Garden Never Born

My dog aged all at once today.

She slept on the cushioned deck chair and didn't raise her head – not for squirrels – not for birds – not for me.

I can see her from the back sun room, perfectly still. This is the room where my daughter practices her saxophone and where I do yoga. It's where I write and fall in love and ultimately realize it's all in my head. This is the room where I drink alone or get high in the dark. From here I give and pay attention to the direction of life.

~

My bones and muscles begin to moulder. Everyone said this would happen. How odd to be alive and untouched on the inside while the external begins to hunt for a place to die. I clip photos of cabins far away knowing full well I am a hundred lifetimes from bringing that to pass.

~

I whisper for rain. When water hits the ground, dust rises like the sandstorms in the movies. Blueberry and strawberry crops have been affected and my garden was never born. I can't solely blame the drought but I can blame it on depression, which is the same as the drought.

The world is on fire and lots of people are acting like it is no big deal. The poet wrote, “Even my old Dylan tapes are fading, becoming near-comic antiques.” This is how I know it is a very big deal.

~

The last time we spoke we were both high and it ended badly. You would say it had nothing to do with cannabis and in this distance, in the shimmer of heat coming off the land, I can see you might have been right.

The Mudroom

Railroad ties framed the gravel driveway of my childhood home. A residual smell of tar would boil up from the fissures of their age in summer heat. They were heavy. Almost immovable. The spikes were removed and rehomed, driven into a rough cedar plank to be used as a long, coat rack affixed over a deacon's bench on our mudroom wall. Fifty years later, winter jackets, a scarf or two, and an occasional pair of chest waders still hang. My father's old, traditional-style, black, doctor's bag also still sits on the shelf above it all.

The mudroom also housed the dog's food; the floor vent with the warmest air; and a quiet place to disappear amongst the jackets when things got loud or painful in our house. I remember my brothers fighting to sit on the vent before school in order to warm adequately enough to change from their pajamas to their day clothes.

This home has gone through a few changes over the years, yet the mudroom remains untouched. One must walk through it to enter the rest of the house, and it is the last room you see when you leave. Memories hang undisturbed.

I did not emerge undisturbed.

I emerged heavy, like the railroad ties – of the earth – still where I lie. Parts of me are useful in the world, like my children – like empathy – like compassion. People hang many things on me. Yet I am fodder for fire, no matter how far I travel from the mudroom.

Or am I the fire?
I am tired.

May I cool
ankles deep in stillness
of whatever
is left?

Catching Moonlight

Grandmother's tea cup –
moonlight afloat
at midnight

Catching moonlight seemed like a magical-spiritual thing to do, especially in a deepening awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. However, in the examination of ego and letting go, perhaps trying to harness moonlight is no different than caging a bird or putting fish in a tank. Rather, why not be alive and awake when the moonlight is gifted, allowing it to come and go, heal, and illuminate as the Cosmos sees fit? Sometimes letting go is a painful, anguishing thing. Other times it is a soft song hummed in moonlight. Either way, a freedom awaits on the other side.

un-possess all
we do not
possess

What were we before we were people? Land – air – water. We were sunbeams and moonlight. We were worms and mosquitos, mushrooms and algae. We were all the points on a compass and all the paths ever taken by crawling or flying things. We emerged as flesh of the earth and grew hungry. Too hungry.

we fell
asleep
in the dirt

We accept our death for the most part, which is strange given the rest of world lives. We think we are in marked graves, our headstones telling the stories of who we were. However, in our forgetfulness of who we really are, we are forfeiting our portion of place in the Great Dance.

We can still wake; we have the freedom to do that. Forget catching moonlight. Forget legacy, power, and possession. Forget this sentence and the next. Turn into what is alive right now in this moment and in that way, we begin again to live forever.

The Way of Water and Fire

life
as cries
for love
and our response
to tears

Not long ago, I took an incomprehensibly beautiful but complicated path. Time revealed I wasn't alone. We walked for years before kneeling on the margins of a tremendous river.

