I am such a fool and frightened,
but weather calmed me when finally it came.
Yesterday I moved through the newly reopened town
where aftermath after aftermath slowed me.
Sown with the stolen threads of youth, the back-break stoop
of the fallen, every cottoned row: our field of dimming stars & stripes.
(Oh, you’d be frightened, too, to be such a fool
as to imagine weather never coming.)
Though cicada-like I sang my song
and published wide my noise.
Sartre was standing in the sun, murky and figural like a Munch painting,
a book in each hand, as if to say, “These are my wings, I’m a shorebird.”
Whether or not the weather gets hot
each wind worries that the night might not.
The rain unbuttoned all my buttons
and night began the day again.
Black clouds closed my scarlet sky,
but lightning awed me with its passions.
I recognize you from the beats in my heart
You are my soulmate.
Paper shover, pothole filler,
iridescent bird of the gray night.
What calms you? Does it come from inside?
Cloud the color of woodsmoke, upturned leaves.
When it came in its strange luxury of falling petals, light—
in its sudden softness, breezes, breath of every hue.
I am such a fright and weathered,
be a dear fool, come to me calm.
Then the sky and ocean brightened
and I could avoid the blame (or shame).
Still, I want to be embraced by pine birth, cone-spangled,
electrified by full moonlight at the peak of a mountain.
I heard a bird’s three notes, a little set
of steps to a place at the back of my atlas.
Look how the sky splinters into tiny white dazzles
and it rains again inside the house.
Fluttering and shaken, I find myself
chasing updrafts, lost among the fallen.
Farewell, fair weather! I must search every peakless
caldera for my daughter’s dust, her blue moonbeams.
And I want you to come to me for shelter
from whatever storm I’m standing in.
No storm that cannot be replaced,
nor any space—faceless or enclosed.
Then having pondered the standing in, why, and for what reason . . . Know
I’m no longer passive, but beginning to move with elemental forces coinciding, not colliding.
inside hypodermic rain, with chemical / heart / fur
you are arp-shaped movie with swollen teeth
Our bodies: firestorms spun from cyclones spun from
the star, pulsing, we name Derecho. Straight One.
For, whatever the storm I’ll weather it
with the help of your need.
The draft horse of grief is gray.
It pulls the plow regret has made.
I want to give you the whole of creation, a song to embrace,
an ecology of belonging, added joy for the struggle.
Then let’s get out of here, my love, my voice,
my life, my daughter, since we have the choice . . .
From whatever paradise we have lost
We will cull the last unforgiving fruit.
Slim-necked, snowy-white egrets slowly
Are coming back to Capitol Lake, cautiously.
Yes, I wore the old coat, the loved old coat,
but it failed to cloak me for once in its life.
Oh, cloak, my dear fur-of-heart, my faux Mink Pelt—
gnaw away. Shear my hair. Let despair be . . . felt.
I shrug into sky lined with satin,
its pockets stuffed with grief and cloud.
Go, then, good coat, I will you to the Goodwill—
you have outgrown me.
you wear night’s plumage like a vestment of small fires
in blue music, stars stumble through your thousand fingered trees
you sink, sink into rooted darkness, quiet
descent as of snow or ashes
but stars are pointed, can’t enter the trunk holes. Woodpeckers call
in sick. If not, we may be told the upstanding trees are hollow.
The world tumbling with goldenrod & asters, I walk
to find a way out of myself, to harvest the stillness of a pond.
Cheer us then for the trip below—
are no we no there no yet no
October, come on down. Boughs-in-tatters, it’s my pleasure
to lease your pre-owned leaves. The going bargain, to be sure.
i follow the footsteps of rain
night into day the journey to you
Some nights, breathing is the work of strange rivers.
Some nights, the wind cannot be imagined as breath.
Some days one lives for sleep.
But who’s ever dreamed of breathing?
In silence we focus on the midnight Yogis. A comet tail exhales,
the gibbous moon holds her breath, Orion poses with Canis Major.
