A Fine Line

Rain pushes through the kitchen window to mingle with freshly chopped dill; the intoxication is complicit. Washing the dishes, I think about a friend who is contemplating a fine line. She asks if she is crazy. We are always seeking our own permission, no?

A cold front carves space to breathe. My chest takes none of it for granted. Long inhalations coincide with a rustling of the damp leaves and branches in a crescendo of wind and rain and a million green hands waving in forbearance. If I wrote a letter to Nobody and put a blue feather in the folds, would you know that I sent it? Empty envelopes at rest in a tight stack – who knows how far it will all go? One thing is for sure, it was made to go.

I consider a nap before company arrives but I cannot settle. Instead I plug in the string of Moroccan lights and adjust the playlist to “chill.” Vodka tonics with lime. He still has his French Canadian accent and she couldn't resist my daughter's saxophones. The night warbled with music and conversation like the sounds of a party drifting across the lake.

Morning is parched. Water tainted with vodka in last night's mason jar. The sixty degree morning blares an autumn reverie. We walk it off, the dog and I.

The manure and onion tang in the air signals harvesting of the muck fields. On the later run, the thought occurs to me that the very act of conditioning the body may be adding to the shaky feeling that I am not okay the way I am. Yet with each stronger stride, I feel closer. To owning the recognition of my image. To erasing the safe distance. To tasting the destruction of woman who doesn't know for sure. The paradox fuels a further experimentation with pursuance.

I'm closing in.  

So I Sew

Green's terminal canopy.

Ivy pulls the fence apart far enough to piece it all together. Striations proxy as the whole. Perhaps seeing each other with eyes is the same deficit as knowing the other in the dark. So I sew the distance.

Too many beers in, Tom Petty cover tunes. And then R.E.M. A man at the bar had the same shirt on I did - the gray one with the white elephant. This one goes out to the one I love...

The smell of fresh dill is August and I would love August if it didn't precede the months that lead to winter.

Morning light and I jog the wooded trail. The faster the run, the less a heart breaks over blushing leaves and forgetful blooms. Queen Ann's lace, chicory, and black-eyed Susan – such a regrettable name for a flower. The colors of leaving.

Finally, rain. Cerulean hydrangea heads tap and bow under curtains of lowering relief. The glass room off the back of the house almost makes me part of the storm. I guess I love the release of a deluge. Sheets of water spilling over the eaves splatter into the thirst. My thirst; can we talk about it?

Whatever is outward has embroidered an internal map on my watery heart. No matter how many times the course is shred, a reckoning comes. I will take “no” for an answer but the cartography still keeps my gaze east. My feet prepare. My knees bruise. My throat still whispers a thirsty consent.

Rainwater burns off the pavement and Thursday resumes. In a misted offering, the question I refuse to entertain shimmers in a prismatic curve. One waits on universe and needles the future to pass the time.

Getting Some Where

Adolescent bluejays every where. They compete to be heard with a neighborhood of generators and the racket is difficult to assimilate. After the outage, there is a feeling of being better off without the reliance of convenience. I've said as much, but the scoffing! Take it all away and see who remains.

Too much red wine. Too much. Red. We spiral in a place that doesn't exist. Our fingers don't lace; our heat doesn't intersect. Maybe.

I remember taking the sleeper train from Cairo to Aswan to meet the riverboat that would eventually pull us back north on the Nile through the desert. Moving from train car to car meant stepping over the open tracks racing with fury and roar, and the only reason to do that was to use the bathroom. The train bathroom was an open hole elevated only two feet above the speeding tracks. The floors were sticky with urine and wind would cut upwards through the hole. All night the train threw us back and forth in our bunks, our tossing and turning punctuated with screeches and clunks and station stops. The children woke several times in asthmatic sputters; it was so hard breathe.