One of us water.
One of us fire.

Before the day passed, black bears came close; too close. We wrestled and eventually called upon the truth of whom each of us really are.

Water slipped happily into the river to became a salve.

Fire ignited – her womb a cauldron – and rose.

The two parted ways that day.

Lightening flashes – thunder follows – rain falls if Mother sees fit.

To know us is to be smudged by water or fire.

To forget us is to become Truth.

~

Stretches of highway as a blank page. Night falls first as pleated shadows before its dark afterbirth covers every thing. This Strawberry Moon. These bruised knees tucked behind his. A sadness that will pass.

Selah

~

I almost hocked my diamond engagement ring for reasons both more complicated and more base than I can overtly admit. What remains, unwritten so far, is my gratitude for Love’s intervening grace and the never-ending narrative of Another Way.

Don't Call it Sleep

Life as a series of trust falls.

The decision to let go can take years or it can happen in an instant. There is no control once you are falling. Who will catch you? Who will not? I'm wondering why I keep insisting on this lesson.

The drought continues, turning everything to cement and dust. I'm artificially keeping everything alive, and as it turns out, I'm not that great at it. The real danger is revealed when I stop trying.

A cardinal perched on intersecting street signs lifts as the dog and I pass. Without any rain, pollen still hazes everything and is stirred by the slightest disturbance. Lungs, hair, and hearts are dusted.

My parents never stay in bed. I've seen Mom nap less than a handful of times and Dad might “rest his eyes” on the trampoline of the sailboat after many hours of strenuous outdoor work. Don't call it napping. Don't call it sleep.

Depression overtakes like a rip current before I even realize how deep it is. My only safety is sleep and I have no choice but to let the world pass without me for a time. God save the garden. God save the girl.

Not a Poem

I say too much.

I've grown tired
of speaking and writing
of wearing a mask
and being vigilant
to every small
detail.

This looks like a poem
but it is not a poem.

It may feel like crying
for help or attention or love
but it is not.

This is a collection of sentences
which lead nowhere
for anyone
not even
me.

~

Last Sunday I slept
off and on
for 18 hours.

On Monday I wore
my cutest mask
went to brunch
and listened lamenting
about gun violence in schools
without the slightest hint
of understanding that they
ARE THE PROBLEM.

We are the problem.

Yes
more coffee
please.

Miss may I
have a cinnamon roll
to go?

~

A literal drought.

The carrying of heavy
buckets from the well.

An injured back
with chronic pain
and the urge to sleep
it all away.

Sure sunlight
and heat and strawberry plants
in bloom.

Sure lupin and basil and orioles
warbling about this birdkeep
of rib and breath.

~

The Lover left
so now love looks harmed
or differently
through eyes of one
with no stomach for ecstasy
or gushing platitudes of Oneness.

Completion is
not needing anything more
than you have.

The question is now
what do I have?

I own nothing.

I have nothing.

It's Complicated

If no one reads, to whom or what is a person offering words? An honest answer dogs me and yet, every time I stop writing, it feels like I cannot breathe. Go into this. My teacher's voice is the same as pine trees waiting on the wind to whisper.

On the floor, along the wall in the living room, are a few old milk crates of Dad’s vinyl record. At almost 80, he doesn't need them anymore and I remember feeling emotional on the Christmas morning he gifted them. What was it like to reach a place in life when something you have collected, used for joy, enlightenment and love, doesn't mean enough to keep?

A day may come when I cannot see well enough to write, or my fingers will not be agile enough to hold a pen or curl over a keyboard. However, will there be a day with no music?

It's complicated. There were times when our shared love of music was the only thing that felt real between my father and me. Giving away the albums doesn't mean the music or the connection wasn't real. However, it does in some ways speak into the fading purpose and joy of holding even that which gives you purpose and joy.

A frost advisory goes out this late in May. I spent my paycheck on plants and flowers only to come dangerously close to losing all of it. Again, I am asking, what are my efforts for?

