No Waiting at the Mouth

In a strained breech of leaden sky, sunlight turns tiny flurries into dancing diamond motes. Each pine reveals its diadem as halo – illuminated – holy – revealed.

Snow
without footprint
or ripple or blemish
welds wounds of the land
with immaculacy.

For a few moments, any sound is heresy.

My gaze is heresy.

Winter buries what dies and for the first time in decades, there is no waiting at the mouth of the cave, weeping for daffodils. I clear bird feeders and feed people. I gather dark hours as bounty, grieved not by various despairs and calamities, but instead, nibble at rayless edges until I digest them into light.

I've gone beyond Calvary.

It's the only way.

Pain's successor brings January to pass under billows of curling woodsmoke. After midnight I pace throughout the house, needing sleep more like a bear than a human. It's an honesty hour, somehow easier to face ill-fitting truths. One truth is that Love has no womb or grave. It reveals Itself as present and alive, and one can merely soften into it or not. Dance with It or not. Love It back or not.

'Tis Customary as we part
A Trinket - to confer -
It helps to stimulate the faith
When Lovers be afar -

'Tis various – as the various taste -
Clematis – journeying far -
Present me with the single Curl
Of her Electric Hair

~ Emily Dickinson

With a healed heart, I think of Love often, and as often as I do, the River in my chest brings to surface all the trinkets shared.

The River reaches to my Mouth -
Remember - when the Sea
Swept by my searching eyes - the last -
Themselves were quick - with Thee!

The God Inside

On Christmas morning, a coyote stood in the middle of the dirt road in front of a great, stubbled field. The field stretched westward across from the casino construction on the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band land of the Pottawatomi Indians. The coyote stared through me, not confessing any signs of concern. Not long after, a great hawk descended to eye level, and then, three deer. For me, no other gift is worthy.

Gray rain falls instead of snow. Behind the misted veil, I am seeing a few important things for the first time.

My eyes are ravished by the god inside. ~ Kabir

The tangle and tumult of modern life takes and takes. Libra scales tip this way and that, without consideration for center. Everything happening outside of me was just that – outside – and not me. Much was taken, but I blame myself for giving beyond the marrow. No matter how it felt or seemed, I was never the one. Who was the enemy? Fantasy – romance – hope. In other words: me.

December's Oak Moon gives maximum light around 7:30 p.m. Night air is too soft to bite – too lonely to keep foxes in bed. The neighborhood is silent for once. If there is anything to appreciate about the holidays it is that.

Forgiveness is a gift for the cosmos, an act capable of keeping spiritual threads untangled. I am not the hungry witch; I am Gretel and I can save myself, thank you very much.

Geese and woodsmoke
rising Christmas mist
no longer beholden to mankind

Matriarchy

winter sky
do you carry a gun
or umbrella

Gray keeps the whole day muted and dull. Nothing pulls attention outward, so deep dives and shame spirals continue. A sense of mourning, further down than I have ever been, rises to greet me. No longer can I be your lover but maybe I can be your friend? I've learned a few things in the dark.

The homescape changes with re-entry of the grown son. I had become accustom to the sediment settled at the end of the day – quiet talking, simple supper, maybe even a poem or two if energy allowed. It's not good or bad, yet the homecoming does somehow squeeze or pressurize any time left for writing or processing. It will be harder to hide my pain now. My role as comforter and healer in the family has been compromised.

The neighbor, not much older than I, becomes a grandmother. My daughter discusses marriage. My mother weighs the death of friends against her own mortality, and my grandmother turns 101 years old. I am here and I am between. My sister and I begin to understand the matriarchy – where it has been weak – where it has been strong. The earth and land reflect the condition of the Matriarchy and if one believes in such things, there is more work to do than you can imagine.

The deaf dog becomes more vocal in her old age. She too has a lesson to share. I teach her some sign language to help make the widening gap between this realm and the next a little less scary. “For her or for you?” Good question.

Tending the Gathas

Hope builds towards winter solstice with an eye on dismantling it. The shortest day means light to follow. This unworthy sentience I am! I pray away sunless days and beg for the ending of night's suffocation. If I were instead golden dust falling from a daffodil, I would be fully redeemed on the bodies of dancing bees. Engaged Buddhism, indeed!

