In the Still

January in Michigan is a junkie thief­ –- sometimes beautiful in order to get what it wants, often soulless in taking what it needs. Whiteness entombs abandoned verdancy like heavy sheets draped over valuables suddenly left behind. Sky-curtains are drawn, as if to erase any impression of sunlight or worse, any visible hope of leftover springtime bounty or summer release. It snows and the land simply eats. Some say, “is it not beautiful,” to which I might think, “is not the first hit after withdrawal the sweetest welcome?” Welcome to where? This is not my home.

Yet in January, there is zazen, buddha's smoldering tea light, fingers nested in my lap. There are boundless dharma gates and I must enter.

Stillness.
It is in the still whereby one realizes everything is in a constant state of change and therefore, all things are possible. That may be the only place hope can live year around, despite winter, or wildfires, horrific war, and the mundane apathy of those still asleep.

Breathe.
Grief, judgement, anger, and fear drawn into the bottom of the lungs.
Exhale compassion, love and peace as liberation.

Ask.
On which bank of the river do you stand?
Are you swimming or on a raft?
Or are you the vast river of oneness itself?

In January, I am staying home.
I am in the stillness of trees, only moving in winter winds.
I am in the frozen lake, at rest in weighted mud and the quiet of my heart.
I am in the snow crystal, lifted on arctic air, moved by winter whim.
I am home.

Whiteness Out of Place

At the heart of every creation is the need to connect. ~ Joy Harpo

Maybe it is just that.

I turn towards my colonized wilderness, my cave of silence, and ask, “what is this for?”

If every word written is an act of creation, a need to connect, then is every line and poem simply a refusal to know that one has everything one needs?

More accurately for me, the impulse to write has everything to do with love – uncovering, sharing, softening – and the poetry simply becomes a state of being.

*

I am in a yurt up north, located two miles down a dirt road, several acres into a natural forest. At night, piney beams raise their arms in exhalation towards the portal through which I can see a million pinpoints of starry light. The Great Horned Owl calls and responds and it lands as whisper into my gravid ear. All night there is only undisturbed darkness.

At 4 a.m., I heat the kettle for coffee and step out into the cedar air. The Eastern Whip-poor-will is the first to stake claim on dawn. It will be an hour or so before the Red-eyed Vireos, Robins, Cardinals and Chickadees join. The land speaks more clearly when distractions have been removed. Before 7 a.m., turkeys join the chorus.

As the sun climbs, I find a small clearing amongst tall grasses and put down my scarlet blanket. I strip while standing, piling my clothes neatly on the western edge of the tiny Shangri-La. My own nakedness is startling. My form and whiteness seems out of place against the deep greens of the meadow. The dog bounds into the woods, returning every so often to make sure I am present. She doesn't seem to notice or care that I am naked. What if that was true for every one, all the time? I like that state of mind.

*

On the last night, a pack of coyotes howled and yipped in the near distance. I thought about the chickens I heard earlier in the day and hoped that all livestock was secure. Although, given the sounds I was hearing, all did NOT seem to be well. The night before was more peaceful. I almost floated away.

At night

cannabis
the moon
and this spaceship

shooting me
into the galaxy

you visit
I let you in

almost all the way

Your Own Arms

This time of year might be the happiest – trees fruiting – unfurled ferns. June's first fireflies ride currents of whimsy in the almost dark. These precursors to Venus light. These beautifully unbearable lessons of life everlasting. And yet. Depression and this heavy-handed heat.

Morning's first tasks are given to water: dog, coffee, garden, flowers. A friend shares how she went camping and spent time naked in the sunlight. I think about the world I have created for myself whereby a desire abides and yet, seems problematic in the existing context of my life.

Now beyond mid-life, I am birthing myself. I am a child testing every borderland created for me. And by me. No longer is life a quest with heroes and villains; winners or losers; comfort and pain. It is a virgin palette simply waiting for my stroke.

Nothing is given. Nothing is safe.

Who walks with me still? That question no longer applies because the answer is but one brushstroke in the unending creation.

*

Hazy dawn breaks like a thick yolk, seeping into the remnants of night's coolness. A smattering of blue jay feathers beneath the reaching evergreen shrub leads to the discovery of the bird's body. It makes me wonder about the narratives we tell ourselves about the cruel nature of the world. I bury the bird near the garden because that is where I put all my dreams.