And I remember the men speaking Arabic when we arrived in Aswan, all of them looking at my daughter. They spoke to her directly and it was unnerving to not understand what they were saying. We kept both children tightly between us. A tour guide collected us and showed off his very best English as we tried to process the foreignness of every single thing.

On the riverboat, Cleopatra sang me to sleep as I pledged my soul to her reign. Papyrus fanned back and forth along the banks, but Egypt relented nothing. Hibiscus tea washed down a bleeding sunset, the likes of which could never be approached with words. There were no signs or billboards, no buildings or other river traffic. Shepherds in robes waved from time to time and children gathered to cajole our attention. Otherwise, it was the sound of the river going some where.

Eventually we docked to catch a bus to the Red Sea. After driving 6 hours through the Arabian desert, I waded into the sea. And it did not part for me.

Today, apple pie for breakfast. A swelter returns a few days after the storm; the azalea droops and curls its leaves in the heat. Summer proves to me that life is going some where. Planting and growing gets us some where. Watering and swimming takes us some where. Wearing less clothes gets us some where.

The here I can not forget.

Railroad Ties and Tiki Torches

Before blacktop, I remember the gravel driveway edged with impossibly heavy railroad ties. In July's heat the smell of an oiled past would boil to the surface of the oaken beams to sting my eyes.

I remember catching my first water snake with skittery hands, saucer eyes, and a hummingbird heart. Grab it by the back of the head! Its perfect calligraphy spread across the shallows until it paused, perhaps sensing my wild intent.

My father left for work before dawn and returned long after we were all in bed. I would be half-conscious of his goodnight-kiss-mustache tickling my cheek. The hints of his Polo cologne lingered longer than he did. On his days off he would wash, polish, Armor All and detail the interior the cars. Once, my bike's kickstand gave way and fell against his fully restored, freshly washed and waxed, MGB. With an overhead heft, he threw my bike out of the garage in a roar. I remember the hot lightening of shame and anger striking my breastplate every time I rode that blue bike with wildflowers on the seat.

Summer was also my mother managing my brothers, keeping them from the lake's edge as they toddled and tumbled from one mischievous plot to the next. One summer she returned to school. She took dental hygiene classes during the day and stayed up late into the night at the dining room table carving molars out of purple and pink wax. The baby sitter she hired was the most beautiful person I had ever seen and I remember rifling through her makeup bag in wonder. She told my mom some of her makeup came up missing.

Summer was rescuing box turtles from Hastings Point road and watching small bass dart from under the dock at dawn. Summer was running away to the cradling tree overlooking the whole lake. Summer was the blossoming potential for openness and the instinctual urge for metamorphosis, met with rules and anger and curses . . . I hope you have a daughter just like you some day! Hot tears, hotter loft bedrooms, and the fiery discomposure of discovering how to be. Summer was.

Yet summer also was that wet, swimming kiss in the glowing green space under the raft. And the belted kingfisher keeping vigil on the high branch over the lake. Summer was my first poem and it was in the summer that I screamed across the lake: I will never, ever kill a bat again! 

I am not on the water anymore but am nearby. Now there are fanning pine boughs and cardinals bathing in the creek and ivy climbing up oaks and privacy fences. There are fireflies and tiki torches and wine on the back porch. Summer is less odium, less feet slipping on the gravel, less sunburns stinging the descent into dreams. It is rabbits in hastas and coleus planted in an old fruit crate.

Summer now is all so safe.

Leaving Graves to Gape

Holding still for east, a garbage truck rumbles the reminder that I have forgotten to put out the trash for the second week in a row. A long, exhaled shit. The week darts about like moth – full of backward glances and future charms.

Sunburns / bluegills / bourbon-barreled beer on the dock.

In the water, my skin cools to become landscape and horizon. Effortless. Everywhere.  

Lately the trees stand still. Heat draws out the winter like a salve. But winter is still here in this sentence. It's July already and the urge to measure and conserve and savor is still choking the praise out of my neck. Summer has its own set of commandments and I am walking along the edge of the lake still wondering if it is too cold.

