Sometimes there is inside me
a space so great
my body takes itself outside—
as if the house is too restricting,
as if this inner space
must be met by something vast as field,
boundless as sky, immeasurable as interstellar space.
If it is storming, so much the better.
If rain races down the face
and saturates the clothes, this is right.
If wind rips at my hair
or snow stings my cheeks
or lightning makes my hairs stand on end,
it only serves the aliveness.
If it is warm and still,
the inner space expands
into the warm and still.
There are feelings too immense for four walls,
too intense to be trapped in the skin,
sensations that rhyme with the cosmos,
moments when we start to grasp
what we are made of—
more energy than matter,
more nothing than something,
more everything than we ever dreamed.
Posts Tagged ‘weather’
Getting Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, nature, outdoors, spaciousness, weather on January 9, 2023| 11 Comments »
In the Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged parenting, rain, thunder, weather on June 3, 2021| 2 Comments »
your
words
a clap
of
thunder
lightning
striking
close
and
me
without
an
umbrella
down
these
cheeks
it
must
be
the
rain
Groundhog Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Groundhog Day, Jacob and the angel, shadow, weather on February 1, 2021| 2 Comments »
May I not only see my own shadow
but may I let it wrestle me
the way an angel once met Jacob
then wrestled him till dawn.
May we scrabble and scrap
until I am trembling, exhausted,
until the shadow dislocates what I think I know
about how to move through the world,
until panting I beg it to bless me,
cling to it until it gives me a new name.
I want to know everything
I am capable of—the destruction,
the ferocity, the benediction.
I don’t need to know the weather.
I just want to know that I can meet
whatever comes, even
the darkest parts of myself,
and learn from them,
then limp into the daylight
toward healing, toward wholeness.
Clean Slate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, language, snow, weather on January 29, 2021| 2 Comments »
It’s almost always sunny just before
it snows—just before the sky turns grey
then meets the earth in giant swaths
of blue turned clouds turned snow turned drift,
and haven’t you sometimes wanted
to do that, too—to shift in an instant
from warm to cool, from blue to gray,
to know yourself as the opposite
of what you are, just as a day does,
an entirely new syntax unspooling
in swirling verbs and whirling predicates
so complex you forget who the subject is—
haven’t you wanted to flurry, to blizzard,
to white out until there were no tracks
like sentences left for you to follow?
As the Pressure Drops
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blizzard, bomb cyclone, compassion, forgiveness, poem, poetry, snow, weather on January 7, 2018| 12 Comments »
Across the country, blizzards—blizzards
so big that folks speak of bombogenesis
while standing in line in the coffee shop.
And the snow begins to fall, snow
blocks out the sun, snow fills the roads,
the drives, the sills until people begin to forget
who they are when there isn’t a storm.
Imagine the storm goes on.
Imagine that it isn’t snow falling,
but forgiveness. Imagine all those people
rising morning after morning to find
themselves buried in compassion.
Piles of it. Heaps of it. Giant white drifts of it.
It must be dealt with before anything else
can happen. Before people can even
walk out the door, they must lift it
and move it and feel its surprising weight.
Who knew there was so much of it? Who knew
just how completely it could shut things down
if not engaged with properly? It takes some time,
perhaps, before the people see
how beautiful it is, how every single thing
it touches is softened, turned to sparkle,
turned to shine. A disruption, to be sure,
but sometimes it takes a blizzard
to find the calm. Sometimes
we must be stopped
before we learn how to go on.
And the colder it gets, the more
we must work to be warm.
Blessing the Weatherman’s Mistake
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgiveness, monostitch, poem, poetry, weather on December 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Interior Weather Report
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fog, great blue whale, parenting, poem, poetry, sadness, tetrameter, weather on November 6, 2013| 1 Comment »
Yesterday, a low gray haze.
A fog. A blur. A sullen shroud.
At dinnertime my young boy says,
Mom, can you guess how much a cloud
would weigh? I guess a thousand pounds.
No, more, Mom, guess again, he says.
Two million pounds? He says, Go down.
I give, I say. He looks away,
then tells me, Half a great blue whale.
And guess how much a storm cloud weighs?
I say, I give again, and smile.
A whole blue whale, he says, then splays
his hands in thrill, and says, Guess how
much hurricanes would weigh?
This time I guesstimate too low—
Perhaps two hundred whales, I say.
By now I’m curious about
how many pods of great blue whales
could swim in squalls of heartsick doubt
and grief, the pea soup kind that swelled
up yesterday. Three hundred whales,
he tells me and I wonder if
the same great number found their way
into my brooding thoughts. He shifts
the conversation to how heat
is what makes clouds suspend up high.
Meanwhile, a foggy thought repeats.
A dozen great blue whales swim by.