*

A few mornings ago, Kora had a seizure and in those moments, I could only swim upside down towards a moving surface. I swam past Beckett's seizure when he was 18 months old – the EMT's defibrillation paddles, the men performing CPR on his blue body, the words from the back of the ambulance: come back to us, buddy. I clawed and scraped for air as I moved past Lexi's anaphylaxis and my injection of epinephrine to save her life. I saw myself lying Kyle down on the gravel driveway after his glove caught in the wood splitter and pulled his hand across the blade. It's amazing how long you can hold your breath when life is in the balance of your own arms.

All of these mornings – all of the stories speaking of a life or death – all of these strokes restricted to their own color on the canvas – missing the masterpiece.

*

Water.

I swim, and I think it is because I am sensuous woman.

Below the surface, there is no where the water doesn't touch.

To be touched all at once.

That is watering at dawn.

Pollen and Fallen

More storms and afterwards, the red bellied woodpecker works the suet feeder. Pollen and fallen seeds mix with rainwater to make the deck sticky. The sparrows do not seem to mind. I write “karibu” in the yellow alchemy as the breeze blows clumps of the dog's freshly brushed coat like golden tumbleweeds. It means we are not friends and we are not lovers, but we have a place. Welcome.

Friday night at the restaurant, one friend sent back her drink because it didn't have salt on the rim; another friend sent back her drink because it didn't have sugar. The clientele was wealthy and the venue was on the water. The group talked about trips to New York City and Louis Vuitton bags. On Saturday, I went to a movie with poets and on the way home, we shared a pizza from a place with bullet holes in the store front glass. We discussed our ultimate thruple situation and other nuances of sexuality. This paragraph is orchestrated as a comparison and yet, there is none to be made. I'm no longer the shapeshifter. I stare into the mirror with perfect recognition. A door closes on certain aspects of life in order to open fully to another. It's okay. It's always okay.

The wind
and this intuitive keel –
freedom masked
as danger

cross the interior landscape
to surrender unto the fetch
of the sea

Paramore – tarot and candle wax – a long holiday coming to a close.

Tarot shows the secrets I hide from myself with stunning accuracy. It reverses my arrivals and reminds me of love always welling – even from wounds – even from the invisible.

This poetry – these lines masquerading as surprise – the words reminding you of how close we are to disappearing.

Mirage of Mistakes

Of all the religions and spirituality to have known and lived, the expression of the open flow of Love was never untrue; never misguided; never wrong.

Love is always the truth.

Once, I was

out with lanterns
looking for myself

and through love, I was found.

*

Our eyes followed the river
compelled with power
unstoppable to the sea

down from higher ground
cutting rock and trees
always shifting

all day, our bodies
soon had to stop,
to rest,

but the river
still flows on
without us

*

Storms gather over the Great Lake, making landfall during the night. Blowing rain brings branches and debris first to my window pane, then to my dreams. I wake just beyond myself, taking a few moments to return.

The mistake has always been thinking there is only one marriage. The mistake was believing that only one writes the vows, only one can hold it all. That is romantic and there are a million love songs to prove it. What about the vow for every season? Or the vow enjoined deep in the wordless lake?

So maybe this is 4 a.m. shit.

But maybe, I'm not mistaken
and I never was.

Many Ways Light Can Bend

Where does your emotional symbioses lie?

The owl's voice returns at 4 a.m. and with it, the realization of how blind my process of self creation has been. Why was I most alive in a hungry gaze? It is because I had never seen who I really am without a reflection. There are many slants in the story of Narcissus. There are many ways light can bend.

Sunrise filters through misty pines as robins pour forth the first chorus. Gardening fills every spare moment, though it falls short of nurturing a certain life I could have chosen long ago. That matters very little now. We journey apart and together, and in this flow, everything ripens of its own accord. But I remember Oneness, and I cannot decide if that is helpful or not. What do you think of peace as a form of love?

I've found my people. They invited me into wholeness, and now I own what I never knew was mine. I am iridescent and light-wracked around the edges. I am Rachel Carson cooly picking up fragments of life from tide pools in Maine. I am Aphrodite on fire. I am Buddha in perfect stillness as everything returns to what it has always been. I am losing words on the wordless way.

