This moment is not
the citrus burst
of ripe blood oranges
nor bitter dark
of Ceylon tea
nor warm whiskey
of long, slow kisses—
instead it tastes
of the must of loss,
the salt of what was,
the sharp young wine
of words not yet said,
and there,
dancing on the tip
of the willing tongue
the yeasty, springy crumb
of truth.
Posts Tagged ‘truth’
One Memoir
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, love, thoughts, time, truth on February 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »
these beautiful thoughts
old pages turned yellow
every word still true
Hiding Comes Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hiding, truth on January 27, 2021| Leave a Comment »
The hiding doesn’t want to hide anymore.
It’s done with shadows and corners and masks.
All it wants is to show up. To step out.
To be seen. There was a time
when everything frightened it, when hiding
was desperate for a veil, a shroud, a disguise.
Hiding doesn’t remember what changed.
It only knows that one day it was no longer content
with holing up. Couldn’t. It no longer fit in its hole.
It wants big sky and meadows and space.
It wants to skip down main street.
Naked. It wants to know itself and be known,
to be as out there as exposé, as confession,
as a kiss on the sidewalk at noon. It wants
headlines. Declarations. Independence.
It knows things might get messy.
That’s why it brought a broom,
but damned if it will wear gloves.
It wants to get all that dirt in its fingernails.
It wants the callouses that come with revelation.
Choosing Truth
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged choices, survival, truth on January 24, 2021| 2 Comments »
And if I find I’d rather not meet the truth,
then I can notice the little girl in me,
the one who hides in the closet
when she is afraid, the one who plays dead,
the one who ends all her stories with happily
ever after, and I can choose to love her.
I don’t need to drag her out or force her to look
or tell her that sometimes the villain wins in the end.
Instead, I can remind the rest of me how alive I feel
when I meet it all, when I choose to enter the day
eyes open, ears open, hands open
and let the world in. That is how,
on this day when I know the truth
of how cruel we humans can be,
I can lean into that pain at the same time
I watch the sky turn pink behind the white aspen
and feel the cold air kiss my cheeks,
my breath rising in visible prayer
meeting difficult truths I walk right through.
Taking It All Off
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Kierkegaard, nakedness, truth on September 25, 2020| 4 Comments »
In order to swim, one takes off all one’s clothes—in order to aspire to the truth, one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one’s inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness, etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
—Søren Kierkegaard
And so I attempt to slip out
of the shirt of defensiveness,
slip off the belt of shame.
I wriggle against the jeans
of righteousness and tug
off the socks of distrust.
It’s scary to take it all off,
but everything else feels too tight
these days, and damn,
I just want the truth so bad,
want to wear it like my own skin,
want to step into it like slippers
I will never take off, want to
wear it like boots that will
carry me over any terrain,
want to wear it like
an eternal perfume—
something I am sure is there
even with my eyes closed,
even in the dark.
Finding Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beets, faith, garden, truth on September 20, 2020| 8 Comments »
While pulling the beets,
it’s impossible to lose faith
in the world. Those tiny seeds
that once fit in the palm are now
large red globes,
dense with dark sweetness
and heavy in the hand.
They are like promises kept,
like small proofs in patience,
confirmations that sometimes
the good that’s growing can’t be seen.
They are like hard truths.
Not everyone will want them.
But some will. Some will.
Ars Poetica
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged answer, ars poetica, blank, question, truth on August 11, 2020| 6 Comments »
All these years of wandering,
toward what? On a blank page,
where are the secrets hidden?
How many mysterious paths?
If there is a truth, perhaps it, too, is blank.
If there is way, perhaps it, too, is wandering.
Sometimes I just want the answer.
Always it comes back to this:
An orbit. A spiral. A mobius trip.
A boundary curve where the question
is its own topology, where the question
is its own astonishing arrival.
One Eavesdropping
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cloud, truth on February 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Dear Moment That Wasn’t What I Thought It Was,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, psychology, reality, truth on February 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Thank you for blessing me with reality,
for showing me when I’m guilty
of what my friend calls cognitive slippage.
It’s like stuffing a big scoop of wasabi into my mouth,
thinking it’s guacamole. The mind believes
what it wants to believe until it’s shown otherwise.
Thank you for demonstrating how sometimes
I disconnect from the facts—especially when
emotions are involved. Like when I think
I’m a pool of warm soothing water
another could enter, but really, I’m a woman
made of bone and corpuscles. Little can I hold.
I always thought imagination was a gift,
but not, perhaps, when it puts me at odds with what’s true.
Dear moment, I want to be attentive. When you pull out the rug
from beneath my thoughts, I want to be the rug.
And when you poke my theories full of holes, I want
to be the hand that pokes, the fresh air that rushes in.
The Truth
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, seeds, speaking, sunflower, truth on January 20, 2020| 2 Comments »
Inside the bright words
there are other words
that want to be said—
small words
in dark shells.
.
It reminds me
of the sunflowers
that grew in the fall—
how we loved them
for their golden petals,
but they were true
to the small dark seeds
that grew them,
to the small dark seeds
they grew.