Last night's storm erupted from nothing. At 3 a.m. the sky broke open and poured down green disco flashes and half-dollar hail. The wind conjured fists full of debris and wouldn't stop hurling. Couldn't stop hurling. Ancient oaks crushed the earth leaving their graves to gape. We won't have electricity for 72 hours but we also don't have a 90 ft oak slicing our home in half.

Morning reveals an altered land. Instead of walking past 45 oaks on the way to Rush Creek Park, I walk past 41. Decades of life now in decay. A grief welters in a pit where the tree's placenta used to swim.

Sometimes she is on the edge and looks over to realize that the edges are many. The tree's roots are legion. The deaths suffered are infinite. Today, amongst the ruins, my body and I must accept the inevitable fall I'm going to take.

Midnight's Inky Bleed

Walking Hermitage Point, some things have changed. A few houses are gone and a few are much bigger. The gravel road widens in places as if to accommodate a larger life. Some trees are missing / me / the way I was with them. Still though, the kingfisher perched on the high oak branch that leans towards the lake. And still again, the trails that ask one to remember the climb and the view and the reasons for seeking aloneness in the first place.

On the last piece of dock, the wood slats press hard into my shoulder blades. The lake quiets to the sound of spaces between the rocks along an ambling shore. My chest tracks the bear across midnight's inky bleed, and she consumes all that I offer. How many galaxies are in one bear's belly? A fish jumps, breaking glass. And yet, what if Polaris told the whole truth about where we were going?

Nowadays alcohol just makes me tired. I sip the last bottle of my favorite stout and feel disappointed it's gone. They've left to watch fireworks and I'm gratefully alone.

Earlier, when Lou showed me his garden, he said the straw bale tomatoes aren't doing so well and by the way, the dog died last week. Thank god the heart is a soft-sided muscle because what was full in the purple bean patch is now empty at his companion's grave. R.I.P Molly and tomatoes and the woman who died in an accident on the lake. How holiday noise covers the grieving masses.

I slept in the loft. Even against the forty year old dark brown shag carpeting, a handful of black wasp carcasses on the floor caught my eye next to the bed. The same knotted faces in the A-frame pine ceiling that stared me to sleep as child still looked blankly into my now older face. Bats scratched and squeaked in the attic, just like before. Although, nothing feels the same. After a confrontation with Dad whereby he acquiesced in unrepentant submission into the very old chair, Jessie shook hands with Jessica in a new alliance of faith.

Fireflies resting on daylight's window, a lone mallard skimming night's lake. Pitch forward – pull back – the axis gives nothing to the yaw.

Where Fireflies Blinked the Night Before

Allowing the storm to come through the bedroom window is an act of possible clarity. All night rain shushes, and all night diluted dreams float in and away from conscious horizons. Dawn, shorn of speech, breaks through and the whole world feels humid and birdless and muted. I return to coffee after months without. My stomach recoils.

Lately, attention lent to how one might articulate without a voice. In a field of daisies, what flows and to whom? I might glean a coolness from running my fingers over dampened petals, but the plant stands rooted and unimpressed. Yet which one of us is free? The daisy is not separated by conceptualizing – it perceives light, it responds with growth, unweighted by ideals or the interface of “what does it all mean.” Information about the Other gathers in a paralytic way. Yet I read on.

Sun dapples the pine where fireflies blinked the night before. The neighbor whistles for his once-rescued-squirrel every morning using a black-capped chickadee call. Am I endeared or duped?

Lately, a pull north to the Upper Peninsula. It's not the desire to travel or a feeling of unease in home places that nags. It is more about listening to inaudible voices, the language of unspoiled vibrations. Who would go with me? There is always that.

We spent the week visiting college campuses and honestly, if the daughter decided to reject that racket I'd consider her education complete. A shower. A drink. A slump into sleep. I'm tired of seeing it all.