I fell asleep too late in the day and woke to darkness. The neighbor has turned off his string of outdoor porch lights, and the dog is already curled up like a golden button sewn atop a pillow. The moon rides a still lake of sparse clouds and dips between Libra's scale. The smell of wood smoke moves towards an unseen horizon as I cling to the raft of wakefulness when I should be moored in bed. My pre-dark heart stirs with gratefulness for the library people, the poetry people, the gay beach club people, the transitioning people, the suicidal people, the victims of genocide, the hostages in a man's war, the untethered and the stuck people, the coming out people, the dying ones, and the ones who carry a molecule of each and every one of those people inside their bones.

It will be 4 a.m. again soon and it will be my voice which returns tonight.

The Vows We Break

Sunflower seeds in the ground, violets everywhere, and a garden ready for more. What is natural versus what is cultivated. But what is the gestalt of life? Nowadays, there is no more “getting,” and “having” is on the way out the door.

Morning breaks with gray-green light, muted by pending storms. I see cardinals less but hear them everywhere. Orioles, red bellied woodpeckers, and warblers. Orange and purple wildflowers have become arrows loosed towards the sun. The garden waits ready for the next round of vegetables and herbs.

All the true vows. All the secret vows. Perhaps it is only the ones we speak, we break. For a woman, secrets really come down to power. Like anyone marginalized or kept from autonomy and power for too long, women will keep the tender truth of themselves secret until it is safe. The world may suffer. You may have suffered. Be thankful for that instead of her wrath.

Somehow we humans have chosen to divide ourselves: male, female; strong, weak; producer, taker; nationalist, foreigner. It is all passed off in the name of progress or efficiency at best. At worst, we label some humans as “right” and “wrong” unto death. The ramifications of this are personal of course, but they are also cosmic. We have disturbed our position in animal kingdom to a pernicious degree.

Maybe that is what my garden is about; maybe knees in the dirt and sweat in my eyes; sweat dripping from my third eye back into the ground; maybe it all is a long and sorrowful psalm lamenting what we have done and hoping a small offering will convey a kernel of peace.

Adjustments

Tornadoes, tulips and tit mouse.

Spring has its many charms and also, threats. Intentional wildflowers along the back fence line are already knee-high, so I must sacrifice a few to plant a medley (melody?) of sunflowers. The swath of land given over to rewilding in the backyard increases, less a decision of mutual intent and more an outcome of not having the time or energy to tend to suburbia's standards of lawn care. Lawns – a symbol of eliteness and societal norms. Or maybe just another symbol of one trying to belong.

God, I love the moments just before dawn. Night veils become threadbare, slowly allowing enough light to begin making out the nuance of each leaf and flower. Hearing the very first bird notes of the day is never not a gift. What gifts do I give at this hour? I meditate on it.

*

Lately, a call arises to examine all the times I've surrendered to the longing of love in order to embrace patriarchy. Somewhere along the line my ancestors learned how to love manhood over justice. This is a sexuality and gender issue both for matters of identity and equality. The psychology of this is evident at the surface of life, and it's also a portal to the aphotic depths of psyche. I turn around to walk backwards into those choices and to pull on the threads of my existence as woman.

This is why it takes some of us so long to understand who we truly are. This is why there is war and destruction.

*

The leaves of the giant monstera plant begin to a burn a little in the direct sunlight. Adjust.

The garden cannot accommodate more rows of greens.
Adjust.

The dog can no longer hear.
Adjust.

The truth in me can no longer tolerate the false binary existence of love and sexuality in my own expression.
Adjust.

The Waiting Room

A few hours before dawn, owls swoop into nothingness. Unlike moon-bound gazers, they face their hunger elsewhere. Laundry hangs cold on the line – a silent presence evoking the satisfaction of work as reward. Affectionate tip-toeing around pines in the dark does not change the fact that we are beasts among these princes. There is nothing to do in dawn's waiting room. Maybe that's what I love about it so much.

Later, laughing birdsong. Small rabbits testing new boundaries. Tulips beginning to let go. I'm no longer grasping for infinity. What is carried in the hollows of my clavicle can no longer be emptied.

