A Gasp of Moon

I watched the house burn – the smell of their entire lives staining my shirt and soaking my lashes.

Ashes of baby blankets and prom pictures and phone bills and carefully hidden Christmas gifts heaped upon my head.

She asked me to carry her dogs to safety. In my hands, a beating rib cage, whimpering. All at once, the back of the house collapsed and she folded like a paper swan into creeping violets.

I don't know her and I can't forget her.

How love can be like that, just a gasp of moonlight in an always expanding night – a hint of eternity projected onward in a perfectly ineffable package. Unknowable and unforgettable. Consuming and devastating.

Every careful moment put into place can go up in flames – fuel of impermanence, lasting lifetimes.

Her collection returned to the earth. Your letters, creased in the code of ancients, buried in me.

Common or divine – we decide. Fire, loss, a breathy moon before the cardinal wakes.

Connect or not. The thermometer of my soul is always rising.

This epistolic narration with no reader. No writer.

Yet I am here.

A quick hitch in the quickening approach of night.

Maybe I Bloom

With spring's decision, an unfastening. The melt matters, Poet. Can you dare to come closer to that which is so tired of being held back? Just blindfold me already. It is the only way to sense the peace of what is given. Yes, I'm talking about you. I'm talking about the world.

The dog and I are back to walking at dawn. Unsullied light. Yet at the moment of acceptance, it no longer reveals salvation. So then, it is just putting one foot in front of the other, breathing the layers of existence as if there is life to be had.

This is not melancholy. I've thought it through and I'm done limiting perception.

Maybe there is hand holding. Maybe there is mind-melding. Maybe there are miles of aching shoulders and river-numbed ankles. Maybe there is dialogue and poetry and companionship in the knowing. . . 

But I am repainting the colonial fencing in a glistening shade of gray. No longer will black and white border the territory that remains unclaimed.

I bloom.

Parting from the Sky

Out in the distance, away from my window, snow manages me. It falls in slow motion. Am I this infinitely numerable? There is no sunlight to settle upon for now. I rearrange my pillows.

Lately, my perception of the world growls in that low, unsayable way, like the colobus monkey's guttural roll call before dawn. I try to move without the awareness. How does one put off the chill of winter and war and hatred and impatience? There is only supposed to be love.

Stacking firewood this late in the game. Numb fingers jostling timber, then burning.

Why aren't you here? The poet falls love . . . no, the writer falls in love . . . no, I fall in love with the syllables of what is.

A finger in front of the god damn moon? No. We are the moon.

So goes the refusal to part from the sky. So goes the ability to reject the blue light of everything we were ever meant to see.

Winter will leave and spring will dance, with or without me.

But - 

not without us.

Sunlight and Dead Cardinals

I'm going to prattle around the dunes and pines and muck fields forever. The territory trades names and so do farmers. But it is always me who arrives, admiring moony sunsets and breezes thick with onion air and springtime blackbird calls.

I don't understand how this is. There is a "me" experiencing sunlight and dead cardinals and dog kisses and family card games. She feels a world groaning, suffering under the weight of humanity. Yet she also grounds into the earth welcoming the silence of nothing. The motionless motion lifting into every molecule that ever existed. Free. Undone. Not me.

These teachers I know say that is it. This is it. I listen so hard and at times, the clarity is devastating. Though mostly, I hear my own voice schlepping through daily ethos: this, here, now, the end.

And yet. She wrestles with a psychic twinge curbing the belief in disbelief.

From my seat at the rounded dining room table, I face the painting of a field of red poppies that his grandmother, who became my grandmother, stared into every day. A window to nowhere.

How do I let this be?

Laughing Pines

Sunrise after a winter in bed. One doesn't always choose the teacher, I chirped. The laughing pines measured the distance and found that we were too close to see each other. How's that for a hardy lesson? All I know for sure is that my attention sweeps the territory for what is.

From blankets, I watch light climb the tired fence. Our tired fence. What leans will eventually fall of course. Yet East rises chiming the bell of truth every day. Gouged eyes still see it. Traveled paths still host the feet of hikers looking backwards. Rivers still speak new sentences without ever stopping.

It all. Goes. On.

She gets out of bed. She walks. She makes it work for every one. Quitting makes sense until the damn sunrise pierces the romance of starlight and dark bodies. You've known this all along. I'm not sure when I'll find it all so funny.

The Allowable Forest

Some times, the nothing I need to say relaxes into the celibacy of departure . . . 

You remind me of the lake ahead of dawn, before fisherman and laundry and the trampolined notes of machines and voices. How clear and beautiful is the reflection of stillness! Yet below the surface, entire ecosystems convulse and retract. I remember sitting at the end of dock, waiting. Lake mist for breakfast. Infinite ripples for dessert. What is unsaid is carried further and further from here.

