26 February 2014: Marin County

Arrangement

The purple anemones from the Sunday market

are glorious all week long. 

But there is an instant, 

sometime on Wednesday, 

when they pass from blooming beauty

into dying beauty. 

I always seem to miss it. 

It must happen when I'm washing the dishes, 

or singing the children's bedtime anthology, 

or sorting the books into usable order--
sometimes remembering to try to be mindful, 

to defer to the teachings. 

Or maybe it was spoken this way into the primordial wind: 

how it was to be,
this ministry of cut flowers. 

That we should see not the apex of their decline
or their resistant throes, 

but only the exuberant stretching to sunlight, 

the praise for fresh water--

and then, ineffably, the graceful surrender

of bowing leaves and drifting petals, 

the easy disintegration of severed stems
into that fecund stew, 

breathing out low tide and high farmland

at once. 

16 January 2014: East Oakland

1 Kings 19

The cave was not unlike a home.

She could straighten the hand towels

and dust the candlesticks

there just as well as anywhere.

The constant crumbling

was a nuisance, of course,

and it was impossible

to keep the threshold swept clear
of the outside trying to make its way in.

When the wind came,

it made a circuit clear across the dinner table,

setting flowers and crystal to flight.

But God was not in the wind.

There was the night

when the whole scene

shook and swayed,

waking her from shallow sleep,

and the lights flashed on and off.

Two hours of tremors,

then every photo down from the walls,

not just shattered glass

but frames snapped and paper ripped to pieces,

with the rage intent

on eviscerating morning.  

But God was not in the earthquake.

She found she could be

in a place that her hands called home

while her heart was a thousand miles away,

alone on an island in a lake of fire. 

She knew she should not set camp there,

as her birthright called out

from the not so distant shore.

But night fell, as it always does,  

with the flames no less enthusiastic.

So she slept again,

like the caged lioness sleeps,

hearing whispers of the hunt in her dreams. 

But God was not in the fire.

In the end,

there was the silence that stood calmly

on her doorstep

for three full days

before it asked:

“What are you doing here?”

No words for an answer.

Only hands,

heart,
feet.

19 December 2013: Elsewhere

Levitation, after Annie Dillard

उदानजयाअत् जलपण्खकण्टकादिष्वसङ्गोऽत्क्रान्तिश्च
udāna-jayāat jala-paṇkha-kaṇṭakādiṣv-asaṅgo-'tkrāntiśca

Gaining mastery over upward flowing energy severs contact 
with mud, water, thorns and the like; whereupon the yogi levitates.
~The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali  

I was remembering the way,

each night,

you used to carefully brush off

the soles of your feet

before stretching your soft legs

into the bedsheets.

At the time, I thought it a compulsion.

Later I saw it as an act of love

for your precious skin,

protection from those stowaway shards

of the broken world.

Then I saw that as exceptionalism,

and decided to dislike the gesture.

It is well known

that there are three ways

to levitate:

to die,

to trip,

and to love oneself

more than the earth.

I find I am opposed to all three.

It is less well known

that we levitate in embrace—

bodies, mud, thorns, and all—

as tenderness holds back fingers of flame. 

8 December 2013: Vermont

The Spinnery

It may as well be sorcery,

how she moves

from bleating sheep

to fair isle mittens,

through centrifuge and steam,

threshing and winding.

It’s the skeins still

deep with the colors

that floated off at shearing

onto the barn floor—

granite, caramel, rust, cloud—

that call me.

But it’s children we discuss.

I am there to find

the root of the next hat

I will knit for my son,

who loses them weekly.

The cloud that followed me in

was the shape of worry

over the particular shade of purple

his lips will turn

with snow on the air,

whether it is tolerable,

whether it will make him stronger

or do him in.

I have one of those,

she says.

A dreamer.

Jumping trains.

I don’t know where she is

for years at a time.

She makes it a point
to catch my eye:

But, you know, they don’t belong to us anyway.

And I laugh, 

remembering Frida
who loved to laugh,

with the barbaric steel in her spine.

Tragedy, she once said,
is the most ridiculous thing. 

23 November 2013: Neponset Estuary

Devotions

Today I built an altar.
It was an act of desperation, really.

The other parts seem to be functioning
relatively well, but
the part of me that knows
where home is
has been traveling for so long
that it seems to have forgotten
in which lifetime
it left the fires burning.

So I set out flowers
that might seduce
the armored fragility--

a smooth stone
to amuse the mute wisdom
with its tumbling, ancient stories
of adventure--

a jagged stone
to tell the reckless heart,
in wounded silence,
what it knows of mountains
and of arrowheads--

a feather to preach freedom
to the captive will.

Each offers kinship to each,
cautiously hopeful that recognition
will set spark
to some smoldering thing.

The candle in a porcelain saucer
does nothing but burn
until it can burn no longer,
until it is a mottled heap of self-sacrifice.

In its fragment of time,
it sets a perfect ring of light
around this stage of chatter
and courtship.

But it is the darkness outside
that whispers breathless promises--
so that you have to strain, ardently,
to hear.

18 September 2013: This Home, Last Days

Postcard from Here

There’s not much to tell

except that the sweet orange 

cherry tomatoes have continued

to spread their thin skins to transparent

and fill with with fruit,

in defiance of the blight.

Maybe also that the orange slant of light

that enters this room at eight

makes me wish for you.

It’s just that it is so improbable,
that glow like sunrise and sunset
and another planet, all at once.
So that if you could find your way across the miles
to just sit with me here for a while, 
in defiance of the blight, 

our shared witness might coax it to stay.

This room might find its way to taut hopefulness again,
might tremble at its edges
knowing its kinship with the slender thread of fall chill

woven into the late summer breeze.

Because I mean to follow that thread

back to the black dirt

or crystalline cloud it came from,

and ask what it is that compels the earth

to go dormant,

to end the blight not by healing the tomatoes,
but by sinking it all in a flood of frost

that spares only what huddles underground

or builds four walls.

I imagine you here to sanctify this waiting,

unsure how long it will last,

certain that this eight o’clock glow will move on 
in its journey to the earth’s darker side,

unaware of how much it is still needed here.

5 August 2013: Lake Champlain

Search for the Plesiosaur

“It doesn’t take much for a creature

to become a monster,”

he informs me,

tossing stones into shallow water.

“But it takes even less to bring them back.
They just have to know you love them.”

So we walk the sandy parts of the lake’s shore,

the wooded ones,

the bouldered coves,

the train tracks
sprouted with summer wildflowers.
We paddle out by kayak,

take the ferry roundtrip

across the narrow neck of the lake, 

linger at the apex of the arched bridge

between New York and Vermont.

I buy a second ice cream cone.
In case we find him.

In case he likes ice cream.

The time passes with comments on newness--
the peculiar flowers that seem to live just here,

the feel of cold, fresh lake water

under the layer warmed by the summer sun,

vistas with mountains whose names we don’t know, 
the way we can see rain clouds moving in 
from so far away.

I have no way to tell him, eight years old,

that I’ve been here before,

and not once.

This is where all the trouble starts—

searching for a monster

with a tender heart.