brown jar,
she says, suggests twist
and elongate and turn.
I wonder if I could be still
like that, still enough
that the snow might settle
on me, though I’m reach
and wrestle and brawl.
This is our practice,
to move at the same time
toward quietude, toward swirl;
to be the scaffolding that holds up
the miracle; to be shine and rise and fall.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, poem, poetry, sustainability, tree on August 14, 2013| 5 Comments »
Here in the garden
the trees do what trees do—
they do not grow beyond
their ability to support themselves.
In the top of this weeping birch,
the branches are leafless and dead.
They will never grow again,
nor will the tree replace them.
I think of all the ways we try
to heal ourselves, each other.
All the ways we go back to the pain
of the past as if it has some answers.
What if we could let them die, those thoughts,
those wounded ideas of how it should have been,
let them turn brittle and gray, and when
they have lost their weight, let them fall away.
I see how the breeze moves through the leaves
that remain, how green they are, how alive.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, transformation, tree on August 5, 2013| 2 Comments »
Here in the avalanche chute
the absence of trees. We emerge
from the deep spruce to find this bright slash—
an alley of blue bells and larkspur waist high.
How lovely this wound has turned out to be,
lush and leafy and green.
I think of my own violent uprooting.
Who are you? I say to the clearing,
myself, to the old trees with thick trunks
standing at the edge, to the litter of needles
rusty and spongy beneath our feet.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, poem, poetry, self, tree on July 9, 2013| 1 Comment »
all that breathing
and not once today did I think
to thank a tree
*
that woman
in the mirror
I think she looks familiar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged children, Christmas, ideal, jingle bells, mothering, poem, tree, what is real on December 18, 2011| 3 Comments »
We took a ride
in a one horse open
sleigh today,
and I was one horse
and the red sled
was the open sleigh
and the kids laughed
and reeled as we
trudged through
the field and
searched for the perfect
Christmas tree,
which was not
hard to find.
The noon sun, it caught
in large facets of snow
and we sang, “o’er the fields
we go, laughing …”
but just as we got
to the laughing part
and I was belting
“Ho ho ho,”
the kids began kicking
each other and throwing
snow in each other’s faces
and tipping the red sled
so that they tumbled out
not giggling at all
but shrieking,
“I hate you! Go away!”
And this is how
the bliss goes,
sometimes it looks
a lot like bliss
and sometimes
no.