Lex runs into our arms at the airport and for a moment, the embodied convergence of parenting, love and our role as humans brings peace that surpasses all understanding. Sense of a separate self is mankind's scourge upon the Mother. Children become mothers of our society, a role we adults share. In this way, we have to nourish one another; re-root the uprooted; tend everything with wholeness in mind. It is better to take peaceful steps not simply for oneself or one's children, but for the world.

Beck graduates this weekend; another chapter both ends and begins. He moves home and in doing so, presents another chance for us to model or tend a certain reintegration into the world's greater environment. Sometimes we go a very long way to find ourselves. Yet even upon a realization one was never lost, a gatha may help to bridge what we experience in the world. Maybe as parents we can tend the gatha.

Where are we going?

Thich Nhat Hahn: before starting the car, I know where I am going.

For a long, long time, I haven't known where I was going. Yet, all this time, I didn't really need to go anywhere.

But I can say one thing with a peaceful certainty, this vibration of “forever home” came from illumination by headlights of another car.

All of whomever I am is grateful this doesn't happen alone.

At the Guillotine

William Blake: Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

The Devil tarot card tells you not to guillotine the rational head from the body's drives. Make a marriage of impulse and control.
Marriage.
Control.

*

Getting high more than I don't. The Plant has mercy on my pain. Meditation is great but eventually one has to rise and walk in the world. Why not fly? I'm going to be honest with you: everything would have been fine; better than fine; joyful even.

These sentences, these lines – they don't exist without a place to moor. They are never not a letter sent. And if I ever stop writing, I will die at sea.

In this cosmic ocean, every poem, lilt, and jot barely discerns itself from nothingness. And yet, to what these words moor, is everything. The whole thing.

*

Green pine whispers.
Remember when I had fireflies
in my hair?
That was a long time ago.
Green pine nods
to our ascent.

All We Could Swallow

Writing into dawn – sunlight finds the right side of my face. East; always east. Warmth and prism light melts away a restless night. I finish yesterday's coffee to make a new pot.

Some gifts come with a sting. Is running out of time a gift? Fantasies, dreams, and desires fill space with possibility, but also cause confusion and delusion. May we continue to dream and follow such untethering with the wake of work and openness.

The holidays loom. Excessive colored lights and inflatable Santas shred darkness all night into day. Our Judeo-Christian heritage looks a lot like consumerism and colonization. Let's go back further.

Before Jesus – before Adam and Eve and Steve and Lilith – before the sea drank all the stardust it could swallow.

Maybe cosmic wind rippled what was deep and pure.
Maybe the moon sent orgasmic energy deep into Mother Earth.
Maybe we were one cell before we were many.
Maybe that is the Good News.

The azalea leaves curl up tight like fighting fists. Grand Rapids sk turns to granite as we all try pretending we are at least half way through winter's cold kiss. Speaking of kissing . . .

Fall Back Further

This place carved of cliffs and stone. Row houses crowding the street and dilapidated businesses stacked vertically upon each other. We walked the streets of this tiny enclave and it felt like a Bruce Springsteen song. Before turning back, a record shop. My money ran out before I finished looking through Dylan bootlegs.

Do you have time to linger?

Consider behavior as language. Sweet, gut-wrenching words can be spoken, but what are the actions? Treat me like an object and you'll have to lose me. Do you think that is true and if so, am I lost?

If I write by hand it's on yellow legal pads, like my father. My very first poem dissected food and my body – all neatly stanza'd on yellow paper – in the voice of my father.

*

Prepping ginger and turmeric root for storage. New-old ways of relieving pain and quieting suffering. The old ones say, “Don't take a pampered cat for your teacher.” Buddha Nature is no longer on the outside of things; I have found the hut and here I will stay.

*

The awareness of Christ surely is an advent but what He pointed towards has always. . . been. Fall back further. Before our feet knew the earth, the Mother carried, writhed and birthed Home. What we perform in December makes us fools.

Dream It

Waking to dense fog, semi-trucks shifting on I-80, the sounds of hotel doors slamming. Heading east always becomes a temptation – to keep driving, to “fuck around and find out,” to live life differently. Yet, in the calm of mediation, fantasy does what it does best: disappears.

Well that's not the truth exactly.

Where is my collaborator – the lion who challenges the challenges and questions the questioners? Where is my dreamer who says, “Go ahead. Dream it. Break the norm and challenge the status quo.” Perhaps wisdom lies with the lamb and not the lion. Perhaps peace is the only answer we have left.