The formality of writing is undertaken in reverence to what is. In a certain light, it is all deeply virtuous and spiritual. Yet in my dream, we tend a flame that devours everything, and then write about it. And it isn't the flame or its tending that provokes, it is the “we.” I sweep up the ashes only to collect more scraggly firewood on the edges of the allowable forest.

It will consume me. In so many ways, it already has. Perhaps I prefer death, or rather, that place from which only death returns. Because no matter how many times I visit the lake or remember who I am or sear my steps through a the piney woods or treat the wounds of the burned, I AM HERE.

writing  / tending  / listening

Slaying Me Unto One

Lately, dying a little with each line. This intangible text unravels its hand at my expense. And speaking of hands, put yours over my mouth . . because there is little left to say in the land of lessening. I am no longer fostering who I was.   J   e   s   s   I   c   a   .

Winter is a deficit. In darkness like this, a single shaft of light empowers motes and hearts to take flight. The unseen becomes known. And the world is saved from itself – migrating between what is there and what is not. The impersonal circumstances of what never was unbuilds itself for self's sake.

sitting here
cross-legged for hours
telling no thing

Each snow flake is adding, adding . . . yet I see that everything is already here. The seeker falls down on top of the finder. We pile into winterscape's seamless white. The Holy Now, unavoidable.

Such is allowable peace.

The warm teacup against my chest.
Lightfall in slants across the wood floor.
A chance to bow before a bear's heart.

Each word, fraught with motion, slaying me unto One.

The Whole Way

The cadence of falling, years later – an ongoing familiarity of a groundless home.

Objects of endearment line the rising wall-scape and I no longer grab at them.

And I stop trying to stop.

Or get up.

There is only recession now.

On a walk, I acknowledge the knotted pine and I greet the maple whose time has come to tap. To steal time and put it in a jug; that makes sense? Is there any memory of the hard winters or autumn's risky red blushing when one pours it over oatmeal or pancakes or on bread? It's just one person's walk; one perception; one way of coping with the eternal lessening of bedrock. If I shuffle by long enough, perhaps it will all become ordinary and invisible – air for the senses to take for granted.

I'll morph towards the world
and the world towards me.

We will fit and fall faster
leaving treasures in the embankment -
stars of old light
guiding.

Whatever is left,
our miraculous vapor.

Our wingspan
leaving trails
in the air.

To be whole for a moment only. That is life. Faith in the intangible. Falling forever. The holy continuance of communion, grabbing only each other . . .  

the whole way 

Measured

With everyone asleep, the sun and I measure morning – which is to say, nothing is measured. Toast with coffee and a slightly snoring dog. The heat kicks on and off and I am grateful. Yet my madness creeps along the warming floorboards; my heavenly incarnate taps the carefully constructed chapel in the woods. I'm letting love have its way because in it, I feel the total process of the world. How else can I lean towards concordance? The quieting sun allows me to see unsettled dust motes and time travel and the way the outside longs to reunite with the inside. I am allowing who I am.

Your skillful pedagogy lifts the mask. Flakes of ash artfully become a stunning jewel and that is why we write, isn't it? There are no monsters to slay – no mountains to overcome. We simply leak the truth that arises from a disciplined aptitude. The honed skill of pleasure keeps us in touch with society's reality after the scales fall away.

Morning says I must play the part in order to dance with dust or dogs or life. Not until your river babbled the words did I understand the purpose of illusion: to play. Our play is that of the cosmos – a sacrament of ultimate being – and love, an art of pleasure opening that highway of the unknowable known.

If it is otherwise, then I cannot live here; I've seen too much and not enough.

we are god

and goddess

without worlds

at home in the applause

of our play

Writer: you teach and point and love and leave and mourn and heal through this art. The finale awaits our manuscript - the collaborative work everything we've always known.

Ending Syncopation

Tonight's moon, low and too far west of summer. Sitting beneath is to examine every single thought in all directions. Open, close, and open again – a heartbeat growing weary of unnecessary contemplation. And moonbeams move onward. A paper soul stays behind, mourning a lost word in the deeper night. Winter whittles towards the shapeless shape, inviting space and silence. The clean, white expanse never begs but quietly extracts with an open-mouthed kiss. November tossed the unfoldable blankets before I was ready. And so what? This is the trek of Now.

So in this way, I haven't packed my bags yet.

I've not lamented the string of gray pearls strung across the sun for a week.

And there is no keening on the moony 3 a.m. trail.

The heart of why I was made will thaw here in the icy tomb. It will touch your chest to end the syncopation of lack. Nature herself gives way.