I hear the astronomer claim that the Sun is really white,
not yellow—Ah! all my love sonnets on sheets of sunshine!
Stung by the night sky, inscrutable, your
Orion is mere figment. Nothing clear, nothing sure.
Vroom-vroom goes the souped-up car, in imitation
Of some cosmic crank, adrift on a map without mountains.
Feeling travels by bus
on a badly rutted road.
the dream reawakens me to remembering
not remembering where I have been or who I love
The grown-ups were sound asleep in their clocks
and they have no way out of their dreams.
As for us? We refused to rouse. Our children, climbing
our mossy towers, tolled “Occupy! Occupy! Occupy!”
Silvery lamentations streamed from my stained pen
Deep in the abyss of my soul, sonorously within.
To know dreams no good dreamers will wear
their looped belts, stars tucked in their tales.
I can always make sense of an animal
like the state of grace preceding the end.
The griefs of loss, the gifts of nature
On a beautiful Monday morning.
Ghazal, “the word for love poetry” // Gazelle, a lovely
leaping antelope // Grace, senseless leap to The Beloved
Then let’s not feed the cat prone to play
the more to speed devouring of its prey.
On my doorstep—a boy wearing a tiger mask.
Do you want a real or a pretend treat? I ask.
On icy naked days when birch’s bare bones grasp a waning sun
I ache for warm sea breeze to whisper free this dust landlocked by barren soul
“Here is the water-verb,” said the gardener to the garden;
“And here is your fruit-noun,” said the garden to the gardener.
Addra gazelles banish motives as they clear
the tall savanna grasses of Topeka or Sudan.
Lost in autumn: the silver-blue dragonfly wings
painted new each time by an August sky.
there were two doors: one to awakening, the other to despair
she took them both
fig. plural “figs”; alias “apple”; personification “Millay”;
Anita’s memory of her first love; hazel eyes; warm lips;
Aye, and such a sudden shunt from defiant to deviant:
If you’re innocent and you know it, raise your hand.
The trouble is, of course, the seep and spurt of love. It is,
it isn’t clearly made compounded of old ironies and crimes.
For instance, the irony of water fountains, pennies
and nickels griming their basins. Every coin, a penance.
Diminished to reflection the ocean cannot crush my bones or feel the rhythm of the waves.
Balance is fleeting, it is art, a moment with love void of hate.
So why not? In the distance between no and yes, in this caravan of bodies
explore what’s ours and right here, a little geography.
Beneath the moon, you are the sea. I am a river entering your mind.
You are my mother, the water, inspiration for my soul.
storm I thrice this shame still lenten
crime unspent torn sky from stone
It is, it isn’t factored from fermented grapes and fizz
or divided by the differences of minus, plus, and times—
My soul, it limps along, cruising the bars
while wearing hats to cover all the scars.
Sweet heart we used to make love, now all we do is fight,
I cry myself to sleep many a night.
Through cracks and cavities over brooks and banks
we crawled through silence as heartbeats sank
Old Kronos’ broken rhymes, the seed and hurt of love,
our rubbled course, it is, it isn’t, clear, appeased by love
And poetry, our own and others’, sustains the way,
the words and thoughts become our passageway.
But this love that you remember—might it be
just what sails the surface of your memory?
Our minds moving through words like
body and desire, tree and belief.
I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you! I scream silent at the God
who made my love granite, to routinely weave a life beyond this night
These times are not smooth rhymes, grief’s weathered face
grows grey, yet blossoms through love’s dappled grace.
This little pile of pebbles, ceramic shards, clouded glass—
remember the mosaic it once was, the twine’d patterns?
Also those utter-hoards, sound-cairns, of old Irish odes:
D’Aithle Na bhFileadh (by David Broderick from Cork).
They were once stars that streamed through a crack in the roof,
dripped off the rafters, and into the bowl of my hands.
Now we wait for a star pointing north to explode,
to shoot straight down into our waiting mouths.
