Two A.M. Cartography

Without North Star light, a certain bereavement finds its way into the interstitial facia of my breath.

Winter Solstice brings the shortest day. Dark days, dark nights. The cartography of 2 a.m. indicates a familiar dream whilst wide awake. In the silence one can hear whispering trees and sleeping sheep and the sounds of hushed lips pleading into the slight hollow of this almost known cheek.

Write. Just write.

The creek freezes. Potable water held hostage to what is. Yet I hear its idiolect babbling in the microcosm of life. The aggregate of the world sinks to the bottom; this and other clues while panning for gold.

What happens in the world interests me less. My pride used to laud all over itself for being aware of the global condition of humanity. These days – this day – even malfeasance barely brings my stomach acid to roil. Instead, the realm of my devotion has the borders of butternut squash and washing wood floorboards and soothing the hurts of those who find me near.

but there are always outliers
destined convergences
coils of care
adrift
in the moonlight sonata
played for me

Maestro, again.  Again.  

I Ate My Lunch in the Quiet

Will I write if no one reads – the question steals oxygen and light from the room. Will I read if no one writes – a deadening suggests, no. Perhaps Finnegan's Wake is not the best litmus test for detecting the reader's soul.

I ate my lunch in the quiet, watching the snow pile. Draft from the old windows cooled my cheeks and nose. There is no lake here, yet I can see clearly the deep, black layers of my childhood waters freezing from shore to center. I can hear the men hammer and bolster their ice shanties for the long hours of sitting in anticipation. Every year someone falls through or a shanty is swallowed whole. One doesn't miss waiting for that day.

How many times will I bury and exhume the bones facing east? My one hundred lives lived, unremembered yet familiar, moan through cornflower hills. They creak through the aching sentinels of the winter forest. Did she leave me any clues? In the beautiful utterances I recognize what I cannot touch. In walking the fine line between hibernation and death, one lets her body do the work.

The coldest day of the year so far.
An uncovered rose bush at the front of the house reminds me of where I've fallen short, like a dead body hanging from town centre.
And no birds; I have nothing to offer them.
They say the sun will peak through around lunchtime and so it is that hope continues to hinge upon what others share.

I am trammeled for now.

Please send birds.

Flamingo Pleas on Broken Knees

In the breathless blue morning, a train sighs in legato notes. The stillness breeds a sense of hyperawareness worthy of rabbit sneezes and feathers falling. Can hating oneself be the same as loving – a variation from the neutral nothing that is universal and all? The dark spiral breaks the heart in the same emotional vibration as joy. Barriers subservient to a force more energetic than peace. More meddlesome. Sure, lessons and all. But how painful the ice is when kneeling on broken knees!

The ego alights as a source of heat, always building on the coldest morning, the moment before drowning in my hypothermic lake. Illusion as survival then? My bare feet recoil from the gelid bedroom floor but eventually they shuffle a path into morning. There does come a point when the eyes swell over and the tear ducts can produce nothing. The mirror and camera lenses do not lie.

If not the sea, then a cabin warmed by cut logs and stoked fire. Coffee. Blankets. The Authors of my life. Perhaps it is time to go.

Today though, to dress the sorrow with earrings and scarves. Jeans and blackness. Dawn, please be flamingo silk beckoning the dear girl forward one more day.

God's Eyelashes

Under a serrated night I dreamt of a fox for the first time. He saw me. He was me. He passed through me on the way to the wet woods.

The moon and his quicksilver gaze! A muzzled light, blushing through wax paper. In a thieving air, I remember I haven't seen the stars for ages. This and other truthful entanglements of time.

Aleppo and snow falling. We are the executioner's wife watching the systematic extermination of innocents. Remember whose bed you warm, wives; the nightmare honors no quilted sweetness or pristine sheets. Speaking of sheets, in another dream we almost made love while the rest of the commune was gathered for the hegira ceremony. We decided to play a game of cards first.

God's eyelashes fall onto my cheek. Winter this way. We are close but there is still room to lose lashes upon radiant faces.

In single digit temperatures, I fade under five blankets, drifting into the trackless shallows of summer's lakes. May I hibernate until spring, or at least until the sky mellows to rose milk sometime after 9 a.m.? And I miss the birds. It may be time to take things into my own hands.