Lily of the Valley, Apollo's gift to the world, infuses its fragrance with lilac, primrose and the crisp cusp of morning. It reminds me of summer at the lake and swimming until the water consumed me whole. Yet also, it reminds me of leaving the taste of the lake I know. Sadness and joy; it is both things and I accept that . . . like the way Lily of the Valley smells of heaven, yet could kill you.

Maples throw down their winged seeds and violets are everywhere. Everywhere. Purple as a psychological creation.

As the day passes, my head begins to ache to the beat of humanity. My mind drifts backward or forward to another quiet chance at first light — the time when I can hear my own pulse — the moments when I can feel us embodying the love of God/ess together. That is not now. Instead, I anchor back into the fledgling mind and reopen unto the wonder of now.

This bright nowhere.

This grand sweeping view.

The Gift of One Time

There is a companion of my work – one to whom I am married at the center. We work unseen, like the moment a dove loses a feather or the long, slow migration of desert sand. Blank pages are my open arms but the words . . . they are my lover's. We rend a heart that is fully realized and yet. And yet. We can only barely speak of one another. When I write deeply enough, I find our possibility. I hear what was never said. I understand that which amplifies this telling. This should be a poem, but instead it is a manifesto.

We had a gift of one time. Nothing more was promised and so, nothing more exists. Except the writing.

*

After the bonfire cooled, I let my head my head fall into the back of the camp chair. The moon moved with hunger through windows of pine. The dog curls at my feet and in these moments, everything that resists or encumbers, completely retreats into the darkness. Distance collapses and touchable nearness begins to undress.

We never made dawn together, but there is yet something tangible existing under this vaulted, black sky.

*

Springtime urges me fall in love with possibility. It causes me to walk at nighttime while others sleep under moonlit sheets. It calls me to sit by fires and make offerings to ancestors. I write lyrics for pine song and swim before the gaze of blue hills. What is temporary stands as a noble profile, but in the light of May, what is enduring becomes so very clear.

Eruption

This unfillable cistern finally gives way to a rivered life. I can stop running. I can stop chasing.

Again with the Japanese death poems.
Again with Clavell's saga.
Both have me on my knees.

Grass greens between my toes and violets erupt in royal dignity. Enough time has passed whereby the thing which cannot be created nor destroyed is laid bare, without distraction or doubt. And to recognize this thing . . . what does it matter, truly?

Rain thrums before daylight but the bird chorus still rises. White-throated sparrows – jays – tufted titmouse – cardinals – each day new merger and mix. Train moans in a minor key dollop the score like a delicious sin. Like most deviations from nature, the sound distracts from what is pure, yet like most human proclivities, it is not entirely unwelcome. Either way, the train fades to the West leaving only the sound of throated tributes to living. Live and sing about it.

Suddenly there are enough leaves to murmur and sigh in the breeze. Squirrels and orioles nest and in all this activity, it's getting more difficult to go to work. Everything is erupting: war, genocide, volcanoes, tornadoes, squirrels and chipmunks, purple tulips, kale sprouts and me. I am erupting.

New friends arrive but old friends are confused and hurt. I've changed or grown or simply disassembled a mantle I wasn't meant to wear. Kyle hangs on and opts to evolve a bit. I am satisfied because I do not need him to match or be like me. I need him to watch in awe as I encompass and become the Cosmos. He's watching and smiling.

Are you?

For Such a Time

The land in April swells from stark to crowded. Winter's dark moments are tilled into new life. When I think of love without labels, there is you – changing the world for a time – melting me like Spring. For such a time.

The sun turns its gaze upon us. Icarus and Narcissus have something in common – they cannot look away from that which calls them to death. Thank God that is not the end; it is the harder path unto the beginning. Daffodil O Daffodil – these dances in the meadow – the tangible remnants of what is truly gifted. No man or woman knows what you know. No handsome devil or feathered thing makes you divine. When you see the truth, even the soul lifts in awe.

Forget-me-nots spring forth in a place they were not planted. Look closely enough and know you are tended in the womb of the earth. When nothing makes sense or feels right, go to Her. There is nothing She cannot make complete.

The garden begins. Attention shifts pain from bent knee and bent back to that which will grow, feed and complete. Pine scent mixes with hyacinth soil. My heart cannot expand any further and still remain intact. I have nothing left to ask of anyone, except, let us plunge ourselves deeper here, into the dirt, our skin warmed by sunlight, for the sake of peace.

