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)