*

Body pain flares, recedes and flares again. I'm tired of pain as a teacher and have only myself to blame for not learning the lesson. My spiritual path becomes crystal clear – like prismatic- snowflakes-falling-onto-fresh-snow clear. My body will melt away one day, yet I will continue in every moment. If I think I am only this body, then I haven't seen me. I can already see myself in others. Do you see me too?

*

On to Pennsylvania. We will split a bottom level apartment for a few days as we sew together our sisterhood. I asked her if she brought coffee grounds and she says, “what are we even doing here if we don't have coffee?”

Every Step A Seed

This place used to be a way to write soul letters – an outward flow laced with the desire to come home at last. Words built the corridor and it worked. I saw and tasted Homecoming. Yet, the bridge got hot and it wasn't long before I felt like I was walking on the hot coals of restlessness. Energy shifted from an unrestrained stream to ravenous desire. Who did this to the purity of Godlight? I did, for there is only me.

I destroyed my own bridge but in doing so, I brought consciousness home to my body.
I remembered Buddha in my breath. In the country of the present, I don't need a map or an overpass or a tunnel.

Then why am I here? I am here now because I am here. At home in myself, existence is the magic.

I'm still walking. I carry Home with me, every step a seed for happiness and peace.

I don't know how long I will be here – this body – this walk. The notion of life and death fades into the truth of continuance.

But I do know I am already Home.

And if you only see this body, then you are not here with me.

Are we together?

Gathered at the Sill

Let go of you.
Discard me.

To be two entities is to forget. It is to stare at the river and see division instead of unification. It is to neglect how west eventually meets east.

One seeks pleasure and another self-mortification. In both cases, the temperance of coherence is neglected. To seek at all is to forget allowance. To hold onto either is to live in opposition.

*

Sunlight slants towards the sleeping dog and tickles the shoulders of houseplants gathered at the sill. The din of leaf blowers is constant now, only ending hours after dark. For that reason, the silence of snowfall becomes my impatient wish.

icy moonlight
shaping uneven shadows
this snowy moor of jewels

Poetry is something you release or unearth while writing it. You meet it when it arrives on the page. Our lives are like that – our relationships – our grounding. I think sometimes we write the poetry or chase the relationship instead of opening unto what is already alive and flowing.

You don't do the writing; language does.
You don't create the relationship; Love does.

*

The red bird steaks away from the feeder with a snappy flutter, barely above a whisper. How I now prefer the quiet unity of hope in all living beings.

This Wake

When the veil of pain finally lifts, life takes on a reborn quality. Pain as both noose and teacher.

It blazes and separates.
It schools a certain softness and empathy.

Happiness used to be stolen – a certain slant of light every 9th day in winter – an occasional trip to the ocean's edge – the unexpected gift as proof you are seen and beloved. After crippling soreness and agony, a sense of becoming fully alive rises with fire and balance. Restoration. And in this wake, happiness. Happiness for being alive. Happiness for the freedom of heart.

*

Night gives way to dark rains and biting wind. The sun is blocked today, so I will operate in the world without shadow. Holiday plans unfold – homecomings.

Windows now instead of mirrors. Do you know the shape of your soul? Mine has the shape of peace and with this clarity, I accept no substitute. How can I do otherwise and live in freedom? What is boundless includes all and therein lies true happiness.

There is no need to take anything more from me because everything is already given.

Cold rain – hot tea – I am alive for this.

That Last Sip

The Pain overtakes everything. Sure, meditation; let it go; don't suffer; stretching; Advil; ginger tea; cannabis; CBD; walking; sleep; so much sleeping. This unmovable thorn. These impossible days. How many times must one start over in order to live? The answer lies in an infinite strip folded upon itself forever.

Cardinals begin to winter in the bush outside the kitchen window. Yes, thank you for that. More light comes through the living room this fall after the trees were taken. Prisms throw rainbows in remembrance.

It took a long time to realize our connection means more than words or bodies. I had too many unmet needs; too much loneliness in my skin. But recently, I sat straight-backed against my towering pine. My bare feet nested in softened needles and black dirt as the last of the yellow leaves let go. The slanted sun on my face, pine at my back, dirt under my heels all culminated energetically to tip the chalice a little higher for that last sip.

I had become a turtle carrying my house on my back – slow and weighed down by attaching too much to imagined happiness.