A Love Affair Without Disciples

I play the sentences aloud. Maestro's words, my voice. Skilled hands becoming warm breath, lilting into existence and floating forevermore as diamonds.

When I am played, Jessica breaks – bending towards the earth like the arms of a colossal pine under white weight. It is the third way. The song I've never heard. My Lord's embrace.

Before bed, toast with honey and a cup of cooling tea. Ritual as a love affair. A love affair without disciples.

The words beget me. I turn and dip my shoulders in between as to avoid collision. But I've already been undone. There is nothing to gain here. Nothing to lose. My tea and eyelids slip down.

It is not hunger; I am full. The abundance of my pliancy has everything to do with what I can give (she says as she eats every word).

Somehow in the moving process the new neighbors have left their outside garage lights on day and night for the last ten days. The light shines into my face through the bedroom window and ripples an already delicate sleepscape. Until we meet, there will be this light between us. That is one way to filter what is.

Yet the sun arrived today, Maestro, and every piney branch danced. The remnant of fall's Tibetan flags waved in the light and I was blessed accordingly. Slipping or sleeping. Praying or persevering. I can only ever fall into your tempo.

My Lake Effect

Ginger tea to settle the truths my stomach cannot handle. When the past shook my hand it felt delicate and more worn than I had remembered. I used to speak of how history no longer exists and therefore, it only has residence if the mind allows. It all sounds so very comforting until the present moment, the-this-is-all-there-is now, contains the convergence of what was and what is – a living, breathing moment with the DNA of a million years and eight hundred tons of stardust. Now and not just now.

At 4 a.m., raging whispers of snowfall spill the secrets of a sleepless night. Our rot now rests under two feet of unhurried suffocation. The tree limbs weaken and camber. A steady march of tiny flakes changes the landscape into pristine treachery. My lake effect.

What if there is only ever words? Does not the river flow with or without them? Yet another metaphor beginning a trail that it cannot finish. One wonders if wanting ruins the moment. Leftover cake sits on the counter because apparently one really can't always have cake and eat it too! Please send coffee, won't you?

Icy daggers hang unemployed from garages with no sun to refract. No point to reach. The birds don't visit anymore on account of the motor that used to keep the creek running has been removed. I'm pissed about it and add the affront as another proof that desires call after their lost twin of suffering. The awareness of the futility of want reteaches the lessons I was born to learn.

Today, a fire and cooking and the assembly of homemade hot chocolate to give as gifts. And I cloister under the storm and find a hundred ways to give thanks. But I miss the warmth of sea-sand at dawn. And the birds sharing a drink and bath outside my window. And eating cake.

The Elephant Sky

December is finally summoned by winter's dawn, delayed and darker than expected. I pace the cold timbers with the struggle for light ahead of breath. How happily evergreens hold all the cards now!

Days arrive in a certain scarcity – a dingy sky holding the ashes of waiting. On call for sunlight, patience is folded into coffee and velour. The family gathers in the living room to share heat and a few songs during the power outage. Guitar and candlelight. Hallmark in action. Which other place sinks love so far in? Yet, the star in the east beams on clear and clouded nights alike.

The wind tears at the remnants of autumn and throws its carnage about. All night something was heard scraping and running and dragging on the roof. When the neighbors mentioned the same experience, an exorcist was mentioned.

During the discussion of racism he asked if I had ever noticed how outside of privilege, white Americans don't have a narrative. They are afraid to lose their story. I wasn't sure if that was meant to elicit compassion, but the question still snakes about in the cochlea of my days. It joins up with the wormy thread that asks what one's role is in the matter of injustice. Where is that mountain top shack built upon the peace that surpasses all understanding? One starts to wonder if the climb is a retreat from madness or an ascent straight into illusion.

The storm pushes the village into alertness. Grocery lines are long and clerks keep asking if we are ready for “the big one.” Maybe the squall will save me from his retirement party whereby I will surely drown in gushing adoration for a man I do not like. For he's a jolly good fellow . . .

At 4 a.m., how soft the snow. How barely heard. How helplessly kept. The unwelcomed necessities, a teacher. From my window, I try to imagine a way through the snowflakes, but I fall into the seduction of just a few, every time. There isn't knowing or not-knowing, only the ordinary measure of clouds. This is my lesson: the perfect season exists in every breath.

