I Forgot You Then

The sun was sleeping
And her people too
A quiet unstirring
Disturbed only by
The lake water
Lapping against
The granite shore
A blip, a splash
An unsteady rhythm
Repeated infinitum
Carving and tumbling
The rocks
Softening their edges
Dragging grains of sand
From shore to inland sea
Lake ebbing and tugging
As if it were begging
All sorrows
To follow her seiche
To the ends of the flooded earth
Where only fish and water exist
Or swimming souls
Find their freedom

Shed the roots
Shed the dust
Shed what troubles

Water is the body
And in water
A body floats
Or so the ancient story goes
From a wet womb
We birthed
And to her
We shall return
Earthen memory washed clean
It matters not anyway

Shaded

She wore a soft hat
That flopped slightly
And shaded
Her right eye
Sometimes she tripped
On roots or curbs
From the shadows
That hat threw
But still she tromped
Down alleyways or
Through bramble fields
Always in the hat
And her step
Somewhat askew

Until Then…

I find myself in need of help. There. I said it.

What a humbling and unexpected thing to say. A crippling thing, really; it leaves me hunched, almost crying, grappling for words, not wanting to say anything because to be misunderstood is more painful than a dart though the eye. It’s incongruous too: I’m a warrior, a fighter, fierce and tough and ready to fight or drag heavy loads up long arduous hills. I might bi*ch and complain along the way but I don’t give up. Quitting is for quitters, which I am not.

I said “almost crying”. Because that’s the problem. I can’t cry anymore. Can’t feel anything at all, really. Can’t taste. Can’t feel. Can’t smell. Can’t smile. I just can’t. Most importantly, I can’t write. No poems. No songs. Nothing. Words belong to someone else. And for me, there is nothing if there aren’t words flowing out of me.

Of course there are words for what this is. Words from other people, layered on me, heavy like woolen blankets, weighing me down. I don’t need those words, I live them.

What I need is the buzz of a bee. The stopping of a clock. Time to let the haze of a summer day settle on my skin. Time to marvel at the winding tendrils of a delphinium, watch wily squirrels jumping, hear chickadees dee-dee-dee-ing. Is that a house sparrow or a song sparrow? Do butterflies mate for life? What do the needles of a spruce tree look like? Dang, who knew an air plant needed more than air to survive? I need time to buy five more air plants, and permission from the air plant society that I’m allowed.

But I have hope. Somewhere, buried deep in the loss, under the relentless layers of demand, the heaps of pressure and worry and sadness there is a word. And that word will stutter and crawl and claw its way out…it will drag other words with it and they’ll lock arms, entwine limbs, march together in unison. A sentence will demand backup and suddenly a poem will shove out its chest, refusing to back down. That poem will breathe. That poem will have wings and legs and fly from flower to flower. That poem will adore bees.

Until then…xo

Spoken Tree Poetry

I always knew

that trees could talk

and now science has

proven it so.

Aren’t you sorry

for all the stories 

you missed,

the lost hellos, 

and goodbyes you

never waved?

And won’t your heart

fill with sadness

when you learn

they sing too,

but never a love

song sung for you?

Baseball

She died last Tuesday, while

Watching a Blue Jays game

In that big, comfy armchair

That made her feel like a queen

No one noticed 

Because the bases were loaded

Blackbird

One day the ceiling of heaven
Exploded
Empyrean everywhere
Feathers spackled the air
And dead poets
Somersaulted down
Birds and words
Fell over themselves
Tumbled and jumbled
Twinned and conflated
Until even a discerning eye
Couldn’t dissect one
From the other
On that day men with
Guns and tanks
And silver-tongued snipers
Ran roughshod
Over the sky
Sonnets dropped
Like shot geese
Into a lake
Too far from shore
And there they sank
Sirens sounded then
A mighty roar
You’re better than this
It blared
But we weren’t
And we didn’t
Couldn’t or wouldn’t
And it didn’t matter anyway
The poets knew it
The birds knew it
The bullets and sparrows did too
Blank pages piled up
In a crumpled heap
And birds huddled on a wire
While the guano grew
Knee-deep, beneath them
And the sun baked it all
Into a hardened crust
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie
Four and twenty writers
Shot through the eye

nothing to see here

all the broken people
and what can we do
I’ll pick a thread on my blouse
and you’ll sing out loud
look at the broken people
we should have a drink
who won the game tonight and
does my makeup look alright

Underslung

 
children scrabble in the dust
of Aleppo
seek shelter in the shadows
as if that could save them
from another shelling
their future underslung
dangling from the
belly of God
by a loose thread
and thinner hope
than that

The Little Things

 

 

 

 

 

it isn’t dying i mind
it’s just that i
imagine when i do
i’ll never again
need to search
for the words to describe
just how that surface
of cracked prairie mud
baked hard in the sun
reminds me of my dad’s
weathered hands
or how a waving
field of barley
carries me home
you can’t dig a fingernail
into the furrowed bark
of a poplar
when you’re dead

are there
lichen-covered rocks
growing on a hillside
in the afterlife
do ladybugs transcend
can you hear
the crackle of
fall leaves
and will my
bones know
they’ve turned to dust
it isn’t dying i mind
it’s just that i imagine
when i do
those tumbleweeds
along the fence
might miss me

swagger

not one plant
nor a single bird
not even a spider
cares about
your swagger

trees don’t bow
reeds won’t bend
roses don’t blush
so never mind
your swagger