Bumblebee on French lavender,
fuzzy turning sideways heavy delightful
flight,
rest, wander,
another one alights,
purple, grey green waving;
a lovely warm night watering
the funny patch of weedy garden.
The patch
04 Wednesday Jun 2025
Category Archives: friends
The riotous wind
12 Monday Aug 2024
Driving along
and a sudden elevator drop in my chest.
Riding that familiar riversong of sadness a moment,
I understand–ah–
my old, precious friend
is holding a conversation I’ve heard countless times.
Now I can recognize her disguise.
Funny mask, dear one,
but a confusion belies those heavy, tearful eyes.
Stress, strain, the much too muchness of things
brings you here.
Rest, love.
Hide in your cubby hole and come out
whenever you would like to sniff
the riotous wind again.
From sleep into waking
29 Friday Oct 2021
A day arrives
during night dreaming
when you come to retrieve a child, an infant
in button-up full-blue onesie,
from a house expecting you
and, upon entry, you recognize the woman
whose house it is. She rises from a room sized table,
oblong, solid, warm and wooden. An enormous shined egg.
Around its edges sit monks, scholars, drummers–
elders all. It feels better than anything you’ve felt
in ages.
She not only welcomes you, while rising,
but asks you to stay.
Come join us.
She says that. . Come. Join us.
Somewhere, slung between infancy and elderhood, you stand,
at times barely, and then holy invitation is spoken,
warmly.
Keep hollowing out the space,
hallowing the place,
where the invitation can finally cross from sleep
into waking.
Devotedly
12 Monday Jul 2021
At 8 I lost my best friend,
with the end of the school year she skipped right up two grades,
and there without I continued on,
no one near.
At 11, overnight, my best friend decided she hated me
and the girl to whom I’d tied my heart,
living right up the sidewalk at the top of the hill,
was gone.
At 15, my best friend, girl who searched with me dark star-filled skies
and distant philosophies, disappeared
right in front of me. On a path
between two pines, she separated,
saying it was over. No reason given. And walked away.
Years passed. Each returned
for a moment.
The first in a market near a pile of avocados,
wandering through with friends on a visit home from college.
Word reached me later
she died of cancer far too soon after.
The next circled back simply to say
she’d left me because everyone in her life had left her first
and she was keeping that from happening again.
The last found me by phone, states away,
wanting to say she’d ended our friendship
because I asked too many questions
and she, being confused enough on her own,
couldn’t take it.
More recent losses diminish even those crushing endings,
hitting harder still than death–
that visitor being inevitable, embraceable and understood.
How loss does shape us,
at times the shape taking decades to decipher.
Wonder steps in,
the companion who never rejects or abandons.
Wonder walks alongside, reverently,
devotedly.
A reminder comes in the morning song of hummingbird…
turn towards wonder, always
she sings,
towards wonder.
To the hills again
11 Monday Jan 2021
I’ve taken to the hills again,
pressing palm to oak trunks,
twisting dried flower from artemisia,
rubbing leaf of umbellularia.
Finely felt in muscle short and long,
a humming soreness blooms from steep terrain
and welcoming climbs toward sky.
How I’ve been so remiss from my friends,
the strange and strangled choices made
and sad distorted hold of events beyond control,
I do not know.
Leave it to the land to call me back,
to breathe life in
to one who still has it.
Faster breath and heartbeats
bring me round again to being human
with a rooting itch of vitality.
Broad hands
06 Wednesday Mar 2019
Launching from plush chair
to a seat below
and beside me
on the wool carpeted floor,
he comes closer.
Our talk bounces
ping-pongs
even spins some
between now and then–
the surprisingly many shared thens.
As his broad hands, accustomed to touch
in work, in nature, on board, on bow,
brush and pet, across and across again,
beneath and atop, thick warmth of blanket
upon which I sit,
I almost speak his unspeakable–
Why not bring your hands to the warmth of my flesh,
as they keep wanting,
and carry the rest of you right along with.
These inches between us
aren’t the turbulent ocean of your imagining.
Twenty-five years on
19 Saturday May 2018
Not until the attentive itch
do they exchange glances to mean
It’s Time.
And off we pile into the car, heading deep
into night and whatever flight waiting
with breath, rolling, in the wings.
Winding round and up and up and round
through dark and sensation
into rolled down window sweetness of valley grass and oak,
Stumbling, graceful, grit of dirt road scuffing,
spinning under 2 a.m. sky and flopping across hillsides,
the stars, sharp and grabbable,
become a spiral
spiral
spiral
as alive to be tucked in a pocket,
as hover, massive and in reach, directly overhead,
as rest in mind twenty-five years on.
At the door
15 Tuesday May 2018
A kitten knocks at the door.
In truth, a word behaving like a kitten,
soft, sweet, riled
from chasing a baby squirrel along the avenue.
Baby tore across the asphalt, tail barking,
no visible sign of what gave chase.
Course, words are like that,
and now one has followed me home.
A fur-lined nook between the armrest and my hip
awaits her.
Curious what mischief we can achieve today.
But first,
a short nap.
Second Street Cafe
22 Monday Jan 2018
Horse sits in the corner
noticing possum hasn’t touched her tea.
Possum, meanwhile,
wonders about her pedigree.
Tortoise dozes in his shell,
tipping awkwardly toward ostrich’s tail,
when zebra waltzes in swishing his stripes
sending peacock for the door in utmost fright.
Such is a day at Second Street Cafe
with elephant missing and
rat wandering proudly off to play.
Order a cup and join the crew,
there’s a little something for all of you.
This little one
01 Saturday Apr 2017
Longing comes with the light,
and sometimes leaves with it.
That’s how it goes when
nobody’s looking.
But a quivering dog needs a soft gaze
to make it real.
Gentle,
gentle with your eyes
and any movement-
this pup can’t take a stare
or a jumping out of your seat to say hello.
Fill a small dish by the door and,
when its brown eyes and cracked nose part
the hillside grasses, sit visibly
but out of the way.
This little one is hungry.
More than that, though,
loving.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 