But Twice Sixty and Five

Somewhere around 125 days and the same number of corresponding nights which have carried them off at sunset, the mist begins to clear; the fog lifts.

Hardwired

I shake and shake the sky wishing the moon to dislodge and slam over rolling stars-- a stone over rattling kernels in jar; destruction, chaos and darkness!

I amplify my voice to the decibel of heartache and scream so all living and non-living beings hear my curse.

and still she wraps me, unflappable sky, her moon and stars remaining in tact across her breast, ever unimpressed by my earthquakes.

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.