Zen proverb: let go or be dragged. That'll do.

M started with pigs but they all died, explaining that they were taken from the mother too soon. She patted the belly of the new, bigger pigs, telling me their names and that they'll be used for meat. I am not a farmer or a farm pretender or farm novice. Those in my care cannot go to slaughter, says the one nestled in suburbia, tending landscapes and hanging baskets and getting food from the superstore. What do you make of all of that?

I spend the day in the back corner of the property, pulling and digging and clearing vines. An old wagon wheel rimmed in wrought iron comes to the surface and a thick green extension chord plugged into nothing. I dig and scrape until my back no longer helps me rise. Working to work. Otherwise, I would sit all day to write about pine trees and Gun Lake and the groundhog who lives under my deck.

Weekend, I love you – Independence Day, not so much.

An Open Lingering

After winter the thought of missing a single day of sun is heretical. The drive to smother light onto my face, to drink it, to let it all in, is a burning circle seared onto my chest. January's scars are still pink and raised. How the barrel of gun-metal months follows one around like a wolfy shadow!

When tending the land, it is no longer a surprise to find porcelain frogs underneath the vines. In this ritual my mind wanders to wildflowers and centuries of secrets.

Suburban fireworks terrorize the dog in lead up to Independence Day. I can't make them stop and I can't make her feel safe enough. Is it still warmongering if the root is ignorance? So, zazen and ginger tea. I don't have a river but I have creek. I don't have trout but I have bathing birds. I don't have a vegetable garden because I don't have sun. But I do have this. (stolen, but possessed.)

Marder, well into the night. He dissected a “spiritual intermezzo” and hooked into an open lingering. I take notes and eat dark chocolate M&M's and wonder what kind of economy welcomes such discussions. Which others will recognize the profound in desacralizing?

My desert loses its center. So, enter here – the no-space between the living.

I think / it thinks / the anonymous function of never really being apart.

Between Drownings

When he asked who was crying so late, I said, “the owl,” and I felt very satisfied to know something.

This cooler day – this cooler ripple over my arms.

A morning is spent moving plants into floating light. A little bluer. A little less moldering. The fisted rose relaxed and the daises bloomed while I was gone. Now the orange and yellow lilies rage.

At the water's edge, one can fall asleep in the silence of glinting minnows; but I am not there. Instead, the trees cast shadows against the neighbor's garage and from the bedroom window their gestures feel like seeping water. It's not the same but is it enough?

I fell into him and the barriers gave up – gave in – gave. We someday kissed / We disappeared / We.

One foot in front of another along the seawall; that is how it is. To fall one way is to continue on almost as is – perhaps stumbling into grass or sand or land. To fall the other way is to lose footing, to get wet, or to swim. Float? The water calls this way no matter where I go – or how hard I love the land – or how much time passes between drownings.

But how do you feel about curry? It matters in a way that is different than say, blueberry pancakes or warm banana bread. The summer kitchen billows spicy air that lingers days after the meal has ended. Red skin, garlic potatoes. Asparagus from the muck fields. One might be forgiven in thinking that aroma is more fruitive than prayer.

This is the recipe. This is the feast.

Yesterday's travels brought us back and now Monday acts as if we never left. A cold spell for June. Is it permanence that causes a union to die? Salted seeds in my pocket. A long walk with the dog.

He wrote, “my hands were daylight all through the night.”

And it was ruinous.
To die this way.

May I now beg:

write it
and allow me to enter
eternal life

East South East

at the garage sale I chose a light
blue bandana marked
free

The second bloom on the rose bush will open this weekend while we are away. Shy roses and other expressions of June that reduce me. At the grocer an older man winked and cajoled as I hustled through the parking lot crosswalk: slow down there, young lady! He swallows me.

Of all the ways home – yours.

Water, blank in expression and a scratch of smoke in the faraway hills . . .

