“Our very life depends on continuous acts of beginning. But these beginnings are out of our hands; they decide themselves.
Beginning precedes us, creates us. There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning.
More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could."
John O’Donohue


21 May 2015

bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
"It was a kind of transformation. I never thought about birds." 

You should set the crow to work
as soon as you can.
For the pennies you spend on peanuts,
you create in her a grinding hunger--
for home, for mother, for lover.
It will serve you well.

She will unhaunt your days,
gather up the frayed edges of your life,
bind them with remnant thread.
You can trust her
not to store up treasures.
There is no marketplace
for what we have forgotten
to remember.

Her gathering is all
the erotic joy of the find,
solitary flight and impossible vision
turned to tenderness and submission.
She relishes your carelessness;
it is your courtship.
      Take a moment to hear that.

She needs you to unclench.
How else could you love
her blue-black anonymity
and her plaintive common caw,
if you couldn't call her curator,
redeemer?

19 May 2015

All of your meaning, all of your integrity or looks
—it must be put into words. 
And the words come without clothing. 
~Howard Thurman

I will admit to fearing death,
though not the dark passage.
It’s all the indelible living,
marks of this awkward lumbering
through embodiment,
what I won't have time to redeem
or erase.

The one nearest my heart
archives compulsively—
tastes and words and treasures—
lest he be forgotten.
I disintegrate compulsively,
lest I be remembered.

But the body can’t live and be silent both.
It speaks all it does not intend,
leaves residue and imprint,
like the shimmering ghost of the snail’s path,
like the improbable weight of a chest full of moths
pressing down four feet—
perfect circles, perfect square,
perfect uselessness.

Inevitably, what will be left of me,
after all the ventured obscurity:
tax returns,
sloughed skin,
uneaten greens,
love, intended.