To spill, to share, to see them exposed to a new light,
umbilical atmosphere inverted and above us
The stars felt light in my hand, but I fell to the floor in awe and
my body shivered with delight as my cat froze in his tracks.
This is the month when sky is anxious, a mollusk shell,
a chest cracked open, gulls overhead turning black silhouettes.
Rivers of night run to the shallows now.
Already, these stars slip in the west.
~ the news is uprising, earthquake, tsunami, radiation, one story after another burned at the edges ~
~ the swallow’s still-wet mud nest leans toward September ~ I would have written sooner ~
It was then I understood beauty is a place made possible against a canvas
of existence pulled tight by the brave laughter of children afraid of dark spaces.
(now dare I read my life in my palm or these stars, their form
once stitched against the heaven where weather roots itself)
It would take more than blood had I lost that much
I would need the hillside of ivy
So more black rain dropped on every hot crying face under
our roof light with rust asking about this child
The river fathoms my anger, rips
boulders from the sides of the run.
Pulling the scarf over your nose, rubbing gloved hands together,
you feel a sadness grounded in the greed you stand in.
Like an infant, mesmerized by her delicate reflection,
you begin to see something fresh in the light, constant in the crisp air.
You dance with the other shadows,
you try to find green again.
The phlegm from my throat rose from my lips and oozed into a reservoir on my lower lip
The flavor was sweet and salty, I pretended that it was caramel
Ice on the eaves, the town turns round
in the crystal eye of the mind and snow comes down.
What I say with my body
You pay for with yours
Thinking the ocean needs the land.
Out of context its vastness isn’t so formidable.
What we look forward to: the start of the rains,
smell of earth and molds; promise of green.
Yet, when the snow falls so fast,
There’s no sense shoveling till it stops.
And the pigeons, thousands of them suddenly elevated to uccelli of romance
A riotous bunch of lightness and promise as they lift en masse
What we miss: the wet underside of the squirrel,
the sound of the rain stopping, yesterday’s yellow.
Try orange—first firings of the silent blast,
its fallout whispering on grass.
Home
Is where the tears fell
You hear the voice of who you were before
you know again and again the difference.
You left your imprint, like henna, on the map of my body,
my wild cartographer, my ardent explorer.
In exile again, I sob my old refrain: don’t turn around
around turn don’t do not no o no don’t not do turn around
And the sea will rush riotously forward,
and the rocks will beat it back once again.
I spun ’round: all in my head, a shred, poised, pouncing.
The lone sound lost then found, winding down again, wound.
Every morning I walk the lake path, lone gatecrasher.
Ahead, in stagnate water, Sandhill Crane curtsy, witness.
Your body as weapon.
It caught me quite off guard.
there is among your memories
one that has been lost beyond recall
Churning and changing, we all rattle forward,
forging new pathways to chase our best dreams.
Leaves, now red, fall atop the mound under which lies
our yellow-orange tabby. The azaleas will bloom again next fall.
I will still begin—will let those partitions
strangle themselves with neglect.
They will collapse into the rising earth, ripen
into compost of venerable divisions, ancient schisms.
Enough of this dirt to dirt, dust to dust;
let’s stop shoveling dirt over ourselves.
Breathe me in—slowly—I am the sweet air moving through you
build your world again out of my love
I will climb into a crevice along the roofline
where mockingbirds and magpies won’t enter.
I am the voice, ignorant of the moon,
A bottomless vertigo, the histories I have leapt through
Near streams in the woods surrounded by words and damp earth
Unifier I call frozen water creator of wondrous births
With what blithe faith we lie down at night,
Assuming, in the morning, that all will be light.
and you, how will you remember snow without me? Remember
the Indian mound shaped like a man was cut in two by the county road
I am sorry that the ten thousand things you dreamed of for your grandchild
are now ten thousand tears.
but I will send you recipes for recalling the frozen passages of your butterflied mind;
fold them in two and you will see how to startle your split brain back together again
The morning was heavy with the scent of garlic and warm chiles
a fine mist rose from the leaf-littered grass
There’s a feeling called “home”, an embrace, a refuge
from things divided, withered, torn.