After dawn the wind will spin off the lake and her glinting will wave its serrated net over the ripples. Blueberries and dragonflies all day. One wonders if there will be a time when the body is all she'll have left. What then? Church windows, in all their glory, pray for the liberation of a stone's throw. That's the way I see it anyway.

Peach tea, cold. We drive east and south and east again, skimming around Lake Erie. These miles pulsating so close to Ashtabulah. She tells me her nightmares and it makes me feel like praying for the first time in years. Praying in, not to. Our absence multiplies itself and even though I have no idea what that means, my bones believe in it.

Mailboxes covered in clematis and morning glories. White picket fences wobbling. Rabbits and summer are hungry enough to devour what I have planted. This is the proof of the dissolution and the atonement of now. Forget the world. Forget me. Because you are, all can be.

Hum the Murmurings

Climbing the mountain in moon's shadow – last night's letter.

The tornado dream hits before dawn leaving me alone in a pool of sweat and silent paralytic screams. I absorb fear and it is more than fair.

Wednesday's light is soft green glints casting off any constraints. My midwest living room shimmers with pines and Great Lakes. June opens my bathrobe to summer. Perhaps it would be better if I tightened my lips around the nothing that must be said. I would still hum the murmurings though.

I press my hips against the sink to do dishes and notice how the rhododendron I just trimmed looks like the destroyed Death Star. A smile is a form of resting. Like trawlers gliding on glass in and out of the fog, the remains of the conversation appear and disappear all day. Everything is a little bit hushed.

Have you ever considered how love is the act of feasting on one's own heart? Emily and her love of baking bread, writing on kitchen papers, feeding those with room in their ribcage. How the baker sometimes starves!

Green tea, a hard boiled egg, and strawberries. I ask for bird feeders but get squirrels instead. Mama Blue Jay dives at the dog to protect the nest but so far she leaves me alone. How long can you hold your breath? The daisies keep their color private a little while longer.

Again the inarticulate rises. Again the northern winds settle. Again summer arrives to lick winter's porcelain plate clean.

Home and Her Identities

Winding west and climbing north – three times a heron lifts or settles where I can see it. How lost one might be without the thoughtlessness of birds. The new lake is frozen with the reflection of deep pines and aging oak, broken only by v-shaped wakes of ducks and amorous bullfrogs stationed in the southwest bend of the lake.

Otherwise, stillness.

Our embrace reveals how things have changed or stayed the same. This and other affectionate roots in Kenya. They ask about our president and we respond with our bodies – slumping, turned away, and shaken.

The second day drizzled its course – late breakfast, quiet coffees, tired teenagers making conversation here and there. Three window sliders frame the sloping view of the painted landscape falling down towards the lake. Everyone says the water is the star of the show. A green metal bird feeder, house-shaped with a copper roof, sits on a tall pole so that it is eye-level with the dining room table. Eating meals with birds! For a time, an erasure of home.

At the seepy water's edge I watched a blue-gray grace land on a fallen tree jutting out into the slow stillness of cottonwood reflection. The heron again. Kora would like it here.

Home and her identities. Have you ever noticed how birch trees sway like ghosts high on the hill? The visitation of black bears and muskrats and bald eagles all hint towards a bonding with the untamed. Unnamed? In the country of austere stillness the lake is lavish.

There isn't much more to this wandering than that.

She told me she has always wanted to see a cardinal and so the slight homesickness festers. Books on Michigan poetry are clear windows and it makes me wonder how anyone would know the pedigree of my embraces.

Near the feeder, woodpeckers visit the suet cage: pileated, red-headed, hairy, and the flicker. Past sundown they roll and drum a welcome bridge into sleep.

dawn's benevolence
             of new freckles
                          and the worship of light

over flagstones
          and ashes cooled by dew
                            the faded conversation

Overruled

In the window with coffee draining.

A butcher's night sleep piling fragments of flesh here and there.

Tell me how the earth feels when you are on your knees. Tell me where your hands go when she sits on your thighs.

