Upheaval

Today I threw
Eternity against Remembrance
The ruby red aflame
Against the settled green

Why toss something away
When it can become
Nourishment
Instead?

My Voice

I've been getting back into a poetry mood lately, getting back into a fiction writing mood. It terrifies me if I'm quite honest.

Here's a quick go that just poured out this morning.

Inspired

Truth lifts us Up
Settles us Down
Snug and safe
Carves a Home of Real
Into the Void
The Space
Between
Shots of light and dark
Momentary illuminations
Brief flickers
heart to soul
Of All that we Can

Just Be

"Tell Me About Despair, Yours, and I Will Tell You Mine"

I saw a wonderful quote by C. S. Lewis on a greeting card at Trader Joe's this week. The photo on the card was annoying: I didn't buy it since it didn't match at all with this wonderful insight:

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one”

That's what all of us are doing. Looking for the others like us, looking for the place where we can belong. Go to The Chocolate Chip Waffle's post on Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese. That's where my post title comes from. Look at the poem and what it says. Look at the comments of the people who love the poem.

A small group of strangers, pulled together into friendship by love of poetry, loving each other and loving poems for their ability to say to us, Yes. Me too.

View From Above

Bright bags piled up
Like oranges for sale
Beside the freeway

Along the Route: Palm Springs

Suddenly you pull the car to the side of the road
Below the rugged mountain peaks
Gravel growls below the tires
And you turn to me

Caught up in your arms
I hear the words I most want you to say
I love you. You are beautiful
Held in your embrace that
does not end

Around us, the desert stretches its infinity
of spartan beauty
and atop the brown mountain peaks
a sprinkling of snow
pushes paradox into the sky.

Hiding

Today I feel
Like writing something
hidden
Tucked away
into a corner
Of the past, where

Only you
Will see it

If by you, I mean
Myself
That other most
intimate to me

Swept by the broom of time
Into the hidden corner of
These cobwebbed words


May 7, 2009

Found This Weekend

The Fist
by Derek Walcott

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Noticing

Five blueberries rest in my palm
Their cool curves a sensitive caress

My thoughts touch on bodhisattva vows
How short I fall of perfection

Perspective

You can

Think

in terms of loss

Or gains

Not surviving,

But flourishing

The tight bright green that curls

Newly in the bare-brown

Branches of the trees, as yet

Unseen

All the past - a gift

More joys yet to come

Think the way the robin

Flies in the sun-filled sky

Of winter

A Rainy Morning At Home

Fiona's brilliant at reminding me how much I love poetry. This one is so perfect for this day of pouring rain that I've lifted it from her blog here:

Rain

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Raymond Carver

A Pause

So, chances are good that if you're reading this, I'm also a reader of your stuff. Probably your blog.

I'd like to just say that I wish I'd had more to say lately. I read your posts you know. I soak them in, I reflect upon them. I'm just not sure what comment to leave.

I haven't been writing much here either. So it is. For now.

I came across this poem in my files today while looking for grant info. Thought it would be something good to post. Guess I'm letting other people do the heavy word lifting for me.

Love after Love

By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Early Christmas Morn

While the dawn opens grey
Across the December sky
Spirit of Christmas unfurls
Below the hustle glitter
Of the manufactured world

Christmas is Upon Us!

I'm guessing you've been as busy as I with all the last-minute hustle and bustle. Monday night found my husband and me zipping through a cold rain to trudge from store to store on the quest for just the right gifts for the kids, as well as their difficult-to-buy-for grandfathers.

Now it's the day before the big day, and I pray that we are ready. I know we have food, we have alcohol, the house is decorated, there seems to be a tree with presents under it, and we're all together.

I think that might be as good as it gets. :)

Below I'll give you the lyrics to one of my favorite nontraditional Yule songs. It's better with the music which helps emphasize the narrator's progression from disillusioned to enchanted.

Christmas by Blues Traveler

Comes the time for Christmas
And I really have to ask
If this is feeling merry
How much longer must it last?

I wish a one horse open sleigh
Would come carry me away
But I've been waiting here all day
And one just hasn't come my way

Now excuse me if I'm not being reverent
But I was hoping for a miracle to hold me, wash me
Save me from my righteous doubt as I watch helpless
And everybody sings

If it's Chanukah or Kwanza
Solstice, harvest or December twenty-fifth
Peace on earth to everyone
And abundance to everyone you're with

Laha da da da da da
Da da da da da da da da da da da
La da da da da da da da
La da da da da da da da da
Laha da da da da
Laha da da da da

Comes the time for Christmas
And as you raise your Yuletide flask
There's like this feeling that you carry
As if from every Christmas past

It's as if each year it grows
It's like you feel it in your toes
And on and on your carol goes
Harvesting love among your woes

I want to buy into the benevolent
And I was hoping for a miracle to hold me, wash me
Make me know what it's about
As the longing in me makes me want to sing

Noel or Navidad
Season celebration or just the end of the year
Christmas can mean anything
And I mean to keep its hope forever near

As if a cold and frozen soul is warmed to love
By love’s own hand
So goes the prayer (if for a day)
Peace on earth
And good will to man

At twenty below, the winter storm it billows
But the fire is so warm inside
And the children while nestled in their pillows
Dream of St. Nicholas's ride
And how the next day they'll get up and they will play
In the still falling Christmas snow
And together we'll celebrate forever
In defiance of the winds that blow

My God in heaven now I feel like I'm seven
And Spirit calls to me as well
As if Christmas had made the winter warmer
Made a paradise from what was hell

As if a cold and frozen soul is warmed to love
By love’s own hand
So goes the prayer (if for a day)
Peace on earth
And good will to man …

I wish a one horse open sleigh would come carry me away
And I'll keep waiting through next May
Until Christmas comes my way

Words by J. Popper. Music by T. Anastasio and J. Popper

Merry day before Christmas to you. I wish you peace, abundance, and few errands!