And today, under the elephant sky, the student transcribes the heart as happy.

(h)ours

Inner space offering a new coherence. When it is shared, what emerges? This and other questions that spin time into silver threads. The teacher asked if human beings are a function of the past making love to the future. In this way, the evolutionary potential of crises sends a message to Jessica. Collective intelligence is at work.

I hear chickadee notes skip across November's end as I work for (h)ours in the cold. The call to critical questioning manifests. Exertion can be noisy. Pulling everything out of the shed so that I could put it all back in a different way produced grunts and clanging and swearing and heavy breaths. Yet the bird song pierced the work. I knew I would avoiding writing about this bird; it is the “why” that rearranges the clutter.

The train sighs at 3 a.m. – my first awareness of another world trying to get somewhere on time. A child coughs in her sleep and the dog's collar gives away her anticipation of an early meal. At 4:30, the rain returns. What I read in myself begins to count less as the work of the previous day washes away under the deluge. Tea and its perfect timing.

The intersection of vertical space and the grounding of embodied structure. How my body as a service to the surroundings is something to consider. Our wedding bands no longer match, which isn't that big of a deal unless one is into symbols and such. We meet in the morning and part at night to make room for true sleep. It is love that calls me in and out . . . and love that brings me back.  

Wishing Upon Raindrops is Better

A kingfisher resting in the rain. Gazing heavenward, the congruence of oxygen and love reaches the interstice of my cells. Royal birds and their faithful subjects . . .

The rain continues for seven days. I don't want the snow or its temperatures, so complaining really has more to do with awareness than wishing for a change. This and other graying stories.

Lately, my embodiment seen through another. A healing happens all at once when the synchronicity expands life's loose-leaf container. Sometimes it is these words and sometimes others. But underneath every letter is an integrated flow that has touched every single part of whoever I am.

One moves through the inseparability, finding more space than expected. They scoffed at the minimum wage hike and the taxes taken from my daughter's paycheck. Can that which one cannot see still be a teacher? It's not my rodeo, so I bow out in deference to the many things I do not know.

The night air off the back deck smells of skunk and rain. Wishing upon raindrops is better because your heart drops into the soil and becomes the surroundings in which you live. I have a thing about smoke, and it felt like a good night for a cigarette. Coffee instead, whereby steam is a proxy.

Curiosity to wisdom. The unicursal path with no dead ends. To walk is to exist and so far, that is the only sense I can make of this life.

Rain, rain, stay another day.

This Way

Lace on the windows suggesting an everyday sunrise. Mostly I am sure of the monastic arrival – the quiet presence of light creeping as a prayer held beneath the breath. Yet other days, I am not so sure. I sing myself a druidic tune which asks – begs really – for more light. More sentences. More proof that there is no “I” in “I am not alone.”

I remember the time he asked me about being a feminist. This and hundred other conversations to explore in a another way. Instead, pillow talk and Tchaikovsky's letters in a lonely bed.

As the enlightened ones would say, there is no other way. This way.

Hiccups and a headache. The letter I didn't write. Hours pass watching the afternoon grow black. We are all liars. Around here, the churchy faces of tolerance and love. Love the sinner hate the sin...or some crap like that. Yet as soon as the crack of permission is granted, a leakage of the primary colors in fear and hate. And what about my lies? Sitting across from dissenting lenses I hold my tongue, hiding from those who don't deserve to know.

“Be like water,” and other Bruce Lee advice. It rains just above freezing, almost ice. Almost dangerous. With each fracture in justice, a recognized closing. Regression. The temperature of the collective is asking to be monitored.

But when I am still in the folded silence, I become aware of the future in my eyes – a transpersonal knowing of the power to heal. Love, my lovely, is the only coherence that settles the turbid flow. Yes to darkness. Yes to hate. Yes to violence. But also, yes to love. Yes to water in motion. Yes to the mystical science of reality.

a love affair unending
because it always is
this way

I Am Withheld

The pines wave as if to reiterate that one cannot go back.

I want no grave, no headstone to chisel, no plot to purchase or pray to or protect. Yet dead authors call us to their bone yards, or so we think when the wind carries just right through the purpling hills of passing seasons.