Winter, even you will gain the power to solace the almost. And with this yes I will not fall asleep.

my blaze your shiver peace therein

Sainted Sea Dream

In a fog of dreaming I drift towards the day I fell asleep, hidden on the sloping dune of The Great Lake's face. Before the slip of consciousness, a cross of seagrass planted at my feet. The sand, my cradle. Sky, my spread. And in my hands, a chaplet of shells and stones. How watery hymns loosen the knots!

untangled in front of the sea - rosary hands

Waking does not mean a fading of the sea. Nor does it lessen the salty sting in the eyes. Instead, the currents of the world pass through as they must, taking only what is ready to go. My sorrow has ripened. Now shame is on its way passed. Past?

As a certain clarity threatens to settle the matter, dreaming need not quarrel for life or truth or endings. Wake and dream. Sea and stone. It is the “or” that slips away into the holy flame of sunset.

parlay wagered on infinite waves

a tendered soul to dream and wake

The Sound of Light

Through the night, a hard rain spoke. Everyone else slept as if hypnotized by an incessant conversation. But I listened to my inseparable brother. He asked for no pardon, so I offered none. This is IT, Watery Way. I am hearing things these days. Murmurs move from weightless echoes into tangible clarity. Teacher, your dust falls upon my crown and I will never not be grateful for the way you held my hand – wordy and fierce. Now there is walking for movement's sake, for I have nowhere else to be. The thievery of dreamfall surrenders to justice.

Now I know what a smile is – an elegant light, spreading recognition.

A smile into the toddler's curiosity at the market. A smile through steamy brown rice. A smile when I dropped the day's clothing for bed sheets . . .

Naked now, laughter borders the cosmic play.

Then silence – a transparent skirt spreading from the sounds of life. Emptied and quiet, the heart accepts it all.

And Love allows me to fall into It, as if I had gone somewhere, so that “I” might hear, over and over again: the Beloved is in love with You.

I am in Love with . . . [Y]ou.

Dawn arrives, splitting the rain, and light is all I can hear.

Train, Rain, the Sea and Me

Perhaps the train . . . To make love on a train, never being in one place, moving to the rhythm of each available now and in that way, there would be no particular state to keep us, no hotel imperfection or forest floor forced to keep the memory of our betrayal in hungry mosses, only a series of moments, escaping homeless breaths, passing by with the landscape at 150 mph.

The train could announce our passage through village and farm and canyon and mountain – a hundred places on one ticket. A hundred faces looking back at one. The steam trumpet alive with mimicry. Who is at the helm? The whistle lets you know.

Or the rain . . .

It drives with an endless purpose, all day and all night, to the point where one struggles to hear anything else. The brook swells with the runoff it cannot swallow. It writhes towards the river, collecting bits of the world as it goes – souvenirs for later gifting. The lake, risen. An arching dam, dutifully holding for now. This cadence keeps nothing for itself as it plays for gravity, a sold-out venue every time.

And the sea . . .

How could any lover not speak of the sea? She is never rushed in her power, nor neglectful in her gentle lapping. Her baptisms sustain the repentant and her anger stirs the complacent from their hazy lull. And when one finally falls into her bed in sublime surrender, one finds room for the entire world.

In all these places and none of them, I finish what never began.

On the Blushing Ridge

I move furniture to follow sunlight across elderly floorboards. From here I can watch October move its borders from sky to land. My mental fringe falls into a slow, floating cadence and like this, stillness is quilted. The overlapping saffron and siennas mute the bald sun for now, but soon there will be only bare branches – trees reaching for hugs. October barely arrives before it leaves. I'm at home on this high ledge of autumn's pinnacle, looking down into the steep descent of frigid expressions. Perhaps I do cling to what is beautiful. But my favorites fade so quickly and in the wake of long dark months, I want to celebrate them while I can. Embrace. And kiss. A Libra and her scales; which is heavier, justice or desire?

Apple slices and tea. Bread and honey. Soup and cider. The table speaks of harvested time. We sit together for now knowing that soon we will need to keep moving for warmth.

But not now. Today is marigold chairs pushed into golden beams. It is red, fleecy blankets pulled up to armpits, tucking in quiet legs and toes. Today is still October and I want you to sit with me on the blushing ridge of fall's most spectacular being.

It's Not Her Decision

Still, the writing only goes in one direction. It's not my decision. Every effort to dig at the fertile places barely releases dusty remnants – specks polluting the deep breaths that deliver your name. Sentences, poetry, jots, hey you . . .

a yes to what leads me - our prescription: Be!

Your eddy, my sun, play in coherence. There's the moon, too. Maybe I love the moon for its emptiness. Its beams alight on all the same, causing the question: do I reflect too much? Yet it all is . . . fueling this orbit for now.

The forest shifts color unto the earth, and the grey vault of winter begins to adhere. It is time to listen more closely to what has always been here. The babbling brook . . .  too long I have called it this or that, without listening to the name it always returns. In my wakefulness and in my sleep Beloved, I love you the same. So before ice demands your laughter, perhaps we will get this right.