Which homes can endure all the coming storms and plunders?
Bird-de-Coeur answers: my nests of silk, matrix tender.
In the presence of another’s pain, he stood—a soothing void.
One by one the leaves come down.
“I think heaven is not as holy
as kissing you or planting flowers.”
I bought a box of strawberries today. They were ripe & they were tart. I would like
to share them with you. But not the satisfaction—
that is yours alone, yours to savor, yours to fold
into the cartons of memory, recover in the white night of winter
Come February you will dream about red keys,
unsealed music boxes, ballets, demi-plies.
But for now I will joy in rust, yellow, bronze
and not begrudge the trees their needful rest.
As in ‘I saw a last bee and felt for it’
(you needn’t know that, though).
To Earth’s slumbering trees, arbors, woody cradles
stars sing. Stars do sing! Lullabies, nocturnes, aubades.
And we rested beneath ancient Sequoias
wondered how much longer will they survive
Seismic, when the the shift occurs, from looking forward to looking back.
When you become wise, not beyond your years, but for your years.
When then you must make something long: an axe
at the base of something tall or a needle and thread and cloth.
Or choose something small, smaller than a wild strawberry spotted
beneath blue-gray leaves, reaching for that arrow of sunlight.
Slowly, the settle-down of your city of noises, the urge of day
with its freight whistle, bird lilt, car wheels on the asphalt, sighs.
Hydra’s waters are warm, in the September sun
As I await my beloved, after the day is done.
Canvas notes, loom page, floor thread ready
to be touched, transformed, by brush, needle, song, the dancer’s step.
If it’s going to mean something,
it had better mean something . . .
An angel tells, they leave
their sheep, the shepherds see . . . Emmanuel.
Grace throws furthest, a great hurling arc under moon,
one cat’s eye yellow glass prize from clambake Sunday.
Clams that dove into deep fine sand,
their feet like tongues pull gravity.
Tucked beneath a day’s end arm, this treasure, light
hidden from view for a few moments, waiting.
Bodies stretch out the miles between us; ions
leap the chasm. Anyone can fall, few can fly.
But grief is chartreuse lamé wilting in a silk lined coffin, grace
wrapped in papier-mâché is carnival glass, is ringmaster’s token.
Is being awake a natural state,
is being asleep awareness of fate?
winter is the only poet
who speaks with the violin of ashes
Lichen folds in the crux of birch tree
limbs drinking pooled rain and loss.
Time seeps through the crack, bringing us back
to where we once thought we were.
We watch an hourglass, the full hour,
and discover the value of each grain.
toppled, still—a love slipped under wood
stove with tinder burning beside counter crevice
I, split in half by the two doors once entered
spin together this cracked skin of clay I’ve uncentered
to hum and wobble before righting itself, collapse
mere gossip in the body’s long hallways.
The dead arrive in teapots, unhappy
they’ve been foretold. They wanted to surprise us.
I see you, she says. I cannot hide my conscious,
Not even from the dead.
And so it was as is
As if it was never his
And you’ll know it—it’s like . . .
I love you has reached you for the first time.
And the doorknob’s greased axle whispers an echo
Like the clicking off of machines reading one heavy line.
you with the frigid, and no engine churning, through space-time
strawberries to a new planet’s shiver and taste
Child-soldier: He narrates his story like an occupied dream/where tall grass hides
And feeds a vacant gut/where bananas and casabas are to kill for—and to die for.
The fire blooms in the desert, destroyer
of worlds: glass flashed into blossoms, a gasp—
Awash in HD signals. Is it time to pray?
Smooth, unbroken screen. The remote always near.