Net of Lights

A net of lights glows
On the slate green wall
At the back of the coffee shop

The vanilla warmth of waffles fills the air

Christmas arrives with spices
Scents, shining shades

The bleak loneliness of season
Pours its riches
Like the ocean’s foam
Through a net of lights

Snippet

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

Experimental

If I were going to write something here, something meaningful, something deep, what would I say? Would I look from my window at the rain-splattered yard and notice the curious lift of my dog's head? Her fawn hair is slicked in wet stripes against her cheeks, and she twists her muzzle here and there, standing calm, scenting the wind to see where she will go next.

I think my yard matters. It matters to me. But do you care about my yard and the view from my window? How do I go about transporting the content of my small space into yours? How do the words that I spill across your screen make any difference to your dog, in your house, with your own pattern of sun and wind, or rain and snow gathering outside your own front door?

Why am I writing so predominantly in questions? Did you miss my writing over the weekend? If my writing here stops, will you wonder where I went? Or will you merely move on to reading the next blog on your list before you return to your workaday world of fixing meals and paying bills?

I like writing in the second person. But why? I talk to you, but I don't know you really. Yet the second person suggests that I do, that somehow we are conversing, that my words are opening a path between us that you did not realize existed until this moment of reading them.

Do you see what I am saying?

This is writing that wants to be a poem. This is writing that wants to say something. Shadow moth memories of other poems I have read circle through my mind, brushing their luminescent wings among my thoughts with a whisper I can almost hear. This is what you will come back to, says Margaret Atwood. This is where you begin. This is the way the world ends, TS Eliot wrote, but that's not what I'm saying in the slightest, merely copying his rhythm that my thoughts suggest to me.

In the Bleak Midwinter- Snow Had Fallen, Snow on Snow

It's Saturday; how about a poem?

This is a Christmas favorite for me. I fell in love with it through a beautiful picture book I used to read my daughters. The illustrations combine a second narrative to the nativity story.

The first stanza is my very favorite, of course. Such imagery.

In the Bleak Mid-Winter

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.

Christina Rossetti (1872)

In My Dreams

The narrow box of donuts

Was really just a box

Of candle drippings

Muted and brown

That interfered

with my typing

I had driven such

A long way

Already

I got out of the truck

At my house

To rest a while

2:30 am

a long and dark December

I heard this driving from one appointment to another today. Since ColdPlay was already on my mind, I thought I'd make it a lyrics-block post.

I love the music; the video's a bit creepy; the sentiment is uncomfortably plea-like. But I'm posting it here simply because random fate and some DJ's playlist suggested it today.

(Oh, and also because I love anything about winter, Christmas or December. Look for more themed poems to appear in coming weeks!)



Violet Hill

Was a long and dark December
From the rooftops I remember
There was snow, white snow

Clearly I remember
From the windows they were watching
While we froze down below

When the future's architectured
By a carnival of idiots on show
You'd better lie low

If you love me
Won't you let me know

Was a long and dark December
When the banks became cathedrals
And a fox became God

Priests clutched onto bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And a cross was held aloft

Bury me in armour
When I’m dead and hit the ground
My nerves are poles that unfroze

And if you love me
Won't you let me know

I don't want to be a soldier
Who the captain of some sinking ship
Would stow, far below

So if you love me
Why d'you let me go

I took my love down to violet hill
There we sat in snow
All that time she was silent still

Said if you love me
Won't you let me know

If you love me
Won't you let me know

Earth and Heaven

Mmmmm. Browsing poetry on the net. Have to love it, even when it tears at my heart.

I talked to an old friend this afternoon, my oldest friend really. We go all the way back to high school. Her teenaged daughter, my goddaughter, wants to be a writer. My friend and I have drifted now, but we maintain the ties we still have out of respect for how close we once were. When her child was born, she was like my own for several years. I loved her with a ferocious intensity that never tired.

My friend jokes that J takes after me. "You influenced her in those crucial years of early development," she claims.

I laugh. Then I offer this advice that I mean quite seriously. I've heard it from other writers, and it rang true. If it is at all possible for her to do anything else she should, I tell my friend. If your daughter can leave writing behind, if she can be happy with any other tasks, she'll live a happier life. Writing is amazing. Writing is a lover that lingers with us always. But writing, while it can lift us to heights and depths that we only imagine, is not kind.

I told you I'd been reading poetry. Via Negativa is an extraordinary site. I lifted the following straight from Fiona's blog (Hope she won't mind!):

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

-Robert Bly


What do I want? I ask myself.

I want love, most of all. I want compassion, both given and received. I want enlightenment. I want security. I want connection, attachment of the positive kind, happiness for those I love. I want to make a difference and to help others all around me. I want friendship upon friendship, showers of friendship shooting from the sky like silvered falling stars. I want forgiveness and redemption, reconciliation and starting again. I want passion and truth. I want not satisfaction, but contentment, like the wise heron.

Hope and Faith I fortunately and inexplicably have in spades. I have enough of that to spare.

If I could sit on Santa's velveted lap and have his kindly gaze turn upon me, these are the things I would ask for. Not diamonds, not a shiny car, not even guaranteed-return market investments.

I would ask for these intangibles. I am asking for these. I'm human, with opposable thumbs, and this is the list of what I want.