I am listening now. Your smooth stones worn by motion settle into the soft portion of my open hands. Accept these letters until they disappear in perfection. This one who tends can do nothing more.

“ I am the vine, you are the branches . . .”

October 9

The river moves without legs and is not diluted by lovers walking downstream. Instead, it laps the impoverished feet of travelers, baptizing along the way. That is rain in October. That is the cold shroud on my birth day. That is.

I press into this day with an expectation that takes me by surprise. Love is here, like every other day. Yet, also, a childlike sense of play. . . and specialness. Mom takes me to breakfast and we talk about family, red lentil chili, and the ways in which aging bodies change aging homes.

And all day, friends send blessings and warm encouragements. My children hug me a few extra times and K. keeps checking my eyes to make sure that I know that today is distinct.

But the dog cries at my feet. She waits for the walk, but in my exclusiveness, she suffers. All threads are not included and so there is a sort of imbalance – missing notes in a song gathering towards harmony. My Libra ways tilt, and the difference changes the tune.

I'll make it back to the river tomorrow. The dog and I. But then who suffers?

the creek's threshold moving stones of broken backs and homes - take me with you

A Slower Gait

Today's walk had teeth. The hunger to feel my legs from the inside out was startling. For so long I have bounced my eyes away from the purple tracks marring what used to be my favorite countryside. But not today. Leaving home in the dark, I pressed my feet hard into pavement for distance and heat and to feel the muscles pull against the scars I have avoided for months. My pace confused the dog, or maybe it was the occasional whimpering and whining of old baggage whose time has come.

Eventually I walked straight into sunup – and not just the bruised sky healing itself towards light. I marched into the full orbing hemorrhage, searing my eyes and dropping my jaw. Reaching down to rub the scars, I felt the mottled tissue and thought about tattoos and cancer and the idea of physical healing and suffering. And I exhaled. Maybe for the first in weeks.

A slower gait for the woods; my presence is disturbing enough. The milkweed and corn on the fringes are mixing yellow and green, breaking in the same places like siblings sometimes do. I raise my arms above my shoulders and pretend that the dying weeds are the onlookers of a race, high-fiving my efforts to go further and deeper.

But as soon as I enter the coolness of the forest's throat, there is no more make-believe. My language forgets itself in favor of nothing. Here, I am no longer confined to the narrow band between birth and death. I am fed unto the ordinary, and digested whole. My scarred legs and bloodied knees drop the pretenses that carried me here. For I am only grateful that you waited forever for the healed me, hungry walker.

Oh . . . Just a Love Letter

Enshrouded in the dense dawn, the dog and I went, step by step. Past the thistle.

Over the low bridge.

Threading benevolent arms and gulping autumn perfume.

We stopped to celebrate pine cones atop ginger blankets and sip from the creek's donation. Only the chickadee sang. And my heart became voluptuous, spilling all the sentiments I meant to save. In a single moment, the lips of our ground and sky did not touch, extending the horizon beyond that which is knowable. The past refused acknowledgement and the future waits undetected behind the unraveling veil. There was only now.

and I was embedded in the individual notes of love's whispering breeze

How does one return from the threshold of eternity . . . the silence of perfection, the integration of all outliers? I have all day to live the answer.

At home, the candle burns and with it, words become flesh as I utter and scribe and reach and hold.

my endlessness exposed - the thin places beg and we arrive

We are the source. Joined to the ineffable. And the invisible hand is implicated as we awaken one another. Verily, verily. . . we are enveloped in a sensuous world – Our Home.

Okay. Okay?

Okay.Serendipity on repeat. The dragonfly I never mentioned. Coffee in front of the empty cafe chair. Bees and chickadees. And so much blue.

I look at leaf litter piling on the porch and I see dead bodies. The fall out. Yet also, fertilizer. Only the mind is at odds with this path. Is and is not; can and can not. The way around the paradox is to crave the dagger. That is, straight through.

Because as it turns out, existence is inclusive.

Sharing the way, we become the oral tradition that lives on in a song, unrestricted by text or meaning or interpretation. The humming chant settles the ripples that our letters have sent ahead, and we remember everything the trees and the hawks and the moon had to say. We are not a part or apart. We are. Just here. Okay?

The Tallest Migrant

  I was the tallest migrant on the trail this morning, catching webs on my cheek every few feet. Across the meadow, the pheasant were dancing so I rested and watched awhile. Wet grasses. Still air. My chest rose in this full moon hangover.

Walking is a work that undoes the work and thinking about that is work, so I just walk. Mostly.

unfastening I find room off the trail already prepared

A new flame rises from old wood. Or is the blaze always recycling, burning and dying just out of linear reach? The ash is easier to process. It blackens my hands and scatters in the breathy night. Tangible. Knowable. Inert?

Walking can be a meandering.

A mending.

Or it can be the way to get somewhere else.

And it can be the surest course reducing the me that exists without.

You.