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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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