Category Archives: motion

Down the line

12 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Autumn, beauty, Body, departing, distance, grief, honoring, motion, poems, poetry, presence, wind

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An acoustic guitar and a train track beat…

we’re chugging rugged countryside,

rounding bends,

wind streaming through open windows.

I think I’ll watch every dry yellow leaf flutter

and fall,

each flock of grass nod, swish and bow to the sun.

Sometimes grief’s a tar sticking in the lungs

and working to let it go means little

but waiting, waiting becomes the story,

waiting until it decides to let go of you.

The strum will fill your warm heart

as the clack-clack rhythm moves you through time–

be with what is,

it’s got its own magic, which you hold

and holds you,

growing in clarity, in beauty

somewhere on down the line.

Mimosa blossoms

16 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by in change, motion, movement, poems, poetry

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Mimosa blossoms are falling,

pink stars upon the ground.

A greatest turning point has arrived,

no fighting it.

But Beauty tumbles on; Steller’s jay pecks

into the plump dense seed of a hazelnut

still wrapped in its ruffly green,

his strong feet holding it against a branch.

I hear him, though now he’s standing

on the arm of a towering black oak.

A man living on the streets sings

while he walks the sidewalk along the fence.

Triple digits again today, most will be hiding

indoors

as long as air conditioning holds out.

Nothing’s the same.

That’s alright,

Same was a comfortable illusion anyway.

Today

09 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in community, distance, motion, poems, poetry, questions, transition

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Today is a tiny girl

in a dress half deep with velvet,

her finger twirling a curl of fine brown hair,

staring off fixedly

in the opposite direction from her big family.

Today is walking along with dragonfly

while a frog sings across the ravine

and buck, broad with his own velvet,

grazes in new season antlers

through ponderosa sweetened midday sun.

It’s a sticking point in the neck,

a filling of time,

the nectar-drip of writings so rich

two pages fill me up and stir until

I’m unable to sit still–

such beauty must be moved.

Familiar faces in the coffee shop

belong to no one I know.

Summer days of blueberries and salmon,

liquid shadows in the breeze,

heat layering in the cradle of this valley,

magnolia blossoms

and wondering, in tolerable doses,

what could possibly be next?

Spring storm

25 Tuesday Apr 2023

Posted by in change, motion, nature, poems, poetry

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A wall of slow spiraling cloud,

a great grey hand,

comes in low against the skin of the earth

swallowing the mesa,

sky, and all that proceeds it–

the West has sent its claim for the mountain.

And as first rain drops heavy and loud,

smell of December bursts full into the air,

only here, here artemisia sings strongest

not in early clutch of winter

but, like now,

in spring.

I drink desert storm

and laugh at the strangeness of time,

dusting of snow on far hills while

a flowering plum turns pink.

Medial Woman

14 Friday Apr 2023

Posted by in motion, poems, poetry, vision, wind, woman

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Medial Woman,

I place my trust in you

who reweaves the world in vision, web and pearl.

Stars offer themselves to your old and nimble fingers,

music of your silent imagination.

Cradling myself in the timeless,

the wide, stable feet of your journeying,

I pluck feathers from the western wind,

forage in fields, in forests, spanning forever.

There’s not an ocean, in singular swirling,

that together we’ve not swum.

Beneath your gaze, egg-filled nests become visible,

rising springs share their voice

and solace of a kindness of words flows

through your unmoving lips.

I train my ears,

I train my eyes,

I allow the knowing in my hands

to find their joyous, wild and original way.

Mud’s come

06 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in adventure, beauty, motion, nature, poems, poetry

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Mud’s come

but you wouldn’t know it

until your foot is three inches deep.

Or, god forbid, your tire by far more.

That’s the thing about this place–

dry as the brown cracked skin lining the arroyos

but a certain season arrives

and the steady, hard, rocky road you’ve trusted

decides to gulp you and whatever force is moving you along

straight into its earthen gullet.

I can understand that kind of gluttony.

Maybe it’s best I slow down and prison-break my shoe.

A place I have become

12 Saturday Mar 2022

Posted by in laughter, motion, movement, names, new, poems, poetry, the road, transition, undone, unlearning, weaving, welcoming

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A place I have become,

with no knowing where home is.

I carry home with me and in her, them, him I reside.

Words only bring us to the doorway,

imagination opens the door.

In this extended departure

the landscape broadens, roads disappear,

names change, expectation reveals its hollowness,

and desert mountain awaits.

A place I have become, moving upon this earth

without long plan, without people on the receiving end,

with nothing of permanence.

Laughter will replace fears and doubts soon enough.

For now, chasing details fills the days.

This place I become will carry me to the grave,

wherever and whenever that shall be.

In the meantime, feeding the soil, sitting with what is,

allowing for what will be, dropping off

assumptions,

and listening softening listening softening. . .

I want to know this place deeply and dearly

before I go.

What is to come?

11 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by in approaching, becoming, community, fertile, motion, movement, poems, poetry, violence, work

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What is to come

with such violence in the world?

Old as existence, violence arises and

falls away, erupts and leaves ash heaps,

sterility, an airlessness that waits,

waits,

waits

until seeds able to withstand–and bring Life–

from extremes

begin anew.

But the cycles can not, will not, alter

until every one of us, each one unto themselves,

can reach the threshold of greeting

the violence with and in

ourselves.

Begin, begin, as those stalwart seeds,

to come consciously into relationship

with the most difficult impulses we humans possess,

one by one by one, together,

let us move into wisdom’s ability

to navigate this earthly realm

beautifully and whole.

Rain

29 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in giving, motion, poems, poetry

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Globe diamonds dangle in slanting sunlight

following morning rain.

Nothing could be brighter,

more precarious.

The river can’t gulp fast enough

after all this rain.

Days of wetness, slow, fast, hard, intermittent.

Maybe nothing more beautiful,

except that it falls exquisitely in the shallow bowl

of the bird bath.

Oh, it’s musical, even on the other side of glass.

Years of dryness and thirst, drought damage

and wondering, fires and more fire,

and now this.

The frogs are having a field day.

A field month.

And my they are sweet.

A welcoming

30 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in approaching, grace, motion, poems, poetry, water

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When was the last time

someone kissed tears from your eyes?

Perhaps never.

Or, maybe, a memory comes of what used to be.

Neither matter, for there is more being asked.

A calling. A welcoming.

Have you ever wished to lower your own lips

to those salty waters?

A writing arrived today about fixing our brokenness.

I armored up at the thought.

How misguided a notion, this fixing. And

truly, how impossible.

Our treasures rest there, pulling us

gently

towards grace.

It’s all in how we approach.

Be kind.