sending you these words
to wear like a scarf, only softer
than that, more like song
Posts Tagged ‘words’
One Transmutation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, words on May 16, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Future Imperfect
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged intentions, poem, poetry, words on April 1, 2017| 2 Comments »
We’ll catch up soon,
I say, and I actually believe it—
though after I say them
the words stare at their watches
and rush off, late
for their next sentence,
their letters shaking their heads
their sans serif heads,
as if they know
I’ll never learn.
Candor
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, words on November 16, 2016| 2 Comments »
That’s when the words
arrive barefoot
and not in the tight laced shoes
we set out for them
by the door,
and they surprise us—
perhaps because
they appeared on the lips
via tiptoe,
perhaps because
they bypassed the brain
with a leap—
so that before
we have a chance
to stop the rogue words,
they bounce
off the tongue
and out into the air
where anyone,
even we—
despite our horror—
are astonished
at their pluck,
so naked and
going for it
anyway.
Two Nearlys
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, poem, poetry, wanting, words on June 14, 2015| 1 Comment »
Two Nearlys
these empty hands—
there was a time
they grasped for emptiness
*
just before the words
there’s the chance to say nothing—
trees don’t have this problem
Bet We Come Up With Something
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, poem, poetry, words, writer's block on February 3, 2015| 3 Comments »
I spent them all,
every single pretty word
I’d meant to give to you,
spent them on the moon,
on a dozen dozen flowers,
on the long drive home,
but I did show up with
these lips and all
this extravagant silence.
I wonder what else
might happen?
What Might Happen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, not speaking, pandora, poem, poetry, words on March 9, 2013| 4 Comments »
As a bundle of hay, when carried,
becomes heavier and heavier,
so it is with words we swallow.
They begin, light as the leaf
of a forget-me-not, light as
a golden straw of hay, just a hair
heavier than breath. But the longer
the words go unsaid and the more
of them we swallow,
the more they gain weight,
the more they cripple us unspeaking ones,
and soon it is as if we had swallowed a bed
of river stones. Sometimes
we can no longer move at all,
so burdened we become. Sometimes
it takes a complete falling apart
to release all that weight, all those
pent words. No one wants this, of course,
some great spilling. The gaping wound.
The chaos. The words, and the fear
wrapped around them, exposed.
But it is not so bad as we think.
Sometimes, once bare to the sun
and clear air, the words break out
of the calcified layers
and we see them for all they are,
tiny boxes into which
we pack our worst fears, our dreams,
our anger, our desire, our bliss. We open
the boxes and whatever inside has not
turned to dust grows wings,
and our mouths open, perhaps in awe, perhaps
wishing they’d fly back in.
Oh World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loss of self, poem, poetry, self, silence, unknowing, unraveling, words on September 19, 2012| 6 Comments »
Oh world, I love you,
you with your roots
that thrust up through pavement,
you with your mudflows
and rockfalls and storms.
See how daily you feed
and destroy me. How
gorgeous your fruits,
how merciless your gravity.
I love you, world, how
you make me and fuel me
and undo me again and again. Always
another death to die
and always a new bloom.
Never the same, always
the same. World, it feels
too proud to say I am you,
you with your splendor,
you with your grace.
I am dust and ashes.
You move me, adventure me.
World, thy will be done.
My problems are not problems.
My laws all are nonsense.
My rules, my dreams are cages.
Sometimes I forget to let you
raze me. I try to wrestle
the club from your hands.
And when the destruction
is done, I try to rebuild the walls,
not seeing you were offering me
infinity. Sometimes you first bring me milk,
then tear me down tenderly,
your hands the hands of a lover
undressing me slowly, but not
stopping with the scarf, the skirt—
taking also every idea I have,
every certainty, every word,
everything I would say is mine.
World I am rambling through
the silence you hold for me.
I am like a woman dying of thirst
who splashes the water with eager hands
instead of cupping it, raising it to her parched lips.
Oh world, I am losing my mind
and laughing about it. All language
is dust, and look, you blow it away.
Still I am talking to you, crazy,
I love you, I love you. Come wind,
catch these words, rend them
from the one who thinks
she is speaking. Let them fall
all around her like leaves.
Nomenclature
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being, experience, naming, nomenclature, poem, poetry, words on August 30, 2012| 2 Comments »
So long I’ve lived
beneath the same brown birds
and still I do not know
which song belongs to which.
So long I’ve walked
through this meadow
and still I refer to all
the tall green stems as grass.
So long I’ve sat across from you
and still I wonder
who you are.
Oh, do you hear it?
One of those birds,
how it sings
so beautifully,
even in the dark.
I Used to Think Talking Was the Only Answer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, patience, poems, poetry, possibility, silence, words on March 12, 2012| 5 Comments »
In silence
everything
is possible.
Our words,
enwombed,
could become
honey,
could sprout wings,
or (imagine)
could shape themselves
as just the right words
that fall out at just
the right time.
Or, perhaps,
it’s that silence
does the work
that words
can’t do,
linking us
to nothing,
which is
everything.
I give you
silence.
five haiku
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, freedom, haiku, love, perspective, poem, shy, stars, sun, words on January 29, 2012| 5 Comments »
I could never say
what love is but often
I say I love you
*
you’re shy? it’s okay—
I can drip love from these words
instead of flooding
*
who says there is
only one sun? let’s think
vaster than that
*
falling through
the spaces between stars
a temple of emptiness
*
a velvet cage
is still a cage she said
scissors in hand
five
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adjust, god, haiku, listening, opening, poem, the dark, words on January 7, 2012| 2 Comments »
the sky unzipped its
blue dress and offered it to me—
hope it’s not too small
*
winter is easier
when your words melt like snow
on my tongue
*
I asked the world to
open me—I did not count
on infinite rooms
*
it was not the dark
that changed but my eyes that learned
to adjust
*
praying to God, I
said, I said please, I said too
too much to listen
Eight Attempts
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, how do we understand the world?, poem, tanka sequence, time, touch, words on December 20, 2011| 2 Comments »
on our fingers,
six layers of skin
because
our hands
are made to touch
*
my daughter
picks a small stone
from the parking lot
and puts it
in her mouth
*
how do we know
what is real?
the stone
in the mouth
smooth and gritty and cold
*
the days
are so short.
they turn
into years
that are so, so short
*
and have we touched
enough?
the fingers
still have much
skin left
*
I am being
eroded
but you can’t see …
it’s all inside
the canyons deepening
*
I used to rush
to fill in
emptiness—
small stones
sinking into a pond
*
already
I have said
too much.
Note to Self
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged night, nothing, poem, sitting still, words, writing on November 22, 2011| 1 Comment »
Even night is not night enough.
—Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice, his fiancé, 1913.
When even the night
is not night enough
nor does salt seem
salt enough, and the hole
in the looming who am I
is enormous,
but not enormous enough
to gulp down the damn ego whole,
perhaps that is the time
to sit very still
and forget about writing.
There is nothing,
nothing the words
can do then except
not enough because
nothing is enough,
which is to say
only nothing
is enough, and perhaps
in that inadequate night
we are sufficiently vulnerable
to really know nothing.