An oriole sings from the split cedar fence as the nuthatch, sparrow and finch take turns at the feeder. I don't know if it is possible for the people in my life to join me in my loneliness. Perhaps, even this, I must give up.

First and Last Say

I wake every morning to the octopus in my chest.
Though I claw and tear at my skin, he refuses to slip back home to the sea.
He feeds on the meaning of the life, devouring all trace.
He is beautiful and I love him.
But I'm starving to death.

Maybe there is no meaning – only a letting go of purpose or plan. My body's dull thud moves through the world, making supper here, washing clothes there. Work, garden, read, sleep, repeat. For a decade I knew how to move, where to go, how to be a conduit of love. I knew sanctuary and ecstasy. I swam in heron blue and slept under raven wing.

Then the octopus moved in, preferring my clam-shell chest over others. No ink for pages, only for camouflaging a heart's truest desires. I am exhausted and irritated at the same time. Me, this involuntary host to he who has the first and last say. Or she; does it matter?

I wooed a man too long. That time has past. Now I wrestle with a cephalopod swimming in my current, and I hope to push one of us into Oblivion. I cling to dank moss along the sun-lost lip of the river. Hear my prayer.

Narcissus and I Go Way Back

What is it like –
years of trying to erase
what is neither here
nor there

This is what writing has been. The question is, what is writing now?

Regardless of voices which come and go, certain melodies always remain. I have never dwelt in a place which did not have birdsong. Deep, Michigan, winters come close to abject silence but after storms, hardy bluejays spar with one another in evergreens and cardinals alight near my window in remembrance of the fires of love.

Before recently, I understood who I was as woman and writer only through images or reflections. Narcissus and I go way back.

I thought he was looking at me, but he wasn't.
I thought I saw myself in his pooling blues, but I didn't.

The myth tells you that Narcissus died of starvation and thirst because he couldn't look away. However, the truth is that he got everything he needed and walked away fat and happy.

The daffodils rise in spring before any other. Their sunny disposition brings hope and color to a lifeless world. Yet, they do not last, fading before the arrival of primrose and tulip.

This is why I sow and tend.
I am not a woman or a writer.
I am a gardener.
Move towards the better light.
I will bring the water.
I will sing with the birds the song of earth and sky.

A Wintering Woman

This laddered reach; this quietude of sap.

Last night's red-orange moonlight bled over farms and fields, and trickled through backyard trees. My body's echo sat in darkness and wept. I tried to pray but there was no life in my throat. A certain cedarn anguish fell, landing like unstrung leaves. Poetry aside, I need healing and asked for it.

Sometimes you ask for bread and get a stone. Sometimes you ask for Jesus and get a cross. In this haunted dark, tree and time stood perfectly still. The last time was the last time and now I have no more wishes to bring to the well. Selah.

The grocery list changes.

I add birdseed to the feeder and wonder if anyone would build me another. On the way, the kids tease K. and I about where we would live if we were single or unencumbered. Truth in jest revealed a shaky bridge – one which requires intentional care. K confesses to not wanting to look after living things, unless it's plants. Not the plants I want to grow, but you know, whatever. I confess to never wanting to live in a condo, near or in a city. I cannot become a wintering woman who sits in a fireless room, locked in a house.

Snow water falls clear over greening rocks and I am asking, begging really, to be washed away.

Beltane Fire

Disillusionment and desire, an artificial pose?

Pouring over Bogan's poetry, I watch her mix threat and retreat, torment and release, muse and invisibility. Her cauldron vacillates between simmer and boil, sometimes pushed to overflow. What many label as her fury seems more like courage and energy, if you ask me. No one is asking me.

I question my own motivations to express myself. Bogan's conviction that poetry springs “from the passion of which every poet will be afraid, but to which he should vow himself forever” feels like a campfire tale, which upon hearing, forces one to consider how much of it is true. Am I afraid of my passion? Do I victimize myself by not unleashing the full power of expression? Gah, this feels like a form of madness – this “Sleeping Fury.”