Not Quite Naked

Rain brings sky to earth and everything grows. Spring is a time to consider the benedictions we invoked and a time to knead the blasphemies we incurred into the ground. Do this in remembrance of me.

Everything riots.
Birds – colors – creeks.
Not-quite-naked branches
climb into moonlight,
and by day, shiver
with budding
poetry.

Dawn remains a dusky bruise. I savor these morning solitudes before neighborhood house lights flicker like new constellations. The clock on the dining room wall outwardly marches towards some unknowable destination. It makes me think we belong to the silence, despite traveling with the sound of words into the world.

This tribe of language.
This palette of creation.
These echos of the universe.
Is it possible to face inwards and outwards at the same time? It is this sacrament I now study.

*

When we gaze into these world-mirrors, what is reflected? Do we see the known or unknown? The ancient or the new? The temporal or the eternal?

Gray-white light is reflected in the slick wetness of the deck. Hyacinth and daffodils begin to color April’s thresholds. Staring into both appearances, life emerges as a continuous act of transfiguration involving something seen and unseen. Perhaps it is something like an inner and outer friendship – an intimacy percolating as a wellspring of mysterium. An ancient belonging stirs and unfurls, reminding us that we want to known.

Maybe?

*

Dawn's incredibly generous and gentle light – you peel darkness away from the world with soft, silken fingers. This time of day nurtures friendship with our mother earth. How many of us now miss this birthing from night's womb? It's all so very poetic until you realize it is not quite so. It is a hardened bedrock of truth that we now prefer to hide or destroy. A prayer is that we waken and accept the deepest friendship ever offered with immediacy and the sense of eternal belonging.

“The Deer's Cry”

I arise today
through the strength of heaven, light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor or fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of Sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.

~ Celtic prayer, translated by Kuno Meyer

Still-Warm Sheets of His Power

Good morning, Spring – with your honey dawn and rioting birdsong. You taste like every gift on the verge of being realized as your yellow light is gulped by daffodils.

Your mist comes as late frost leaves for heaven.

Or, it comes as one balmy day gives way

to the hard truth of March
as a lover, reluctant to leave
still-warm sheets of his power.

Your wild chives fill me as if I am kneeling at the communion rail; I have a chance to be whole.

*

It will snow a few more times. My back bends over lifeless remnants of last year's largesse to clear a little more room for sunlight. For me, there is such a thing as growing strength in the body in order to work the land in the coming months. It takes time. I'm sore for a few days after clearing death and uncovering untouched growth. My skin burns a little in the fresh light, but it emits the intoxicating incense of sunlight and new warmth.

The senses wake. Even the acrid clearing of death is a soul-salve. Jays scream into the air but it seems like they never have anything new to say. Tree shadows move from the swelling creek, to the sleepy garden, over the gazebo and bird feeders, and finally stretching long across the back deck into twilight. Hour by hour a throbbing sentience speaks of the season and the life to come. Die, rise, repeat.

*

There is a wound I am healing. It can be argued that wounds are perception...they are not real in the sense that the thinking mind is malleable to one's interpretation and self-informed context. But sometimes it is first helpful to identify what hurts before sewing it all back together.

Twice now I have fallen under a spell of what felt like a significant relationship whereby I was given glimpses of the eternal – the unending oneness of that which cannot be grasped without reflection of the other – only to find that I had created this perception myself. It was a oneway street leading away from something more true. More grounded.

I am consumed by winter or spring, the micro moments of love and growth, instead of the macrocosm of all the season at play together in a year – in a decade – in centuries.

What I see and feel in any given relationship tricks me into happiness or even the feeling of divinity. In contrast, what the other feels makes me the soup du jour.

The first time I felt this, it took me over a decade to process. The second time stings like ripping a band aid off tissue paper skin. God, it hurts. And the instinct to blame myself becomes yet another bandage to apply to the now, fresher wound. It still hurts like hell, but I can dress the wound immediately and reflect not on the injury itself, but on the unhealed child forgetting her name.

Why do I need to give myself away?

*

For now, I will dig and prepare the way of summer.

At summer's end
I will mourn
the passing of verdant light
and warm, starry nights.

In autumn I will fall
with dying colors
to sleep in the tomb
January made for me.

And I will wake
like snowdrops and crocus
when the time is right
to grow again.

