Home

I wear home on my back,
strung indecorously about my neck
tattooed upon my palms and soles
and intricately folded up
inside the bones, a wound ribbon
in my ribcage where breath lives
and my heartbeat.

It cannot be taken
or broken or burned down

I am not lost.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


from Dream Work by Mary Oliver

(No) Sound of Breaking Heart

driving alone, talking to
walls and living among my own sounds
echoed in every movement, resonant
like glass underfoot; a crunch
ing sound would fit, but
silence: the quiet bed

my daughter's bird body
curled up, light as down, tucked
in the hollow of my broken heart
breast while the sun sets the sound
of sighing would fit, but
silence: the tortured dreaming

behind closed doors, a picking
over, combing through of a broken life
and other lives over and over again,
unbearable sequences shifted,
visited, revisited,
shifted. The sound of a wing
beat, frantic trapped
bird would fit, but
silence

is the sound of heartbreak

Twiceforty

eightydays in the desert
will burn your soul to purity
a vision quest, sudden
clarity

Phoenix

see how mythology tells
a human story: when the rhythm
of living is halted abruptly, when
human souls die and new lines
define sides of our lifetimes, we tell

of Rebirth.

(Art Cred: Merrill Mahaffey/Stolen from the interweb)

Penya-Sagats, 1926

their over-intellectualized analysis lacks for
I was there on the
rocks, the water chilled
as the sun sinks, slips
around the stone, tide scolding
a stray foot

Here. My figure fits among
the flattened faces, screens
that frame this moment as
he comes

find my skin prickled by wind,
the wet foot; I wear the whole sky
in fading light where the sea stretches out

accepting of our transgressions, swallowing
secrets, speaking only to clouds

Don't
uproot my body
and place me where I have not been--leas of green
or among the trees

for I may miss my lover
who seeks stone and sea
in search of me

Haiku for First Snowfall

a seed stirs; no one sees
the gesture of soft skin breaking, life
pushing gently out.

Telltale

your absense murmurs and
creaks over the floorboard
of my heart/my heart beats
buried under yous floor
boards

On a crisp fall morning
I try to lobotomize myself
with knitting needles, supine, wide
eyes staring past their protrusion
to the skylight but find in the
prodding and sweeping, the severing
of softest membrane, cleansing
of memory, experience--
that one can begin but
cannot finish a lobotomy
on oneself.

So I sit Slack-jawed and still
with needles hanging
from my eyes, singing some
fragment of lost song as the
leaves fall; I remember
nothing and no
one seems to notice.

The dishwasher hums; I play piano
and get a little drunk.
The oven is on but I forgot
to start dinner and her shoes
are scattered across the floor, their
shadows changing softly as afternoon
gives way to evening.

This moment is a dream, a muddled perception of what
seems Real. The context no longer matters, I know

so time passes slowly
like a songless spirit shuffling
across vastness
into vastness.

and my hands, not knowing
what to do, keep the time--
a funeral march, while the light
changes and the smell of food
does not emerge from
the kitchen

The season gives up
its last gifts under hushed moon
light and sworn in whispers,
sealed with stars, new
alliances are made. The moon aches
for earth and orbits
her curves, disturbing her
waters from afar from under
a shadow veil.

You are here with me, a silent
presence hangs between us while
the fields give forth final grain
and gourd

to lay down in waiting for the death
of winter's hard hand to brush
their eyelids closed and turn their bounty
back into earth.

And moon, a dark stone
whose borrowed splendor hides
a hollow song, glides
over, never closer,
his eternal dance of solitude
illuminating some night threshing

and our still hands never touching

It's a Motherfucker.

Memory Man you make yourself
comfortable in the darkness beside me
your weight and scent unwelcome
and you reach--

stretch to my side while I read, slithering
your greedy arms around me searching
and defiling my respite,

your creeping fingers play
upon my neck as I pull the bow searching for song,
I find only hollowness and wanting
as they slip
softly around and constrict.

I curse you and excise your spirit
but you return in the dead quiet
with gin on your breath and sigh
into my ear, silencing my call

Running a rake through sand--

swirling furrows and circles the point

is not to revelate but to be found

In getting lost. The movement, a repetition

Impresses memory on the sinews,

a comfort new and old like first and last

breath and the wind of living

Sun bleaches the grain, leaves

pollute the media.  I stoop to finger each,

And fold into pockets filled with debris.

40dysnthdsrt
wllmkychs
mrages&ls
yrwy

Flood

Slipping off into the fortieth night of sleep(less)

off-balance bed. A world of empty

over which I am the queen. The moon sees

as I warm to my own heat; the nights pass

and days follow--a silent spending off

of days, like water on stone, boring a hole.

Perfect with no edges, smooth, defiant of expectation:

a refinement. but the madness!

of the wearing remains unbearable.

my fingers quiver with the heartquake

that comes at sunrise

and at sunset-- the dripping rain

upon my heart; a flood. Forty

days and forty nights. The sea swells.

Drunkish origami: hard to
line up clean,
predictable, symmetrical folds
and creases: intentions and
results. The white shows.
Sometimes the white of the inside
shows! and destroys
a pristine presentation.

