04 Friday Jul 2025
Wetness of the earth
after night’s sudden and generous rain
settles the sharp dust of hard happenings.
Sleep came long and heavy,
dreaming ridding a poison too old to name.
Bless the waters
and millions of emergent stars hitched
to an approaching clear darkness.
02 Thursday Jan 2025
Posted in abundance, approaching, beauty, becoming, companion, courage, dark, devotion, discomfort, dreaming, fertile, food, Found, freedom, human, Love, loving, medicine, movement, night, offering, Opening, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, receiving, release, return, storm, water, welcoming, wonder, work
≈ Comments Off on Mettle
Withstand the Void.
Please.
Be upon your own two small feet,
at the edge,
darkness cloud-forming,
ledge a tipping perch.
Night ocean crashes on rock straight below,
the rhythmic waters moon-guided, rich and dangerous.
Call forth in echoless open and
wait,
the wind will snap and take it up.
Let the Void offer
all your fears, inadequacies, foolishness,
rage, grief, shame and sorrows.
Be with them.
Sense their intolerable
movements in your one body–
these are the monsters
you are to marry.
In union, living through and beyond
your exiled, an invitation
to what Beauty is yours deeply,
the gift to be offered back.
Leave no aspect behind–
you are here to love the denied.
Blood needs circulate.
Bones need grow. Air must enter.
Bring the outcasts and castaways under
warmth of your grand cloak.
Allow them refuge of your beating heart.
Welcome the unwanted,
a feast-filled table is set to feed everything
in dawn of this new year.
21 Friday Apr 2023
With one slow turn of the head
eyes sift softly through glass and
who should appear but the swallows;
The swallows are back,
zipping and gliding and making mirth–
they are the mirth-makers–
and my heart goes lightly, up and out
with them.
They emerge from a crack in the world,
from beyond there to right here.
How lovely to be with them again.
Together, as sun says goodbye this evening,
we will cut the sky.
We will cut silent sky,
and pull down a net of stars
to sprinkle dreaming
across a blooming desert night.
26 Sunday Mar 2023
You drop
again
into the cavern void of light,
pure dark pressing hard upon you,
vacuuming all air from your lungs, faith
vanishing with the bright world.
Hell changes its mask for each of us.
The cavern has no up, no down, no way to go
but within, where the pantry stands bare as prairie winter.
Possessed by stunting panic, mind swirling nevers and forevers,
begging,
‘Please, no.’
And yet.
Here you are.
If, for even a flash of an instant, you could let a finger
reach out, curious though tense,
to the black walls, sloped floor,
whatever it is actually holding you,
is there earth? Is there scent? What sound?
A blessed thought enters.
Persephone.
You say her name aloud,
more weak exhalation than speech,
‘Persephone.’
She gets pulled down by the heel
into the underworld.
‘Persephone,’ rises your whisper.
And with it, the tiny spark of memory
that she, like you, is always, has always been,
released again at the end of winter,
released again into the birth of spring.
And spring must come.
15 Tuesday Nov 2022
Posted in approaching, night, poems, poetry
≈ Comments Off on Edge of the storm
Blue spruce holds in her generous arms
the whipped cream snow junco ushered in
two nights ago.
In deep dark came his hooded head
and spread wings at the window glass.
As the wind changed, from still
to sweeping, he danced from the blackness
all flutter, gentle and strong,
up the door pane, over to full window beside
and back again.
Back, forth, up, down,
when do songbirds ever enter the night and dance?
Here, at the front edge of the storm,
he arrived, to sit
finally on the low lip of the door frame
and look in with yellow-orange beak
and open breast.
After his hilly flitting away
the snow began falling.
And I smile at the generous arms of the blue spruce
who perches the birds every day.
06 Sunday Jun 2021
Seems I’m becoming the neighborhood wild one,
unkempt, bedraggled, living out of pile and box,
a two-legged more attuned with the four and winged,
becoming something I can’t yet recognize,
likely to speak a language closer to the birds and loping raccoons
than the stuff that’s tangled my brain until now.
Night walks are introducing those I live with,
swooping bats among them.
There’s lots of soft chatter out there…
24 Monday May 2021
Today, finally, I can sit in the sun
and let tears run their river course down upon
this new place I call home.
Walnuts in my teeth and blueberries in my belly,
I’m meeting the many pincher bugs residing here,
the flies and bees, jays, roses, swallows and eucalyptus.
I awoke suddenly night before last
not knowing what hit me until my senses explained
skunk had a nocturnal exchange with an uninvited guest
and the room had filled with the intensity of her defense.
I understand.
At times I could lift my tail and release my own musk
if I had it.
And then the neighbor whose
sexual escapade she sustained for nine hours
straight
left me crooked and grumbly for, well,
hours more than that.
But the mission bells ring, the hills that held me as a child
hold me once again.
Much will come of this, here, together
with land that made me work to the distant edges
of my heart’s own end.
Stories and word shall find matter,
yes,
and maybe my heart can rest and open again
in the constant cricket song and salted wind
of ground long missed and calling.
25 Sunday Oct 2020
I’d like to sit in the room
there with that pajamaed boy upon his knees,
crumpled blankets and bed beneath him,
staring out windows into the dark,
to sit silently with him
wherever he may be.
Not to pluck the darkness from his sight or sorrows,
his fears or confusion,
for he needs the darknesses,
they feed him as much as light.
And Heaven knows he must gather experience
and knowing
and skill continually grappling with both.
Both, ever both.
Here, it is an All sort of existence.
May it be that he (and you, and I and they)
feels what it is like
to be he, only he, and to sense
that that being is more
than even a growing imagination
can conjure
in vast nights silently sitting, and
finally with darkness
not alone.
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.
06 Sunday May 2018
An initiation ritual,
in the dusk-scape of dream,
of shared finery, costume, camaraderie,
and non-blood family
emerging from here, over there,
here, here, there
unexpectedly,
for the me before me,
with a gathering of eager others,
to mark time with life.
Saying no, no but I am not she
not anymore
no–
But as beads pass over head, and colors add up,
layers of feather, bone, cloth
none mine
each display on this body
currently
a light in mind shifts-
not for me
but she
who may pass through, closing
beginning years, finally,
in step with those knowing when it is meant to happen.
Dressed, prepared, without doubts,
I walk the procession.
To celebrate.
To say goodbye.
To welcome all the rest.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 