to grow a heart from lake water and an old
junk yard, from an empty classroom
and cheap novels bought at the second
hand store, two-liter bottles of diet coke
and a dusty dead-end road. There was more,
of course. An old plaid couch with a squeaky spring.
The spiraling cord of an old telephone. A rusty pan
with cornbread made with Mavis’s fresh eggs.
The breathing weight of my newborn girl.
What hasn’t gone into the growing of this heart?
An old red truck. The pinnately compound leaves
of Jacob’s Ladder. But it is the unpetaling
that astonishes now, how all the stories
of my becoming—all the particulars
that seemed so essential—begin to drop
No, not drop, exactly. It’s just that I nourish
these stories less as I turn my attention
toward the vastness from which all arose—
and in this turning, discover how the more
the heart is undone, the more
the heart can grow.
Posts Tagged ‘unlearning’
We could say it took me my whole life
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growing, growth, heart, particulars, unlearning, vastness on September 16, 2025| 4 Comments »
En Garde
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fencing, learning, poem, poetry, self discovery, unlearning on October 9, 2019| 3 Comments »
Keep distance, the fencing teacher says,
and by this he means, stay close enough
to your opponent that you could, at any time,
extend, lunge and attack with your point.
All my life, I’ve tried not to keep distance.
All my life, I’ve done my best to avoid
the attack—from either side. And now,
with my silver lamé and my one white glove
and my face safe behind metal mesh, I dig
to find the part of me who craves engagement,
who seeks a bout, who wants to threaten
my target and exploit their vulnerability.
Keep distance, he says, and I understand
that this is how I show up for the game.
This is how I meet not only the opponent,
but, perhaps for the first time, myself.
Original Sin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, poem, poetry, relationship, unlearning on February 16, 2016| 2 Comments »
Tonight I will give you yourself.
All those pretty words you spun
into negligee, all those promises
you strung like pearls and then
tightened around my neck, all
those lovely leashes you made
out of praise, I give them back.
I have always loved being naked.
I think this is what you loved
most about me, too. Once. No one
is at fault for this strange game
of dress up we’ve been playing.
Perhaps it is what we were taught to do.
I unlearn this game. I want to give
you you. I give you your
own nakedness. Any robes
of hope I put on you, I untie
them. See them slip into soft piles
on the floor. Look at you now.
I see I never saw you before.
Out the window, winter is melting.
Everything loses its sheen.
I tried to hate you for the ways
you bound me, though the bounds
were beautiful. Now, all I can feel
is the thrill of this body so bare,
so new. I stare at my feet, my hands
and marvel at how they move.
Is this me? I never knew her.
I know her so intimately.
It is almost sweet now, so innocent,
how we tried to dress each other in dreams.
We didn’t know then that even
the softest words become chains.
I give you yourself, your longing
to be loved in the ways you thought
you needed. I give me myself,
I don’t know what that means,
already I am shedding.
I Told Myself It Was Impossible, But
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, unlearning on March 21, 2015| 10 Comments »
still unfurling into blossom,
this flower I thought
was fully opened
What the Guidebook Can’t Tell You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged naming, poem, poetry, uncertainty, unlearning, wildflower on June 28, 2014| 2 Comments »
I don’t know the name of the flower
about to bloom beside the trail,
but it has the leaves of a lily
and a single bud that hangs heavy
off a long bent stem.
Just as I don’t know the name
for the feeling I have when
I want you to act a certain way
and I have not yet realized
that my wanting is the problem.
Neither of these things matter—
the names, I mean. We like to think
that by naming a thing we know it.
But I have stopped believing that.
Whatever we can name, we start to overlook.
The heliotrope, for instance.
I greet it as we walk by, but I do not
stop to investigate its tiny white flowers,
nor do I rub its leaves between my fingers
to better understand their shape.
Imagine I did not know your name.
So every time we met I would
gather everything I could about you—
the scent of you, the shape of your hands,
the weather of your moods.
And imagine I forgot me, too,
and in discovering you, I’d see
myself anew. And I would be unfamiliar
with words such as happiness or forgiveness
or wound or wife.
Ah, to meet each other like that, the way we meet
this strange flower. More inquisitive than convinced.
More curious, less sure. Less like gods,
omniscient, commanding, more as if we are the ones
with so much opening left to do.
Ready to Learn a New Way
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, self-destructive behavior, transformation, unlearning on June 3, 2014| 1 Comment »
I am perhaps like the fish
who is attracted to the hook,
the thrill of the line—
though barb is sharp,
at least for a moment
I know what it’s like
to fly.
No Guarantees
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged knowing, learning, poem, poetry, unlearning on February 22, 2014| 7 Comments »
It turns out I have loved
learning too much.
Star charts. Yeast. Omega 3s.
Tear fluid osmolarity.
Particle and wave.
I want so much to make sense
of things. Like why we have
so few words for smell.
Why only some birds sing.
Slave to purpose, slave
to the why, slave to the need
to know. I want to compare,
to contrast, to chart, to rank,
to graph, to prove. As if
that might tell me my place
in the world. So I pin down facts
like butterfly wings, splayed
and precise and dead.
Meanwhile the world expands, overflows,
moves beyond all that I think I know.
Let me live on questions. Let
me lose my absolutes. Let me be willing
to abandon my certainty. We are that
which breaks down the walls
of the learned—let me know this,
and unknow it, too.
