20 Monday May 2024
Twisted linen in the closet:
rumpled skirt, wrinkled vest..
Who would imagine shirts
could dent.
Comical to even consider remedying that.
Seems I can not stay put.
A magnet polarized from place
when place is done.
Not that I want to be washed from the creekbed.
I’ve bolted, leapt, flown, jumped and been
catapulted;
I’m praying for a gentler crossing
this go round.
The hanging lines held in linen
are a telling road map
of more to come.
17 Friday May 2024
She barks at him
bitterly
across two tables and a faux fire
(real flame, no wood),
he nods,
yuh, yuh,
nose angled toward his paper.
They’re married,
the cafe their living room.
Meanwhile, Nina Simone
and a squealing cappuccino machine.
A man, clearly successful,
speaks at air,
bluetooth lodged in both ears.
Opposite,
women burble of this and this,
while another couple, thick grey locks
lidded by heavy cowboy hats,
laughs together.
At a single,
a young one,
pale and half asleep, sits alone,
the lower half of her face parked in her palm.
Two dogs, wide eyed,
wait.
Spanish wafts over from the counter.
With warm cup held in both hands,
I drink it all in.
15 Friday Mar 2024
You lose your beauty
and the sky turns pink.
It’s not yours to lose.
What twists us in knots
keeps us,
an unholy marriage,
from the divinity shining
within our own eyes.
Who says what is beautiful,
he, she or he?
Meaningless judgments aimed
at raising one, at undermining another.
Recall the kindleless fire
and your heart will know none
but love threading song.
08 Friday Mar 2024
When death meets you
long before memory remembers,
wrapping tender and dark tendrils
around your heart,
a shadow casts upon all that follows.
Inexplicably.
Without reason the most beloved people,
one after another after another,
disappear.
And the pain nearly kills you.
Vanishings become a lifetime of dancing,
red shoes stuck to your tired feet,
exhaustion pulling your heart toward the edge,
right up to the moment when you find out:
The she you could not have named,
She died.
And you were with her through the end.
Ghosts haunt lifetimes.
17 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted in daughter, generations, poems, poetry
≈ Comments Off on We reach back
We reach back in the generations,
untangling threads,
and wonder over familiar terrain,
hunting fruit-bearing trees never noticed
before.
But before
was when the wood was too green,
flowers knocked off by freeze,
bees unable to work their magic–
harvest waiting for the right season.
I wander the woods
after sharing those stories again and again,
ones asking unanswerable questions,
sensing the complexity of things.
I did not know,
until now,
I am the winged one
returning to the grove
to hum between pink petals
and play my part
in the fecundity of my ancestors.
Ancestors
whose bones move beneath this skin,
whose bones make blood
carrying me to the end of my days.
17 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted in offering, poems, poetry, transformation
≈ Comments Off on No other way
Watching the weather come in
through breaking light,
February flowering trees moving
below with the wind,
I can’t recall the bird I heard last night.
Sleep dropped hard–thank god–and
dreams of a friendly pockmarked face
and who he was.
I’m small here beneath swirling sky,
flea to the breathing animal I try
to rest upon.
I’ve no idea what’s coming.
Somehow, with birth arrived a tossing of
security
for a life that wouldn’t crush my soul.
I know no other way.
And don’t think I want to.
30 Saturday Dec 2023
The limitations of our fathers,
they are not ours to live by. See
and be done.
Do
and live beyond.
The next generations are here to end
that which came before.
30 Saturday Dec 2023
They rise to the occasion,
the ones you called
to a come-to-Jesus–(minus the Jesus)–and,
truly,
they break bread and drink wine.
With you.
For the first time.
Mountains of stone become sand.
Standing centuries diminish to an hour:
Movement.
You initiated it and
rise, they do;
an occasion
holding both
life
and death
because, really, how damned much time
do we have?
Really.
Grapes, and the blessing,
the bleeding,
of injury and heart,
must not be
wasted.
Moments of chance,
swim up
to our lightly closed fists.
Let the bright, fluid young creatures in.
This may be the last.
And nothing like living waters
ushers in a new year.
Upwelling.
18 Saturday Nov 2023
We save each other’s lives
a little
every day.
Follow a pointing finger,
find the child.
Hear a cry never
bellowed,
resolve the ache.
Listen through hands,
to a quaking,
a breaking
of a heart yet again,
and turnings of ages will echo
through bone.
These are callings
answered by few.
Let the unmoved move
with slightest
kindest
deepening
touch,
reach stars buried
and waiting
for a return to dark sky.
We save each other’s lives
a little
every day.
In this is more
than enough.
26 Saturday Aug 2023
Fuchsia smurf hat
and a cashmere scarf,
feet cupped in sheepskin..
it’s August
and far from cold.
Sometimes you hold yourself
in whatever way you can.
The yellow jackets are on full attack,
two stings slowly healing.
Jay carried away a green fig,
no time to pause for sweetness.
The boundaries have become sloshy,
I’m waiting for true definition.
The wait may have lost its own edges.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 