A. gives me a hug from her Wiccan grandmother to wish me a “happy Beltane.” More than once this week I have been called to examine Gaelic and Celtic roots. Kendra asks if I consider Ireland a spiritual epicenter of sorts. Maybe the energetic veil thins there. Maybe one day I'll hear the sea break on her green shores and know. The clanking racket of the clock suggests otherwise.

These Fires with the power to give and destroy life. To fear them is to love them. How these flames leap upon themselves.

First Impressions

In the writing, my first love appears.
First and last kiss.
Sky falls all around.
Earth becomes salve to wounds.
In the writing, bees return to the queen.

Near the front door, a bluejay nests in the rhododendron bush and beyond that, a daymoon hovers like an apparition. When I see the moon, I suddenly realize I have been holding my breath. I think my whole life has been like that – somehow forgetting to breathe.

Was I ever more than a good, first impression?

Steel blue sky, only once in a while these days. Instead, mostly gray with frequent snow and weeping. No more reading between the lines; the lines have been erased. Yet I still wish for that passage between cup and lip, when the eyes close in anticipation and suddenly open in the pleasure of divine elixir.

I was married in a church, on a steep hill, rising in the middle of the city. One used to see the church from miles away but now, it is dwarfed by tall medical buildings and corporations. Don't read too much into that – symbols of marriage get crowded – Gordon Lightfoot dies – grass is favored over violets. But also, rabbits are born – cardinals visit your feeder – the wind in the pines causes one to listen...to really listen.

Plants and planets. Prisms and pines. The lawn begins to green and come to life with dandelions and violets. I am delighted and confined; it's nothing to get upset about.

Revenant and Reflection

The road quivers with pooling rain.

I still have an awareness of his shape – the look in our eyes effortlessly reflecting one another – gush, froth, dismember.

At work the question is blithely asked: if you were a ghost, where or whom would you haunt? I said nothing, knowing full well one doesn't have to be dead to haunt or be haunted. Instead I wondered what shape we really are, dead or alive. Soon enough, we move from something touchable – a pen, a pink tulip, your favorite mug – to something muslin – filled with light and air – breathing like curtains in the late summer breeze.

And what's after that? What is this thing in us that cannot be seen or touched? In what forced occupation are we participating?

The sink hole in the back yard widens and smells like sewer. The car breaks down and we all are straining and stressing trying to find a way to get to work. Snow is still falling despite every other sign that it is spring. There is no stasis. That is what is see in all things reflective.

So much of my life has been based on waiting. The cardinal chirrups before dawn, not waiting on me, not waiting on anyone. He finds the feeder and my joy is inexpressible.

Do we love because we are loved? One day, my ghost was unwrapped from nonbeing, arriving in gauzy light and spilling manna everywhere. The apparition guided me through a house of mirrors to the remembrance of Love. I lived, but do I still?

Wake, Woman!

The heaviness of snow in May.

A discount offer comes to my inbox for a hotel in the Berkshires and oh my God how quickly the truth of my story charges my every heartbeat, every cellular conversion, every fantastical ability to imagine. Whatever is here exists outside of every plan I've tried to devise until finally, I must acquiesce to the idea that there was and is no plan. There is cold May snow falling through soft azalea blooms. Beauty upon Love upon Light.

Suddenly the library work teeters out of balance. I'm out of my depth and challenged to look at what I do not know. How absurd the resistance to this! How cruel the terrorist of fear can be. It doesn't have to be this way. I choose again. In the meantime I begin to recognize how order, precision and attention to form becomes ways of managing fear and disruption.

I wake earlier and earlier in order to write or think or be. I ponder women on a pedestal symbolizing the restricting all other women. The sound of arrested wind falls from earshot. We are affixed in sexual and social roles which leads to psychic and even physical isolation. Is it all just a dream? I consult Medusa, to which she responds, “wake, woman.”

Maybe there is a good reason I despise looking in mirrors. What reflection is trustworthy?