A steep sky scrawling.

My peace rose only blooms while I am away; even now, it readies.

Saturday's shadows fatten and hot elephant air leaves the delicate trampled in its wake.

Just get to the lake.

As a kid I sucked the color off my M&M's and nibbled all the breading from the chicken McNuggets and squished my doughy dinner roll into a ball the size of a quarter to eat in methodical morsels as if it was the last bit of food for a stranded survivor.

And on the way home from catechism classes we would sit facing backwards in the white station wagon with wood paneling on the side and velvety blue upholstery. We held hands in the dark and pretended to talk about school while we watched scurrying asphalt being devoured by the perfect cover. He wore Drakar sometimes and a gold chain and a Chicago White Sox cap with a crooked bill. His girlfriend was popular and pretty. I was a good kisser and not allowed to date.

To feel alive is to ride the calamity all – the – way – up. At elevation, peace billows in a tumbling plume from one's gaping mouth.

An adolescent kiss.
A moonlit 9th-green kiss.
A bass player kiss.
A swimming kiss.
A not-yet-tasted kiss . . .

Rear-facing partitions to change the view of the very instinct we try to overrule.

Nonprofits and Other Vaginal Topics

Small rabbits at dusk. Every sunset fades like a season – bruised peach prophets falling through evergreen frames. It's not the salt in the sentences or the way they melt in my mouth. It is the symphony of unnamed notes, the alternative realm opened upon climax, the impression of your knees on the kneeler after you're long gone . . .

Even in June, October is always on the way; your hyphen mouth tells me so.

Supplies stockpile on the heirloom table: gluten free pancake mix, organic tortilla chips, popcorn seeds, s'mores, and local beer. The french press – because good friends are worth good coffee. These custodians of wide-open places tend the coals after migration. Honor instinct. The elephants must sway in the rhythm of the red oat grass; the acacia must anchor the flat clouds of Kilimanjaro. And the missionaries must return to tell us about siafu and terrorist attacks and the scavenging kites that steal lunch our of your hands. Do you remember the time when the baboons stole the cooler out of our hands and guzzled our Coke's like drunken sailors?

With my feet in the stirrups we conversed about nonprofits in third world countries. Maybe more tests. Maybe not. The body plays an anchor in a show I've already seen.

Night swimming. R.E.M. floats forward from summer soundtracks devoured in and out of love. I'm going to do it; I'm going to let the moon see my weightless nakedness in the still waters of a sleeping lake.

No. Body. Cares.

wish I may –
the sky's colander of stars  
healing empty hands

Unknown Moments for Unexplained Reasons

A single tone plucked from an oriole's song evokes a wild, unbroken landscape. In the Mara there were no fences – no sutures pretending to heal serration – only tented beliefs from which to emerge.

In the schoolyard, clover is left to bloom. Waiting on or digging for or studying "why" doesn't really change the livestock's desire for fodder.

Faith and her hopeful expectations! I'm watching life gather in the pond and letting the muddy waters settle. The biology of truth, teeming.

And how many things have I brought to life by thinking? Unraveling / unveiling / uncoiling.

Two birds hit the window today, hard. This and other diary entries marking unknown moments for unexplained reasons.

What if we all went to the movies and my leg brushed against yours in the dark? Afternoon naps that go too far.

Colorless meadows
resist

bottle brush pines
insist.

A certain fumbling to find the off-switch for a blinding beacon sorta prevents the chill vibe I am going for. Forget me, forget-me-not. But write it.

Near 3 a.m., God's voyeurism glows through a crack in the blinds. The dream drowns me to consciousness by lapping the freezing lake up to my shoulders. How dark and cold the night is when you've pushed away the blankets that make the bed so pretty!

Habanero pepper in the macaroni and cheese. Every time she told me the conference is in Boston, I kept seeing angry men looking for wooden legs. My own jokes passing the time.