From Birth to Love-Me-Nots

Another language swims under this one. Are you familiar?

Burning deadfall and stoking ash is a reminder that I am dust.
Robins pick through my powdered bones while mourning doves faintly call to one another in a nearby distance.

Spring is alert now. Crocus – daffodil – tulip.

Dawn kisses limp bed sheets as opal clouds sit on the edge of a horizon on fire. My moored shoes are pulled from beneath the bed. Today begins. I am the navigator of day, and I am waking.

I have no fear of dying but I do dread the granite tomb of winter. There is beauty in all of it and yet, whatever is my spine, breaks beneath the weight of January's austerity. This has all passed now.

Now is only unmade light.

*

But the world burns
with lethal righteousness
as we devour Mother Earth
and the petals of her children.

We have slipped time
forgetting we belong to each other
Our eyes looking away from orange
light over mountains

Bury yourself
in six feet of dirt
because there is no way
to get clean

Spring rain does fall
does waken daffodils and tulips
does fatten creeks and streams
does turn shriveled dead-fall to green

But the world still burns trying
to erase all the colors, praying to Death
and greed as our god
dying of a broken heart

*

We have forgotten how to love each other to life. Forgotten?

No.

Chosen.

*

I move about the land, readying the garden, collecting branches, turning compost. My cheeks begin to blush and burn, not used to this up-close light after so long. Soon the canopy will don their crowns, birdsong will pace dawn, and petals will turn from birth to love-me-nots.

Yet, the world burns. Its bridges collapse, leaving a million miles between my tulips and yours.

I am planting the difference between the breaking of heart and spirit.

What I Almost Heard

It's warm now, but too warm. Birdsong pours liquid trills as if inviting us all to spring tea. Can you call something “unnatural” if it happens in nature?

We discuss death and funeral arrangements, tiny homes in the woods, and what it means if one us is queer. There are things you can ask of a man – things he can do or not do – and then there is the glowing beautiful orb he is given by Mother Cosmos, which, if you can nurture and tap into that, makes the world safer. Breathing becomes as easy as wind moving through pines on a mountain.

In a short-sleeved t shirt, two sizes too big, I unclog the bird feeder and take a barefoot stroll over ground which was covered in two feet of snow just two weeks ago. If it wasn't so windy, I would consider a bonfire for the branches downed by winter. I have an offering to make.

There was a time, when our hands met, that life danced like water bugs teeming in the quieter bend of the creek. There were days of limitless horizons and nights of constellations pointing toward the heaven we knew we owned. It's hard remembering what I almost heard.

While collecting old wood and kindling in the backyard, I am thinking about how love is so often laced with flight. Fliers, the sun and me. Perhaps is it enough to stay grounded in awe of feathered things.

Late into morning, I sit over words, working them into coherence. Work-life balance breaks me and I think the poetry and prose suffers for it. I see my role in the world outside of writing and pondering Mother Earth, but I mostly just want to do the quieter, alone things.

A spider moves freely above my desk so I ask, “if I promise not to burn, eat or kill you, will you stay?”

Love
never a surprise
this burning home
inside

How to Burn

Dawn leaks above-normal temperatures, erasing outlines of Michigan winter. Evergreen bushes spring back to their usual shape and the Grand River overruns its banks.

Songs of the nuthatch coil the length of pines, and a woodpecker works with intense diligence on the oak. It's no where near spring, so we all know the toothy wind and mushroom sky will be back. Winter will return like a hard slap across the face after a week or two of garden-dreaming and short-sleeved sun bathing on the back porch.

*

Once, I was slapped so hard by my mother that the braces on my back teeth came loose and shredded the inside of my cheek. Mom didn't normally dole out corporal punishments so the hit was equal parts painful as surprising.

I set a hill on fire, put many people in danger, and embarrassed the family.

This shame wasn’t my first shame; shame was soil in which I grew.

What options do growing things have but to either live or die where they are planted?

*

In the greater woods, he and I unpacked and repacked marriage. As we talked and gazed outward from the massive windows, our eyes tracked the deep shape and shadows of birch, hemlock, and white pine.

The perilous animals are tucked away, sleeping unto a better time, but deer tip-toed around the cabin, whispering of mysteries we could not quite hear. This man loves me and is willing to churn up the soil in order to keep growing.