Elephant in the Room

dawn
just outside
of possession
at the edge
of air

A cardinal surveys the landscape atop his white picket throne while steam and dove coos rise into morning light. A new day is introduced yet I am sitting under a tomb of yesterday's broken concrete. From shadows of shame, I try to look outward at anything – anything other than the abyss of my own making. A sheer sky; wind chimes hanging, ready to sing, the imprecise language of landscape. So many beautiful projections. Can I not be one of them?

No matter how much energy I spend making myself smaller, I am the elephant in the room. I lumber. I am chained to my own body, performing circus tricks for the masses. If I am mind only, the body suffers. If I am body only, the mind loses too much light. It cannot see the very next step forward on the trail.

Once upon a time, there was a way to bring mind and body together in my story. There was a fork in the trail; a bluff overlooking a river; a jumping off point. Maybe that is the problem – I saw the way, but it appeared as a choice – jump or do not jump. Had I allowed what is choice-less, I would have simply fallen.

Muesli in Greek yogurt and steel cut oats. The dog and I walk before work, neither one of us expecting this degree of chill. My eyes involuntarily water but honestly, it might as well be from grief. There is a death happening; I need to invite him in.

An Essay?

Lately, I've been thinking about the estrangement of women – estrangement experienced from her artist self, her body and sexuality, and from male counterparts in the writing world.

To function as a poet or writer, many times women experience a sense of isolation between the social self and her creative being. I am beginning to bring into awareness the tension I have within myself between my outer and inner writing life.

Some times a self-crippling mold exists that women force themselves into by censoring, altering pronouns in writing, and projecting some kind of compulsive niceness. An isolation occurs when we do this. When women do not force themselves into these confines, like Sylvia Plath, they are labeled “crazy” women.

Men and male writers experience isolation too. However, it seems theirs is typically expressed as an existential condition, a faith issue, or a result of their past. Women, I think, experience isolation as a condition of gender and how our gender is received, treated and considered in our society.

I also consider how many (or few) of our life-myths or creation stories are actually created by women. Most prominent myths disregard our life experience and leave us with no reflective promise, at best. At worst, they remain stories wherein women exist primarily as sexual vessels for men or predatory witches coming to get them. Some woman are rewriting and reinterpreting these myths and thereby helping to close the gap for many women between inner and outer self. I wonder what women will convey, write about, or look like when the myths we choose are the myths we create.

I am thinking about my own poetry and writing. In poetry, I tend to zoom in on the natural world and maybe, if all conditions are right, attach personal revelations. But even then, these depths may be coded or layered or wrapped in distance. There is a sense that I must control this aspect of conveyance, just like I must control my outward self in my society. Sometimes my physical self squares off with my spiritual self.

Maybe for me there is an invulnerability to the self when writing of nature. It's safe and easy. When I think about writing about sexuality or body issues, and all the baggage that tends to go with that, I freak out. More specifically, perhaps I avoid it all together.

As I explore and unpack some of these themes, I am able to open another level of gratitude for those women who have faced and worked through all of this. They exist and their light is piercing that which threatens to remain dense and dark to me.

The Weight of Bees

azalea blooms
wincing under the weight
of bees

Temperatures remain too cold for the opening of tulips. All this beauty at the ready.

freezing fingers
digging a little further
into my pockets

Friday night, alone for once. I'm lost in vodka and the epistolary relationship between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Celeste croons in her whiskey-whisper voice about the strangeness of people changing from stranger to friends, friends to lovers, and lovers to strangers again. Like spring wind to the ear, I hear the psalm my own way. Daisies will rise again, unpicked, after summer's supple rain. “I tend my flowers for thee – Bright Absentee!”

The hyacinth finishes as hostas reach hungry hands towards heaven. Days begin to take on the feeling of a life well-lived. Past and passing. I sit with the poems at my dimly lit desk while the rest of the world sleeps. That fucking river....the one we all become on the way to the sea.

love letters finished
just before dawn opens
her robe

Mutable language, which is to say, language, plagues me. It's time to evaluate actions. Don't tell me you love me or the earth or God. Show me.