We may have held our conflict as a war as opposed to a musical duet. There was order in our chaos – a pattern of governed by hidden laws. There were countless chances to smash old forms in order to reveal something new built from the shards.

My body, these relationships, the world around us – the stress we swim in can more deeply reveal ourselves and this revelation must certainly be central to creative change.

Of Moans and Stones

The dog's bark hangs in morning air and behind her, sun bursts through for the first time in days. I wonder: what would I say if I were not afraid? Half of speaking is silence; half of the truth has not been said. These and other aphorisms at the surface.

Body pain as a point of empathy. Gone are the days of elastic weaving through space. I used to be all legs and flow. Nowadays I am a strobed image getting from one point to another in stutters. J secretly recorded me dancing at the ska show, so I have image of all the reasons to just… not.

This weathered porch covered in downed leaves.
This season of falling and staying down.
These bones being milked of moans and stones.

When I am high, I don't want to wear my glasses which is no big deal until I'm not high and I need to find my glasses but what I also like is how I can still see, whether I am high or not, or whether I have my glasses on or not, the rainbows my prisms throw over the walls and couch and plants and sink and bed and face and heart.

There is a creative fire that comes from friction that I miss. In friction, two things cross, like kindling or a crucifix, but where they cross, the two become one. Sometimes I need permission to strike out, set fire, rekindle. William Blake said, “Opposition is true friendship.” I think I know what that means. And I think it has something to do with fear.

If I had no fear, I think I would say: again, yes.

Flourescence Easily Overlooked

A bright star beckons, high to the right. This chalice of sky shaped as a womb; this cupful of dreams dipped into the stream. The desert blooms and I am opening all the way. Whose gazing eye can hold the universe?

Cabbage soup and hefty bread. Tarot and meditation before dawn. Tarot said that some gifts come with a hidden sting. It is the Celt in you which leads to the divination of stones. Is that the lost light? Stones hold a fluorescence easily overlooked.

pocketed stones
carried from home
quiet like falling leaves
between us –
we can touch it
if we want

*

In the summer it felt like I didn't sleep for months. I couldn't; I had to follow the river to the mouth before winter. I thought we were walking together.

*

November sunsets ignite a fierce magenta if you are lucky enough to witness. Apples finish and wide-eyed owls take over the night watch. Stews and oatmeal replace watermelon and grilled vegetables. All things die back, but the rituals remind one of where they are from, now that they are not from here.

I cook in this quiet house, make a fire, unfold and refold quilts, and read books off my shelf. Where I sleep is a mystery to everyone but me.

Flower Sequence

“Inflorescence” – the order in which flowers bloom on a stem.

Do you know our flower sequence? On the surface it may seem that we bloom(ed) from top to bottom, limited by constraints of historical DNA, or by the world's ability to label everything as “this” or “that.” May I suggest that in truth we are in the act of blooming from bottom to top; unlimited in presentation; an energy of what seems concrete and logical towards abstract; secular to sacred. In our search for what we are, we keep forgetting to allow.

I have done the work. I have slept in the soft cool muck at the bottom of the depths. I have both learned and unlearned a few things. Veritas veritatum.

I am no longer dragging words or poems through myself; instead I am watching them flow through me. And in watching the words, all the words, I see that they give voice to us, as opposed to us giving voice to the words. And these words give voice to that which cannot be spoken.

At some point along the way, this became “wrong” or incorrect or immoral or... ?

When one watches and waits, what does one see? What path does poetry make for the flow of words? I have come to believe it is our job to make naked contact with the language. So yeah, write everyday. Allow.

And in doing so, those of us who write, we will see and find the truth indiscriminate inflorescence. The truth of us.

All Around the Hush

The texture of change.

In the end, all is impermanence. How deep is your keel; how tall is your mast. Can you open a little more? At one hundred turtles down there is stillness and yet, it is not static. Water moves all around the hush. Nothing is impossible.

The old dirt road is through pain – its many ruts – the washboard nature in spring. When it also bends and rises with pleasure, one struggles to come to rest at the final crest. Yet Love's urging feet. Yet the birds' translation from the crown.

*

November comes fresh with snow, dawn spilling pink over the army of rooftops. Diamonds of frost, our daytime stars. I'm lifting us all with my breath. I don't want anything anymore except to join. Words don't count. Enter me and no more mistakes will be made.