A renewed desire to hike. I've asked about Pigeon Creek Trail and will find out what dawn has to say about it – after the doctor's appointment I hate.

All these words dancing or creeping or sliding around the connection of naked intent. If I'm honest, which I am not, I just want us to take a walk.

Summer Soundtrack

Blue jays tap at dawn's window. Passerine thoughts add to the stone's weight of a sunless break. On the way to Detroit, destroyed deer bodies lined the highway shoulder every few miles. Suppressing vomit is easier if you breathe with your chest instead of your guts. I hate the sport of hunting – rather, I hate killing. So do the means end up justifying the ends? Those deer, with their heads flattened against their backs have something to say.

Laundry. Food prep. Packing for the Land of 10,000 Lakes – the hum of a soundtrack in anticipation of being with the ones who gave me Wendell Berry. Our Kenyan fraternity allows no exit wounds. Her language is my language. His music is mine, too. And the children bleed a global blood that cannot be read about or studied or synthesized in a lab. Maybe we will have room in the car for a guitar.

The forever yes: a meaningless distinction of willingness. Rivers, lakes and the sea all push me here – at the bottom, looking up towards light, knowing the gulp of life when I see it. And I cannot wait to get to the lake. L'Etoile du Nord, I shall meet your reflection and consider the fulfillment of days a simple rendering of everything I ever needed to know.

Sleeping bags. Towels. Bug spray. Tuck in. Keep warm. Bug off. God's gaze into summer is calling all the shots now. That's why I say hey man nice shot.

That Kind of Woman

The itching blisters of yard work – certain sensitivities say: enough is enough.

I bought her a poetry book as a gift but kept it for myself. I'm that kind of woman.

When pulling the grocery carts apart, my hand jerked to knock a man from his thoughts. He was wearing a handgun on his belt and nodded politely as the greeter pointed out pictures of firearms on his iPhone. They both paused to listen to me make an awkward apology involving some quip about fighting with carts.

Kenya and her AK-47's filled wishing wells of peace with pennies. But following the Glock clipped to the ass of the white-haired man strolling down the produce aisle at Meijer felt like sitting on my knees in church with a barrel to my back. How the profane licks the sacred on a hot, hot day.

I ate the whole bag of dark chocolate covered blueberries because I'm that kind of woman.

When he was long at work, I would climb the deacon's bench in the mudroom in order to reach his black bag, high on the shelf. Old varnish peeling up from the bench crackled under my bare feet like pieces of petrified paper. The leather bag was heavy and required concentration, but what a treasure trove for a treacherous child! Syringes in sterile pouches. Gauze and bandages rolled in perfect bundles, like soldiers awaiting command. Stethoscopes, otoscopes. Scissors and scalpel. For a few tiny moments I stole a man's most prized possession. That kind of girl.

I remember hearing the faint sizzling as long, dry grasses transferred the remnants of life to the waiting arms of death. I smelled the inside of sooted punishment long before I was seared by the flames. She slapped me so hard when she found out what I had done that the brace on my back tooth came off into my mouth. People could have died. Why? Why?

In the back of the old blue Ford truck, I held the match until it burned my fingers, over and over again. I could see into its soul. On the last match, I let it drop over the side into summer's thirsty throat. Even as the wind took the fire further and further up the hill, I laid frozen in the bed of the truck, staring up at the sky. I was that kind of girl.

Sugar and spice and everything nice / I was born this way – hey . . .

Hot and hazy afternoons on his waterbed in the basement, his parent's shower, his copper sparkled RX-7 – the homecoming queen of high repute gave what was needed and took what she had to have. The boy exalted; the girl, hidden – ferreted away to forge her shield and mask in preparation for the slutty double standard of mice and men.

Don't cry for me, Argentina.

When I wasn't allowed to have things, I stole them – cookies in the night, money from Mom's wallet, my sister's Midnight Oil record. Just share with me, okay? I want to be me.

That kind of woman.