Gripes and sighs into the Darkness.
Folded. (Not) neatly
tucked up and filed off
with 32 living and ten-
thousand buried.

You may be among them.
But you are not. Dead.

The Story of the Crane Woman

It is true that in the beginning he loved her and healed a mortal wound; that when she was vulnerable he took her into his home and gave her rest and love and comfort.

And that is how a crane came to give up her wings and roost with an earthbound sail maker, becoming his wife and living with her heavy human feet bound to the earth. Bare of her splendorous and downy garments, she grew together with her love, made a home with him, replacing the comfort of her lost feathers with his body and learning to sing to the thumping sound of her fleshy feet and solid bones which trod daily over floorboards, forest floors, and mountain paths.  And so the sail maker, who thought he knew something about the wind unwittingly fell into love with the spirit of a great bird and the great bird who knew nothing of the earth knowingly loved the soul of a human man.

They thought that love would save them but the woman was of the wind and sea and the man of the earth and wood. Feeling their time unraveling the woman chose in desperation to reach into her deepest secret and give freely of her very essence to save them.  Shut up behind a screen, she began the undoing of her silken feathered soul, pulling all the wind and light from her heart to weave into resplendence a great gesture of love for the sail maker, who profited and became happy by her sacrifice.

In time the sail maker grew rich and enjoyed praise and fame for the sails made of her soul while she quietly withered in her unwinged, earthly body.  He didn't notice when she stopped singing and careless in his comfort,  neither did he perceive her cold and thinning skin as she wound herself in blankets under moonlight.

In his ignorance, the sail maker betrayed her. The shroud around the suffering crane was broken away.

Mottled, and bleeding at the loom, a great bare heaving creature beat her wings for freedom and in the defiance all her splendor returned. As though she had never left it, she took wing, returning to the sky.

She never returned, her long life with the man on earth becoming a dream that belonged to another world.

Song of Mourning

I was so young. And you lit a spark.  We fell in love. 

You climbed trees, raced around on your bike, made music, made art.  You were a familiar. A spirit brother who I treasured and clung to.

We started a life together.  My dishes filled up your cabinets. My rocking chair nestled itself into your living room, which then became ours.  We drank tea in our bed under a hideous painting of a ship in a storm.  We wrapped up in each other. We found warmth and made a home with sunlight and orchids and a soundtrack of 311, the RZA, Mark O'Connor and Yo-Yo Ma. 
I wove words together into poems for you and you constructed gifts of the earth for me. 

We got married over rolling hills and the sea, our hearts running over in joy and celebration.  I remember the sloshing of the water pump in the ceiling above our bed in the cottage.  The priest sprinkled oil around us to protect us from the elements of this world. We toasted our union. We lit a candle.

I still have that candle tucked away with our etched flutes. Your grandfather used to say that whenever there was a storm, he and your grandmother would light their candle. Maybe we should have done that.  Maybe we should have said a prayer.

We made a child. You celebrated my body as she grew within and you caught her in your own hands when she emerged into this world. We have raised her together, a shoot sprung from our own seed; she has grown and blossomed under the protection of our strong limbs.

We have traveled the world together.  Lit campfires, talked late, watched the stars move, breathed red dust for days in the desert.

We made plans and dreamed. Forever. For us.

But now you are gone and our dreams are like vapor. Your love has suddenly dispersed on the wind and I’m left standing here shell-shocked, the hearth cold, searching for signs of what we have done where we have been.

There is a place where your body has lain in our bed for over ten years; the mattress remembers what you’ve chosen to forget.

And I cannot stop remembering. You have betrayed me and forsaken our marriage and our life, leaving a gaping hollowness where you used to belong—where we use to fit in together.  You were my best friend and trusted partner until the day you picked up your things and deserted our life.   

I love you—have always and care so much for you.  For what?

My soul is a constant voice wailing the mourning of our lost life, of my dreams, of my damaged heart

I cry out. Only the walls hear me. There is no response.

My Indigo

It's late. I've come
to find the flower which blossoms
like a saint dying upside down.
The rose won't do, nor the iris.
I've come to find the moody one, the shy one,
downcast, grave, and isolated.
Now, blackness gathers in the grass,
and I am on my hands and knees.
What is its name?

Little sister, my indigo,
my secret, vaginal and sweet,
you unfurl yourself shamelessly
toward the ground. You burn. You live
a while in two worlds
at once.
   
Li-Young Lee

(One of my favorite poems and poets)

You aren't real anyway so

I allow you to wander around

the back room of my thoughts, picking through them,

thumbing them over and paying

less-than value because they are dusty

and unused. "At least," 

I say to myself, "they will be appreciated"

even though you aren't real. I sigh

as you walk off with threads

of ideas balls of words tucked up

under your arms, feeling like you got a bargain. 

The door swings.

I go back to work and forget

You were ever (not) here.

Rainy Day Thoughts

Pedal your flying machine
over puddles and red boots, rain caps wet
and slick water drops slapping as
you pump your wings and sing
your song of freedom over the clouds
and into the sun.