For the Hungry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, poem, poetry, unlearning on September 15, 2013| 1 Comment »
it bends
the dark
and sweetens
loss
it holds
the daughter
as
she coughs
it rides
on buses
slips
on tongues
it begs
to be
unlearned
undone
and when
the swagger
turns
to swoon
and when
the clock
has ticked
too soon
and when
the rain
keeps raining
long
it finds
the spaces
in the song
where all
the words
you thought
you knew
are different
now
it leaks
somehow
this love
this mmm
this empty
spoon
Five Ripples
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged learning, poem, poetry, tanka, unlearning on May 18, 2013| 4 Comments »
reading in my journal
the lesson I learned two years
ago the same lesson
I was so thrilled
to learn today
*
I leave the dishes
when you say “let’s play,”
not because I want
to play but because the day
will come when you won’t ask
*
the veil
of hurt, though it
weighs nothing
I am utterly unable
to lift it
*
sowing poppy seeds
in the meadow together,
though it will be months
before we see stems
already I feel blossoming
*
what would be left
if we solved all our troubles—
just a breathing
sometimes when I get very still
I am still not still enough
Driving Late Night with Vivian Rose
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loss of self, love, parenting, play, poem, self, teaching, unlearning on November 1, 2012| 4 Comments »
Mommy, she says,
I can see right through myself.
What do you see,
I ask.
I see the night,
she says.
Are there stars,
I ask.
She pauses long.
Yes.
And then a few moments later
she says, Mom, I’ve disappeared.
How do they do it,
these young ones,
teach us to be
so wholly here.
Do you believe in always, the wind said to the rain
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged alone, couplet, infinite, losing the self, rhyme, tetrameter, unlearning on October 12, 2012| 8 Comments »
—poem on a line from e.e. cummings
Rubble, smoke, sparrow, stone,
she wakes in darkness all alone.
Angel, master, docent, thief,
she wears the scars of love and grief.
Furrow, honey, Chopin, moss,
those are veils that are her loss.
There’s more, there’s more to be undone—
milk, lattice, lily, plum.
Winging It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flight, mothering, poem, Rumi, unlearning on May 23, 2012| 5 Comments »
What will our children do in the morning if they do not see us fly?
—Rumi, “The Way Wings Should,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Dear Rumi,
You tell me to fly, to cartwheel
around the sky, to soar, to reel,
to spiral in the wind. But
there is a nest and two hungry mouths
and two bodies not yet fully feathered.
It’s easy enough for you to advise
I should let my heart play,
as you say, “the way
wings should.” You
probably had someone else
at your nest to care for your
young while you unfurled
your wings and wheeled with Shams
and felt the joy of rising.
Perhaps I am too literal.
Perhaps you mean later in life.
Perhaps you mean bit by bit.
Perhaps you mean fly in this moment,
wherever I am. Perhaps you mean
I have put too much of a cage
on the word “should,”
have limited notions
of what flying looks like.
I thought I knew what wings
should do. But maybe this letting
go of what I thought I needed,
perhaps this, too, is flight.
Five Unlearning Haiku
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, kiss, letting go, losing the self, mine, poem, possession, relaxing, sky, stars, uncertainty, unlearning, wind on February 4, 2012| 1 Comment »
That wind always tries
to undress me … today
it took my name, too.
*
It’s hard to be
serious when you’re kissing
my elbows.
*
What’s that? It’s only
supposed to have seventeen
syllables? But the sky today deserves at least twenty-five.
*
Erase the word mine
from these lips. Replace it with
nothing.
*
Tonight the stars
are just stars, the lines that link
them all undrawn.
Or Is It Learning to be More Than That?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged answer, certainty, falling, path, poem, question, silence, uncertainty, unlearning on February 1, 2012| 9 Comments »
I curl the question mark of my body
into the silence around us. There is silence
inside of us, too, a pure silence that pools
and spills and overflows making it easier now to not know,
to not even guess what comes next,
and after years of wanting answers and trying
to make the world fit into an equation or an outline
or a calendar square or a rhyme scheme, I am
more easy now with falling into silence, with falling and
not even believing in wings, falling past
the hands reaching out to rescue me as if
falling is a terrible thing. But even falling
is a form of knowing, just a new metaphor,
a new word for path. And even a question mark
knows where it curves, where it is line, where it
breaks, where it becomes a point, one small point
amongst many small points. I am learning,
unlearning, to be less than that.
The Gift of Forgetting
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being available, brilliance, dissolution, gift, Rumi, stars, unknowing, unlearning on January 29, 2012| 3 Comments »
As salt dissolves in ocean,
I am swallowed up in you
beyond doubt or being sure.
Suddenly, here in my chest a star
came out so clear it drew all stars into it.
—Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks, Say I Am You
Dear Rumi,
It is easy to believe that a star could come out so clear in your chest,
a star so clear it could draw all stars into it, but in my chest? Here?
A star so clear? I don’t think so. No wonder I stumble
each time I try to memorize this line. I don’t think this is humility.
Is it fear? Fear of being responsible to my own light?
Here in my chest my own heart is straining against the cage
of my ribs, pushing hard all the oceans of blood that stay
in the shores of this skin—some interior ocean I am afraid
to go swimming in. “Not past the tip of the nose.” That is what
my teacher says, and time and time again I feel how true it is,
and now, your words like rocks in my mouth, here in my chest,
the same lesson again. I have been dreaming of stars,
dreamt that they were being poured into my mouth, not just the stars
but the spaces between them. Are these the stars of which you speak?
My god, here they are, already they have been given to me, and I am somehow unable to see them, unable to believe my own experience,
unable to unwrap the packaging and receive the gift. Here in my chest—
but these stars are not for me. Not something to make me brighter,
but a light that belongs to everyone. All of us dissolved
into the same ocean, all of us dissolved in the same night.
I can almost touch this, and then it is gone,
there is still too much of me here.
two
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, poem, self discovery, unity, unlearning on January 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »
field, thief, woman, stone,
there is nothing the falling
snow does not kiss
*
I could not bloom
for you until I opened
for myself