At this late stage I begin to claim myself and somehow, he rises to meet me. Why didn't the ancestors teach me this — how to burn? Now I make up for an invisible past by impart on my children the power and respect for fire.

*

Yet the wilderness is holiness and in it, I am part of a virginal horizon.

It is here I know for whom the poetry is authored and why.

I am tended with tenderness and love now, but I still need the sun . . . and only the sun teaches me how and why to burn with holy fire.

Sleeping Bears

Floor to ceiling windows of the two story cabin face deep into the pine and birch forest. To the west, the Sleeping Bear Dunes tower above Lake Michigan. To the north and east, lush, dense forest rises and falls along the glacial paths of ancient water.

This is Ojibwe land. Her legend says that there was a great fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan, driving a mother bear and her two cubs to seek shelter. They entered the great lake and swam for many miles, trying to reach the other shore. The twin cubs began to lag. When the mother arrived on the eastern shore, she was alone. She climbed the high bluff to wait for her cubs, but they never arrived. The Great Spirit, moved by the mother bear's faith and determination, created two islands to honor the cubs. Winds eventually buried the waiting mother under the sands of the dune where she waits and sleeps to this day.

At dawn, a family of deer feeding near the cabin notice me, noticing them. We watch each other for a long time. It was so quiet, I could hear their hooves stamp through wintered leaves and piles of lingering piles of snow.

At night, a hundred million blazing stars surround the cabin, something surely unseen in the summer foliage of this place. Around 3 a.m., the waning moon hangs low, seemingly caught in an impossible wooded cage.

Deer, bald eagles, and sleeping bears – that life is more than enough – and yet – it is not my life.

Kyle sleeps in, wakes to coffee, and kisses me on the forehead as I write. For a quarter of a century, we have grown together, loved one another, and after wearing a hundred different masks, finally learned share the kind of honesty that saves.

My cubs have made it to shore; the mother can be the woman awake on the hill; the woman can honor the Great Spirit and begin to move about the land, following the deer deep and deeper into the wood.

Birdcages at Night

A migration of attention.

There is a loneliness kept in mirrors, something covered in the image, like birdcages at night. I'm trying to tell you about this but my mouth is full of thistles. Speaking of – too many broken pine branches revealed in the melt – too many dead skunks in the road.

What is not complete in me? My mind tries to crawl from oasis to oasis instead of enduring the desert. Do you remember that time at the river? The water made no promises, and the love on the banks had its own language, whispering stop dying.

January sky piles hueless ribbons of light but yesterday, a robin's song took my prayers to heaven and hung them like keys at the door. I smelled the earth for a moment and forgot about the wars and plagues. Deaf politicians and hungry men decomposed. Music of the earth shimmied a little. Wake now.

*

I'm no longer bowing. These garments I wear are confusing to those who are losing power over my life. I suppose this was inevitable after I felt truth of autonomous power. Stop calling me names. I will never be any of those things.

*

No one walks along my inner mountains. No one hears my diminishing echos. One lover knew; one lover stayed.

Fingering Tidemarks

Snow melt runs through the eaves. I struggled to surface from an unending dream at the bottom of the sea. I can hear morning – the dog's nails clicking along the wood floor – the coffee maker gurgling as it finishes the brew cycle – school buses coming to a clamorous stop. Yet I can't shake the dream.

nothing to claim
this ageless dream
fingering the tidemarks
of the ebbing
past

Fields and hills darken in the melt. The Grand River overruns banks, bike paths and highway barriers. It is not spring. We are the nameless source ruining the world. Have you seen my wars all over the world? The cartography is a ruse. I'm almost begging you to stop falling for it. Sit back. Swig from your cask of milk and honey. Your comfort makes the stars tremble; your insistence parts the seas of peace. We've damned it all.

Crushed evergreen bushes begin to regain shape as snow withdraws. Small birds find their way back to the feeders and rabbit trails disappear with the melt. When the earth reappears I test it with my bare feet. Do you still love me?

Look back on Time, with kindly Eyes -
He doubtless did his best -
How softly sinks that trembling Sun
In Human Nature's West -

~ Emily Dickinson

I can't seem to picture our West, but perhaps that inability is the last gift we are given as humans before we fall asleep one last time at the bottom of the sea.