One bottomless moment stretches from horizon to horizon. I can smell autumn's transition to sterility. Damp pavement to decaying leaves to woodsmoke to nothing.

To meander around the banks of a riverbed, following the rise and fall of whatever the land has to offer, is to feel something. It is to love more than the mind allows. One could even forget to ask why.

Have I been distracted by teachers this whole time? It is so easy to say that the world is bound and suffering. But then words and images arrive to point towards a beauty and freedom – a moment to moment reckoning of dark and light. Yet we do not trust them! No, not “we”; it is I who does not trust.

I saw the photograph of myself and did not recognize the woman. This and other ways I am withheld. In my dream, we were at Mass together in a long oaken pew. We recited the prayers from our childhood, word for word in sync. But behind the words, we offered up the fullness of the universe with our eyes. A smiling nun. The disrobed priest. How the steeple claims the view!

Night plunges all at once, and so light huddles in houses and bakeries and workshops. Ginger snaps and chamomile tea. The impermanence of consumption can linger warmly in the mouth. Maybe that's what happens when I'm brought to my knees.

No Water and No Seeds

All night the wind shreds piled leaves ready for pickup. Ice pellets pepper the bedroom window, breaking dreams into high pitched shards. Then a milky dawn, softer. And the first snow fall. Sometimes the work we meant to do must rest. Did I ever mean to do any of it all?

In the surgical waiting room, my sister called. It was hard to speak about how he was doing or what the nurses said or the briskness of the surgeon. How the sun and moon dance around my children! Without one of them, everything would be in fact unlivable.

I love hospitals. Everyone has a role vital to healing and well-being. When we are most vulnerable, even the simplest kindness is seen as a great miracle. The drama of emergency and the unknown outcome of trying this or that to save a life calls a person to immediate and unflinching attention.

K. goes for Starbucks and I scroll through poetry wrapped bite-sized brevity. The authors couldn't have known how they held a trembly mother that day. We sit side by side in plastic covered chairs waiting to know – too nervous to hold hands or talk about anything more significant than the predictions for a snowy winter.

The creek in the backyard is broken again. Water slips away under a sad song dead of leaves. The birds don't visit now because there is no water and no seeds. One can only ask for repair so many times. What I cannot fix myself has ramifications. That's the way dim eyes see it for now. Snow piles. The sun hides a bit longer.

I drive through my racist town, but the men hold the door open for me and carry my pizzas to the car when my arms are full of soda. Women fill shoeboxes with gifts at Christmas for the needy and children ride their bikes from church to church to do service projects and mission trips and overall do-goodery. Yet they pray to the orange god of capitalism, exchanging their soul for food on the table and Christmas gifts under a slaughtered tree. What is legal takes power away from those who cannot breathe. How does one walk through this terrible dream? I want to fall away. I want to fall. I want to. I want. I.

We've underestimated our enemy, friends. And overestimated our friends. Paul and his poverty points out my blackened knees: Lord, take it away from me!

Playing Opossum

A dim day clinging to bare branches. The smell of fog and the way one can't quite see or hear the world as it was. Beauty and injustice, hidden all the same. The way I see it is not at all the way it is. Perhaps we would kiss like that, at least once.

The cashier asked if the asparagus was green onions; this and other ways to fall in love. One walks around in a white haze and wonders what the world would seem like without the clarity of news feeds revealing exactly how it seems. Must one be untrained to love? Unplugged? I've studied cause and effect long enough. Can we just let it be?

I have a thing for wooden beams – rough hewn, strong, and dashing in simplicity. Growing up in the A-frame loft, the pine walls came to an apex under a single large cedar beam running the length of the house. I remember apologizing to the dead trees and thanking them for protecting me as I slept under their care. So much is left to tell of this story. Can we talk all night? It will take longer than that, something you have always known.

A small opossum plays opossum in the back yard. The dog doesn't really know what to do with it other than bark. This and other small delights in the delay of snow. In mid-November I am walking without a coat and can't help but adore Michigan and her strange reluctance for sticking to the plan.

Tamped Too Soon

East into a criminal moon – stolen words and breath and hearts. The women in the front seats spoke about Yale football games and climbing northeastern mountains as I snoozed from one reality to another. We'd stop in Cleveland this time but every cell begged for the murderous surrender of the Tidal East. They asked what I wanted to do if I ever made it to Connecticut. It was not poetic to say, “head towards Emily and my heart.”