A Grand Swerve

Magenta petals busking for regard; I donate gladly while tending spent blooms.

She called. She was in an accident. She is okay. Everyone is okay.

A mother can only function with single-minded action when her child is in danger. A bear's nature cannot be out run. Or out prayed.

The moon tilts its mouth to fill up on more of the night sky. Summer is coming.

With the sun just right, a subtle breeze off the lake, and the yellow swallowtails floating in and out of the picture, one might be tempted to understand that this life cannot be held.

A grand swerve to avoid hitting a turtle making its way from one side of the isthmus to the other. This and other ways that a lake can be too close.

barrel through / miss the center / swim around the bend

I couldn't bury the oriole. Perhaps skulking cats carried him away. All I know is that he is gone from the place I left him, but not gone altogether.

The old path through the woods has been widened and paved. A trail turns into a path and a realization dawns on the idea that it was never the forest that was so special. The trees and birds and flowers all remain; it is the trail that moved underfoot with the seasons. It was the earth that changed a little with each traveler – gaining and losing pieces of itself with each touch. Some how the comfort and convenience of pavement stands inferior to the unknowable surprise and discovery found within a drifting pass.

The pines still whisper and the wild grasses along the path still bend with their own weight. But I shall not travel through the same way again.

Our Ever Green

Before supper the sky turns a dusty sage.

Sometimes the truth disappears behind the mounting storm for a little bit. Fiction's savvy manteau becomes too close to call – too warm to let fall.

In the heart of purging today, I took notice of my talent for giving things away. I've kept almost nothing, having passed along gifts, money, and most mementos. At times there is guilt in the moment of letting go, but it swells and dissipates like a stone's ripple plunked into the frog pond. I slipped out of my clothes to try on the creamy silken robe reserved for my wedding night twenty years ago. I've never worn it, yet it has remained folded in the back of my bottom bureau drawer. What does giving it away change?

The neighbor kid who lives behind us screams: I hate you! And his mother screams it back. Sometimes he and his brothers play war games with Airsoft sniper weapons and terrible words. Overshot pellets and cancerous offenses amplify the pending the storm.

Green can mean a lot things.

Green Car Motel, green sky before all hell breaks loose, green with envy. . .

Green is Michigan's color of renewal and it is also the steadfast intensity of her evergreen.

Our ever green.

Alexis wins a scholarship with her essay and in one draft she has made more money with her words than I ever will.

The grass is always greener on the other side; I know better than that. Light plays and dances and deceives.

As the rain begins again, it taps the leaves, seemingly one by one. I always think of that scene from Bambi when he is curled up tight next to his mama, and he experiences rain for the first time. Each drop that falls is another note in a gathering musical shower.

A rabbit nibbles on the leaves of the hostas I just transplanted. Green thumb, green in the gills, God's green earth.

The way rainfall dampens the riotous clamoring of spring nights – I love you for that. Osiris nods and with his blessing, I tend to sleep and to the earth and to those who choose to grow. Words or no words. Green or black. The journey of a thousand mossy spores in one – simple – step.

Not a Bread Maker

This spring, unlike any other.

A searcher rests in the nick of time.

Lately, the sun breaches and retreats after days of colder rain.

Mourning coos, cardinals, and young chipmunk chirps.

The dog and I stare at the dead oriole, neither one of us knowing what to do.

What part of death isn't my fault really?

My hair moves in the wind, waving to the bracken.

Now I no longer read out of hunger or need; beauty is its own melty finish.

She is right: it's not the relationship that thins the veil – it's how we hold the common ground.

The new moon opens the doorway.

Walk through to stay in place.

For three nights, an exacting pulse dices the darkness: 12 am – 3 am – 6 am . . .

And over tea, I realized that I am a soup maker, not a bread maker.

Being in love with bread is not the same as loving flour on your fingertips.

Ah, but soup!

A requiem that I never chose speaks on my behalf.

life lingers
and is also
just

h

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