Wednesday 14 July 2021

I Waited

All day I waited.
I waited for nothing.
I curled my hair, and put on makeup for no one.
I made the beds, 
pinched the basil blossoms away.
I tossed them over the fence,
Half-thinking I should eat them instead.
I admired the lavender, the eucalyptus in its vase--
I placed them on The Bedside Book of Birds.
I watched the real birds,
in their true form, flying from vent, to tree, to deck.
It is more or less the same for them, the birds, 
the birds who wait for nothing.

Tuesday 15 June 2021

Early

It is early,
to be awake
in this sleepless world.
Give me silence,
vast and empty as a star-sea, 
black as it is before dawn.
Leave me in this temple
of dreams, let me stay 
with my thoughts a little longer.

Monday 14 June 2021

Forty

On the day after I turned forty, I cried the entire day.
I described it in a letter to my best friend
as an ocean of gratitude.
I called it grief turned inside out; the opposite of it
folded back and over onto itself,
until it resembled something more pure
and more animal 
than I've ever known. 

And when this happens; when I am 
utterly undone, and gutted by love
from lack of sleep and too much wine,
it is no longer the tears of sorrow 
that reduce me 
to sobs that I muffle from the ears of the children 
in the kitchen where you hold me
and I thank you
for your love, for the kids, for my best friend

Herein lies the worship of love.
The terror of love. 
The dark church of love, lit by a single ray of sun 
through some ancient wooden door,
the same sun that lights the bottom of the dense forest floor.

This is where I look love straight into the eyes 
as if it were a lion, ready to take me in its jaws 
and spit me out, ready to destroy everything that I've come to have 
and to hold, and to believe about myself,
and for the first time in forty years,
I defend it

Saturday 12 June 2021

Emotional Landscape

Every day is the same test over; a continuum 
of all the things that go on living.
I rise and fall to the challenge.
Spending hours in the waves, swimming 
filling the rooms with such dark light.
Crested white, murky-ink under moonlight.
Climbing the walls, finding release in every crack.
I'm trying to find the names from where they came
And this-- 
familiar thing to study
She stares at me from across the mirror.
Wet eyes, soft curves, unkempt hair.
I allow myself to love her.
It's not subtle, not a tiptoe in, 
not a gentle tapping at the door.
Without distraction, the body goes on remembering.
I don't miss it much-- the before.
But I think of the time when the days had needs
more pressing than my own.

Friday 11 June 2021

Pause

The world asks it of us.
To pause. 
Just this once.
To offer something more of ourselves 
at last.

Listen.
The world wants nothing of you
but your graces, and your gifts
of time.

There will be no rushing through this.
No distant distractions 
or unholy validations.
Only the returning of yourself,
to itself.

So pack your bags of wrong-doing
and of greed,
take all of your sleeping guilt and shame,
your deepest fears and your noise,
and turn it back onto itself, 
in love.

Fumble around in the darkness to find it,
search often, as you lose it.
The place within each of us where it lives--
a place where we do no harm.


Chasing Time

Yesterday at the lake
I came upon a snail in the grass, 
as if I had been looking for it. I was
looking for something like it,
for any stone or leaf; any small proof
that the beauty of nature
was something I can hold.

You could look no further 
then the endless-blue lake 
and stop to worship there.
Or get lost in that eternal temple 
of the moon, and I do

spend all day and night like this-- 
my neck craned up toward the heavens.
So I remember to look down.
And there at my feet was the snail.

With it's long eyes out, it reached 
its silver, giraffe-like neck upward,
touched the grass as if it's entire body were a finger. 

And maybe it has never seen the lake,
or anything but grass and stones and leaves
And maybe it contemplates nothing 
on its slow and careful journey.

I hadn't looked at a snail, not really 
not since I was a child. 
So I bent my stiff knees down,
stooped my arthritic back over 
and thought,

This is no longer the body of a child.
But this is still the body of a snail.

Wednesday 26 May 2021

The Planner

You are forever planning; making lists. 
You ask for dinner ideas over coffee, 
or when we lay in bed.
I study the indent of your cheek,
the white-grey speckle of your jaw, 
the impossible beauty of whiskers and skin, 
tanned even in winter. You add ingredients to the list.

You want the answers, and I
have no use for cooking, if I can't also catch your eyes, 
and soften them,
wrap my whole self around you from behind,
drink wine at the table and watch
as you move across the confines of the kitchen

I don't know how
you can listen to a song and not cry,
or watch me buckle under the pressure of emotion
when grief rises up into the belly of the room,
and still stay so focused.
As if this was always part of the plan.