Asking for the Bee

I shared a story with a coworker about witnessing a frog leaping from the creek to gulp a bee and how, moments later, the frog spit out the bee. She asked, “was it okay” to which I thought she meant the frog but as it turns out, she was asking for the bee.

Every moment is a teacher and I need not make any form special. Trees, dogs, people – when they occupy a zone called “special,” I usually open more access, which in turn, allows tremendous growth and healing. It's not not a good thing. However, what would it look like to offer full ingress at every moment?

I learned as much about myself from my work mate's question as I have from those I knight as special, and it is a reminder that healing dialogue is universal. It is not bodies or feelings. It is not preferences or attachments.

Yet I still ache sometimes.
I prefer.
I raise and lower boundaries.
I get stuck in that which blocks the free-flow of Love.

Sunday morning brings rain as promised. The coolness, a salve; its gentle intonation, a reminder to rest. Yesterday's work in the flower beds and gardens felt restorative. Kyle surprised me with a new bird feeder but the only customer I've seen so far has been a black capped chickadee. He is as brave as he is friendly. Maybe it's supposed to be like that.

This soft time in the mornings is so hard to relinquish. Yet the ink eventually runs out and one must get to living.

Paper Birds and the Breath of Dawn

In last night's dream, I identify each bird in a nearby tree. From a close distance, I see a small creature slowly climb the tree to snatch a bluebird for a meal. I am both horrified and accepting of the circle of life, but I am eventually relieved to find that the bluebird was a paper decoy.

After a long night of indented sleep, I wake later than usual to the morning chatter of the Titmouse, Nuthatch and Robin. Michigan begins her spring dance by warming into the upper 70's, allowing everything to burst out of the ground with pomp and circumstance. Within days of daffodils and tulips, the temperature drops to freezing and it snows again.

Kyle mentions the runoff from the gutters causing washouts and sink holes

to which I excitedly mention the possible addition of rainwater collection barrels

to which his immediately rolls his eyes

to which I lock his gaze and say, “it's a good idea and you know it”

to which he smiles, turns, moves a little dirt with the tip of his shoes, and stares off through the pines into a fading sun.

If I'm in charge of the land, then I am in charge of the land, no? I walk towards the creek just in time to see a frog leap to gulp a bumble bee from the shallows. Within seconds the frog spit out the bee and it swam to refuge on a rock. While Kyle checks the breaks in the sprinkler system, I disappear into the house to research ways to make or trade for something that can be used to collect rainwater.

At 4 a.m., a waning crescent moon hooks light through budding tree limbs. A Dylan song is stuck in my head and so he goes with me into the breath of dawn. Last week the moon was in Libra and this week, Aquarius. I have no idea what that means but reading it does bring a half-smile.

Dylan, Kora, coffee and I slip out into the dark. To know the exact moment when the very first bird sings its song to the day is to glimpse the understory of the Cosmos. I think about what it means to braid something....the tension, three strands intertwining to become stronger, healing, practicality, and mostly, beauty. I think about weaving together song, oxygen and soil; about paper blue birds, regurgitated bubble bees, and rainwater; about how long it takes a seed to fall, be buried and grow . . .

The moon disappears from view as the morning sky asks me about my paper wings.

Everything

Boys pass by on bikes with fishing poles jutting out of their backpacks. Red buds dot all the nearly naked branches. I can almost hear their hymns. It's warm enough to work barefoot in the flower beds and I cannot help but gulp this elixir of change. Everything begins again – everything?

The pulsing wings of the Sandhill Crane startle my daydream. Nothing stirs on the pond, but further through the woods over the rise, a single file line of deer shuffle through October's leftover leaves. I used to think we'd never end and in certain ways, we don’t. Yet in the ways that change everything, we did end.

I am full of nothing these days. Maybe that is the point. I wake around 4 a.m., read, write and stretch. Go to work. Tend the family. Dream about mushrooms and vegetables and a circle of friends that understand it all. They are beginning to arrive – just like you said they would.

And yet.

Everything they share with me says we are never not constellated.