Small acts of love as an answer to paralysis. How clearly the teacher beams light these days! Is it too much to ask for more? More please. More.

In that way maybe the new darkness is okay.

The leaf pile is taller than the old red Subaru, and there hasn't even been time to address the fallen in the backyard. We won't reach them all before the snow and so it is that spring is already sabotaged. That work, a futile waste. Yet through the toil of fresh decay and its comparison to the passion of being, a clarity asks after the teenage girl curled in the corner studying MLK's every . . . single . . . word. Do you remember her?  Born with a fire tamped too soon.  

That girl resists the futile. And that girl also insists: now?

Dawn sneaks in behind a frosty fog. Blowers before daylight; machines grating against an already serrated countenance. A sandalwood candle for love's sake and the aftermath bound by an empty pool. Libra sets to work in weighing an escape towards peace against the actions for justice. Though one searches for balance, isn't even that dualistic? One against another in the hopes of neutrality.

I guess in the middle of all these words and weighing, hope.

And certain prayers.

And always the immeasurable moonrise in my east.

The Woman's Work

Winter's delay means the air tastes like leeks longer than usual. The breeze now does the work, each gust sending missionaries out to save the world. This and other generosities of trees.

I am guilty of hating – of matching difference and injustice with anger. A ripple on the pond some say. Yet I begin to sink, lower than the swale. Under the muck.

Love. Yes, Love. I recognize the spark igniting, just like old times when it opened the door to the universe. More please.

The coffee and I, watered down a little too much. One writes from a lesser place. Yet there is no scrawling apart from the moment the moon turned his face down to answer me. Always this.

The son's surgery and the daughter's mononucleosis. The dog won't drink water unless it is from a creek and the husband wraps a braid of work, global heartache, and family life around his neck. He's angry with his wife and he doesn't know why. The country flinches under the new regime and there is more abuse rising. Each inflammation consumes its host. Yet the woman collects the maladies and tucks them in her basket to be carried every where, every day.

She must not go down.

Some say fight. Some say love. Some say deal with it.

The woman just asks for help carrying the basket home from the river.

Nothing Turns Back

Plainly, I look up to find untouchable light. To the eye, all light is light. Yet to the skin . . . distance does end up making a difference, no?

Hot green tea and a peanut butter honey sandwich. My (yes, my) mustard chair faces the pew, and with the steady steam of falling gold against today's inexhaustible blue, I am indeed reminded to pray.

But I confess nothing. No sin comes or goes. No contrition calls out for bloody knees. I've let my heart burst when it must and ache when it recognized a piece of itself in the other. Attention was given and paid to light and dark and east and west and blankets and ferns. The thought has crossed my mind that I am not the woman anyone believes me to be. How long will this theatre endure? How long does the river hold one's scent after wading ankle deep? Knee deep? Waist?

The odd warmth November gives. The payback winter exacts on the greed of hopefulness. We'll never get all the leaves up. K says that the pine on the west side of the house is dying and I say that I know. Has asks why. It embroiders my bedroom window (yes, my) and there used to be days when all I could do was stare at it for hours from my bed. So I said I killed it with my humanity and he mentioned that maybe I don't have the special powers that I think I do.

Clocks turn back for light's sake. But now my son is 6' 3” and my daughter visits colleges and I hold them longer than they hold me. More than ever, the second hand deafens in a hushed house.

Nothing really turns back.

How the red-orange light piles onto itself with even a hint of autumn breath! And despite what the man on top of the mountain knows, I am working my way up, counting every color that falls before my feet.

The Beautiful Unbearable

The things we cannot bear, we bear.

Everything green is now covered in a copper blanket of after.

What life is this that we are allowed to walk around saying this and that when all along we each carry the mountainous weight of being a wish?

Lately, beyond speaking. Words can fall short leading some to question their talent for certainty.

Do you know those partings that come without pain or promise? I don't either. Even grass and butterflies and certain birds leave a space to be filled with whatever is nearby. That is where the perceptions settle; that is where the image reveals itself to be a moment of a moment only.

Turkeys in the field, feather-stepping the loam. Fog settles and now I. How sincerely the future looks back, begging me to turn around! Where is the firebrand? The scorching wood resisting the suicide of abatement?