Last golden leaves peer through new lace. I am here and so are you. Sunlight breaks through the treeline. How we walk the road is up to us. I'm reaching out my hand.

Let's go?

"Look Up"

In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.
Every time a bomb falls, every time shrapnel hits our graves,
every time the rubble piles up on our heads,
we are awakened from our temporary death. ~ Mosab Abu Toha

Lives shattered under showers and skies of stone. What will be left after the appetites of power and war? Bend closer to the torso of trees. They will tell you how we are guilty for all of this. Why don't the me consult poets and music makers for a way to peace? Why do they not turn to the Mother?

The sky turns black with cold air. Snow falls in a way that looks like ash. The heat kicks on at 3 a.m. but I do not go back to sleep. Now is not the time for sleep. I think of the bartender in Austin who confessed in hushed tones that he was from Lebanon. He said, “it seems like I can trust you” . . . indicating some are not to be trusted. I wonder about the bright grace heating the upper branches of the tallest trees. Will he ever know it? Will any or all of us rise?

I cannot tell you about single tree I saw in Texas, though I know they must be there. Dust and drought yawn over the absence of tenderness. This cleft into which we all have fallen bends and turns as a maze, more vast than desert or dark. “Look up! Do you see the sunlight?”

"Hold You in My Arms"

In each other's arms, we sank closer to a truth previously ignored. Will you ever want me that way again? Maybe; but you need to see me.

Our mouths so full of questions.
Our hearts refusing to prophesy.

The lover is gone or out wandering the woods or in the monastery stacking wood for winter. So I am asking: have you ever noticed how tarot cards zing in your hands when you've paired with right deck? I mean, other decks work and tell truths. But the RIGHT deck takes you to a whole new level. Do you know that feeling?

I might have drowned in the Jordan River. I might have washed up on the banks in the middle of The Great War. I might have turned into a dove and flown into the sun. I saw Icarus on the way. The question is, did we land?

November comes into being. Darkness pawing at the last of golden light. Can we hold each other again?

"Rainy Night House"

Leaves and rain fall and festoon as Joni Mitchell croons farewell to October. Oh October! You leave everything on the table.

He meets me at the airport with flowers but later tells me about the time he has been spending with another woman. It's okay, I say, and mean it. We grow closer together and further apart, and we are both . . . happy?

My tanned and freckled hands fade back to porcelain. I sort kindling and stack wood despite the ever weakening pier of my body. It's still warm enough to open the window at night. The owl visits, sings a bit, and disappears before dawn. One sings without lyrics these days but have you ever noticed how good it feels to hum?

Bickering jays. The din of a thousand leaf blowers. Sometimes I sleep, but sometimes I roam around the encapsulated night, writing, thinking, guessing at poems. It is during this time I weigh my love for rivers against the more unhurried lapping of lake water against the shore.

A celibacy remains in which no one complains. We all grow too old to wear the masks and yet, the men all still mow bright lines in the lawn and the women shuffle tarot asking: what now?

Summer gold ends and distant moonlight glitters on pine.

We fall asleep
in the earth while
the one who lives
listens to the nothingness
of falling snow.

"God Bless Texas"

Westward landscapes.

Gold falls from the sky, covering the ground to a degree which makes the world seem as if it is suddenly healing something very deep. A memory of certain birds sinks into another life while other birds remain present. A cardinal's redness cuts through the depth of pines and rusted leaves moving side to side in descent. Soon enough, snow like shivering moths.

Off the plane in Austin, one is immediately hit with heat giving way to bare earth. Thistled fields lined with cacti and low shrub expands like a shoreless sea. Everything IS bigger...trucks, highways, longhorn bulls, and sky. Everything looms. The sun shines every day but the only birds I see are crows and vultures. A billboard shouts for Biden to “stop buying oil from terrorists.”

My adult daughter falls into my arms and our tears brim unto each other's cheek. My god, letting go is hard and my god, reuniting is the communion from which we are all formed. We explore her new life and show each other new ways of navigating. She takes me to Austin's music scene at night. I take her to see the bat migration from Congress Bridge. All is beautiful and all is impermanent.

We walked along the Colorado River and held hands. We smiled for selfies as a way to hold onto moments. But I am old and getting older; and she is young, finding her miraculous way.

There is no extra mile or last first kisses or one more dark sleep into winter. Beloved You, there is only this.