I distance myself from a million ready-tongue poses
preventing me from remembering you said you’ll always be
Will you be my shelter—my sanctuary—my safe haven
After the ravages of Katrina, still unsettled, still unhealed
Knowing made it worse; anticipating accidental death is for no one
life offers no control when the body’s time is forcibly done
bitterly comes spring. cleaning, we find every garlic bulb
in her winter cupboard has shot green through its skin.
though skin sloughs off, though it falls, in winter months,
in spring, on summer’s hottest days and coolest nights, it stays
the dust of eternity mingling with the dust we become. It
only seems part of us; in fact we are the smaller part
Freshly aired black lace untarnished along the stones of Minister’s Beach
where the Aramaic-speaking stranger no longer persuades in palm greenery
Faced with the horizon long enough, black fades to grey and grey
stones darken. Listen for the footsteps of those who wander.
Across the plains, and the Roadrunner runs and kicks the dust behind him,
“don’t look back,” they say, “keep running! keep running! Don’t wander.”
Shades of pink and buttercup glitter on the fountain top, like
gems of stored memories waiting to be sought.
Rose quartz—a summer romance,
Citrine—that September sun’s unkept promise.
A shadow ladders and lengthens
content with its lonely climb.
Another center stage on a photograph:
dark train trailing busy feet . . .
Rails clacking steel grey faces
Telling a long blue history of America
Someone was counting syllables as if that might help
Something was angering water It was me
in that winter garden of inward-growing snow,
crystalline seeds sowing rows for next year’s timid leaves
That frozen pond a reckoning, even a foreboding
No happy endings will there be, in our tangled history
A telephone in almost every room, each one switched
to the silent setting. Will you never call? Or write me—once.
Distance is a test;
Time is a pest.
When the rain smells like peppermint,
cloud shapes, arctic curtains.
As though a curtain, its unselfish leaves,
could be enough.
Past history and hope dwell in your eyes,
Such glory of love cannot be disguised.
The red bird’s song in quiet trill,
“brave, brave daffodil!”
Imagine talking to a wall
said the shaman to the Circle of Elders
The spirit touched a collapsing wall
Pushing her eagle over the jagged edge
Insanity of dangers, volumes torn, rewritten with a shattered pen:
it’s not right that children vanish.
Is it all slowly changing, forever lasting,
and at the end of time, irrelevant?
Shamefully, it takes too long to realize
eternity is simply a man-made invention
all night storm—raindrops
merging on my windowpane
The long walk begins again
Where who and who and who and who form a multitude.
White noise, what’s in a crowd but a din?
A million in a furrow, what days and lies unfurl, unshadow
but the child learns to speak anyhow, the child says
rabbit. Rabbit? Is it going to be a good life?
Fierce daughters/My womb still aching with the fact of you
As stinging waves swept you to my wild shores
Eyes filled with red blood vessels and glazed with tears
Sweaty hands rub over the lids to no avail
as in wipe clean or burn out? Of course true;
that’s what suns and planets of suns always do.
You go, but I stay here. In the rain, I smell the Chinese restaurant. The owner there
smiles, sorts cash into a drawer and then makes change. He never rings in anything.
Winding a spool of yarn threads constance
While unwinding a spoof treads on chance.
Nothing is strict, nothing straight, the weave is what we do
from instinct out of what we are, what has woven us . . . .
an instant in time, each thread, lying
in thoughtless knowing under the naked light of stories
Again we turn to Poetry, again
we trust in words to make things new.
My left eye is aching to twitch or form
a small resistance of tears against me.
I ignore my parasitic twin’s plea for force-
meat shaped into a smooth-cheeked face.
“Oh, that is how water flows!” exclaimed the composer
and rushed back to the piano and corrected his river.
I saw that white keyed river, playing, by a dock full of laughing yellow boats. Then I thought of the underground day, when I noticed your gait, and now, how I love you so much.
Still the Monday bridges first unknow and then condone
the flow of rivers. Foam crawls up their grimy pylons.
Lost on the dirt road web of silence
She finds her way home without a map
