Under Tented Beliefs

We split an elephant ear and talked about draft horses as rain muttered from the corners of the tent. I hate the fair. Too many people paying too much money to eat too much crap and watch too many animals pant and sweat in too many cages. How strange the places we find ourselves when trading discipline for the decadence of impulse! Though, somehow this was better, the drizzled twist of a dampened chaos.

Later from the back room, I watch an apricot grin fight through the gunmetal sky. A fiercely guarded aloneness means marking territory with warnings and “do not disturb” signs and snarling teeth if one must. The world is living me without my permission, and it's taking a toll. Not until the day is carefully folded and put away do I tend to remember the easy path through the borderlands. Even a citizen can be an immigrant from time to time.

But how grateful I was this morning for her talk of visiting birds and then again, with the aching poetry of chirps and presence! There is mystery in this stricken chord. And for an eternal moment I am perfectly content to listen without the accompaniment of why why why.

under tented beliefs I crawl for a song - cardinals in the rain

Widening in the Vase

The usefulness of pronouns wavers like summer's wane - minutes convert away from long lasting light towards the growing hunger of night. Tender grasses are serenaded by that silver-tongued iceman making his way ever closer.

Manifold forms of the earth say it better than even the most lyrical landscape of the rhapsode bard. Sunflowers bow and nod. Blackbirds carry their song to a more appreciative crowd. And all the while, humans keep filling the conversation with words that dull the improvisation of nature's incessant interrelation.

Even me. I know better. You do too. See? They want more than the pen can bare.

I keep setting aside the end that locks down my gaze. The one thing that makes me feel special must dissolve into the babbling current that fills space with every thing that ever needed to be heard.

If I am not an author, then I am not “I.” If there is only listening, then I become a conduit of home-cooked meals and clean floors and thank-you notes. Perhaps like this, a fade into the ancient and always chorus arrives, whereby language returns to its unspoken, unbroken origin.

The last rose bloom of the season widens in the vase. Yet the hearts I have tended, less so.

How much longer will I resist the lessening of me? Cicadas say: l7 years or in an instant; it makes no difference, you see.

In the Language of Flowers

I still climb the ladder. How strange that words maintain the lift towards a better view. Is it more than that? After the raw moment of newness, everything else only offers a dull walk around managed wilds. The lack settles, like the golden dust of summer's wane.

you be you and hold my hand - it's how goldenrod is harvested

Lately, I meander. The trail has changed so much since spring that the way seems heavy and foreign. Lace brushes elbow-high and the dog no longer fits beneath brambles. Too soon the twigged skeletons of the departed season will bear witness to autumn. October makes me a Libra but it is also the last possible boundary before that familiar canopy of darkness.

There is a certain self-loathing to speak of winter in August. But honesty is now requiring an ending to half-way touchstones. Maybe it's not clear because I can't know what I mean. In that way, it seems that with the yielding of meaning comes the end of writing. For what need would there be of a translator if all of this is transient? For whom do I even exist?

desire in the language of flowers - silence

Soft in Mine

Golden shades of day flutter in the arms of pine and oak. A bee throws itself against what looks like freedom, but instead remains trapped. Or is it a house fly? All I know for sure is that today is ending. Please be quiet. Living is patient work, I've decided. The person I want to be sits beyond, shaking. For what purpose is life, Teacher? A boy the same age as my son died today, and his sister vomits in grief behind the wheel. The path has been given, yet I see death. I witness the watchful land of splintered men.

It's not possible to speak of love anymore. There is only the moon with its lost appetite, waiting for the cycles to change.

I hear you asking about what I mean. I'm saying that it is foolish to announce life and death and love and grief and hope. It only leads to suffering. My son's hand, soft in mine, will only lead to bloodletting; tucking my daughter's hair behind her ear is the same as throwing dirt onto a rose-colored casket.

The freedom to be free gets us no closer to the place we already are. And the heaviest chain of all is the one that insinuates that I am so much more than this.

so and yet a deepening sigh I let it be