As the canopy thins, more and more light enters the house. Daily, a new slant against the pew. Tell me, after all of this reading, how does one have a true voice? This and others things I would bring to a cohort of teacups and winks.

Some day, a reparation for the way in which the beautiful unbearable has opened my heart. At least this act of humanity remains.  

Now Through and Not For

To compass the very center for a thousand lifetimes is the life's work of one who writes for and not through. This poetry of purpose must find a way to break the ribs. Perhaps now.

Sunlight seeping through dagger holes, softened by the gauzy blinds. What bleeds will repair to bleed again – a self-generating reformatory of the babbling fool. The gods grant permission and so I turn, turn.

The jangling rise and fall of the mail truck engine chops its way through leaf-blower din. All you November jump-the-gunners! I say wait for the work to finish before you finish the work. Growing irritation is a sure sign that my constructed rind has become emaciated.

The shaggy cedar walls of the lonely cabin, calling. Your bitter moon brighter, turning. The faces in the woods, laughing.

In the sense that the everyday flattens beneath my feet, I need to walk. My ankle isn't healing, but whose fault is that? The robot faith that keeps my work tall and ordered is the path before me.

After I was raped, the idea of sitting alone in a bar has never crossed my mind. Riding a train with a book or walking at night and hiking the hills in the way I have always dreamt about is not manageable. A lifetime of being careful is not enough. Yet half of an entire nation is getting ready to vote for a man who rose to power doing as he pleases. Taking what he wants. Poised to learn from my oppressor, my head is down as I try to dismantle my own desires to take what I want.

Now, more than ever, I hear the leaves falling.

Monarchs and Maple Leaves

Hunger created by words. Can I translate without metaphor? So many rivers and churches and cabins and moons! I am honestly afraid I cannot say this without saying that anymore.

Butternut needles on the rotting deck and dying begonias adding a deepening red. Colors seethe before they leave and in the middle of it all, one never wonders if it's worth it.

Instead, an ineffable joy bleeds into expanse. Soon enough, charcoal trees will poke at a relentless sky, and all that was livid will cool into dross. Winter will descend with its irrefutable claims, listening to the beggars with his stone face. 

But not now.

Now we have what is lavish.

And here, a cardinal at my front door! I watch him pick seeds from the scrolling dogwood leaves. He will leave if I move, so I stuff the desire to reach for the camera. In the quiet of watching, I am affected.  

All turns bring me here. A conversation always flowing in a continuous leaving or entering translation. Do you have any idea what I really want to say here? Please tell me you do.

On the way home from town, the dazzling beauty of monarchs and maple leaves, floating on fire until the end. This kind of perfection is never achieved by doing or praying or asking; It only just is. Seen. Known. Processed and recorded by thought.  These strands I untangle create a space for more, but what is undone and why? 

That missing chord, which is nothing at all, unwinding to find the endless end of just being here.  I don't know what any of that means.  But are you with me?  

Even a Poor Man Needs a Dog

The wind and I thrash all night. Autumn's debris slams against the roof with thuds and calamity. Insomnia arrives which angers my plans for Tuesday. At 2 a.m., a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich with a side of apple slices to accompany a book reaping. Thoreau wins to endure the howling rage of night with me.

Dawn delivers a syncopation of 75 degree wind blasts and rest. The thought of New England is never not there anymore. Decision. Division. Danger.

The opossum family shelters under an evergreen bush to hide from the dog; she is obsessed with them. And a skunk sprayed the neighbor's dog, for which I am very sorry because I know what it's like to live with that inescapable fetor. Even in all of this chaos, one hears the cardinal beck and call, up higher and commenting on the show. I was thinking that he said, “even a poor man needs a dog.”

The wanderlust rises again, as it tends to this time of year. My unspoken plans carry east of the Hudson or south into the Smoky Mountains. Before snowfall, I need to see.

“Transgression for the greater good” doesn't settle well, but neither does carrying a lamp that has been ushered under creaky old apple baskets. I want, therefore I am not. My mother's voice injects something about being dramatic.

In the end, for all the bluster and storming, the girl who has a dog and a family and a dread of winter must engage some other truth before the death roll smothers what remains of the ginger gold light.