Tag Archives: Love

Bent On Flying

26 Saturday Nov 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fogged in for five days,

A space, made smaller

By low-hanging clouds

That won’t go away.

Nothing is as ungovernable

As weather, except the soul,

Bent on flying–

It’s what they always get wrong

About need; I need freedom;

I need sun, and a view so clear

It extends forever, like a soul,

Bent on flying–

Beyond every cage, open space;

Beyond every wall, more room;

Beyond this fog, the sun,

So bright, it will blind you.

2

He said, the world is bound together

in shame, and shadow.

3

What serves your soul:

A walk, a song, an embrace.

Last summer, we danced

Under stars and moon,

To music from Alexa.

Last night, we danced

To Christmas jazz.

You opened the door,

Danced barefoot in snow,

Twirled under night clouds,

A free soul of sun, and song,

A soul bent on flying.

Winter Blind

24 Thursday Nov 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A white blanket was pulled over

Our homes, the earth, our heads,

As effortless as sliding on ice,

As uncontrollable as dying.

And, it was hard to see beginnings

Of fields, or endings of hilltops;

In that way, it was a blur of (also white) fog.

Who’s to say what lay behind it?

The infinite forever of lost souls–?

Just there, and there, look where

My finger is pointing, beyond the trees.

I see myself only as far as the fence-line.

All else sparkles back, a vision

Of what is here, and what has been here,

Always within the margin

Of what we can so easily see.

Her Arms

14 Monday Nov 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I will take a *Pound out of this poem everyday until it is three lines: a title, and 2 lines.

I envy the Aspen,

With her sleek, white body,

She stands unmoved,

While her leaves shake,

Turn color, fall,

And she is left,

Naked and alone,

In wind, rain, snow,

Enduring all,

Judging none,

No complaining.

In spring, I remember

Her limbs rejoiced

In buds, then leaves,

And birds.

They gathered

In her arms:

Robin, magpie,

Sparrow, finch, falcon.

This autumn was summer,

Then winter,

She is bare again.

The chickadees bounce

From perch to perch,

Fully happy in her embrace.

During this too early winter,

When we lose faith,

Fall to our knees,

Barely endure

dark day after dark day;

She stands reaching,

Arms outstretched to the sun

Beyond the clouds.

You must see now,

Why I envy the Aspen,

How she will survive,

And thrive, beyond me.

Let Me Be Like Water

19 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The way water comes

In many forms,

Lapping here, at my feet,

Or droplets, from a dark sky;

Let me be like water.

My father told me

God is like water:

Ice, steam, and ocean,

The way it evaporates

Then moves in clouds

To mountaintops,

Over and over.

Let me be eternal,

Like water.

Last night, I cried,

Tears of salt, and water,

They spilled out of my body

In waves, and clouds,

Emptying my grief

Into the great God

Of the helpless-lost.

I was poured out

Into some common,

Wet universe–universe–yes,

Let me be that vast,

Powerful transformation;

Let me be like water.

Have You Seen a Heart?

21 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Forever and ever,

They have underestimated

Women.

Elizabeth

Would not be queen.

Born to a whore.

(They define whores.)

Do you see the difference?

The threat?

Does a man scare you the same way,

As a woman with a feline sway?

No, it is a woman

who brought down Troy,

And toys with the heart in you.

Have you seen a heart?

Not the one you scribble

In pen,

But the ripped out organ,

Still beating blood

Into your hands.

Love Letters

04 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Whisper me a tale of lovers,

Through limbs of trees and years,

Rattle a leaf, turn a page,

Rifle through an abandoned dresser.

You will find them there among socks,

With no feet left to cover.

The body is taken away,

Yet, rises again in pen.

She recognizes the scrawl,

It is as much him as him,

And hymn to her hurting heart.

You realize love too late,

She thinks, beyond the day-to-day

Bicker and fuss, we lost us-–

She sees her lover now,

In what is left undone–

The many things he touched

And with his touch, flourished,

They wilt now that he’s gone.

Yet, in her hands,

She holds his scribbled words:

Nineteen sixty three, nineteen sixty four–

And, it all comes back to her.

Some Gifts

29 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some gifts are better than others,

The way I saw your heart extend

Into past memories of her—

Tears from your uncrying eyes—

Her loss was the one loss

That broke you like that,

Like that,

The sobbing unashamed.

And then, it’s as if we fast forward

The great movie of our lives together:

You’re dying,

I’m a middle-aged woman.

You give me a dog.

A wolfhound,

Like the one whose loss broke you

Way back then. Riagan. Riagan.

Whose eyes held our gaze,

Whose eyes sought to impart wisdom;

Perhaps, her eyes saw beyond this life,

To where you are now.

Wouldn’t it be something

If our lives are that special,

They continue forever,

Two points–three–an infinity of dots

On some great line that extends forever.

How We Keep It

23 Monday May 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Moments, so beautiful they are painful,

Unless you take a deep breath

And carry them into your heart & lungs

Where they mix with the sweet oxygen

Of your body’s blood, pulse, beat, throb.

And you think, I will keep this, Lord,

Help me keep the memory of it,

Let me be changed forever to the goodness,

Yes, even the holiness of this moment.

(Because what is this, if not sacred?)

A poem can keep it, too, and as I read back,

I feel you in the flashing memory spots,

Where touch and sight and smell,

Ignite the latent feeling of you, still alive.

There you are, rising with other wonders:

The geese, flying through basalt cliffs,

The view, after ascending Doe Mountain,

The ocean, when I had not seen the ocean.

There you are among it all, in my mind,

And I can feel your love from this far away.

Skunk Cabbage

19 Thursday May 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No, I did not bend down too near

To smell the yellow flower

Which grew in weaving lines through

The swampy crack, the scraggly creek,

Creeping amid mid-high, mid-spring grass.

We were at the base of Quartzite Mountain,

Nestled behind a tiny ski town, ghost town,

When the skiers don’t ski, or snowboard,

Or venture icy roads to snow-topped peaks.

You said the clicking was cicada,

I said, cougar, because I’d seen a video

Of a cougar making a clicking-ticking sound,

And decided the next clicking-ticking

Behind a bush, or tree, or grassy knoll,

Would be a mountain lion. You see,

We will never know who was right,

Because we passed safely the miles up,

The miles back down the hill, to the creek,

With those most beautiful, yellow flowers;

You could see them recede into the woods,

Like mystery, like scattered crumbs,

Showing us the way to an unknown truth.

I followed them for awhile, alone,

While you stayed back, and packed the dog;

Those irresistible, extra steps along their path,

Like blazing torches, luminous, yes.

What Was Lost in the Trade

15 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The push, and pull, of memory,

When you left me I got sadness, despair,

When I left you, I got amnesia.

Be careful what you forget,

Memories, hostage to one another,

Shoved into the abyss, together they go,

What was beautiful, too,

The joy of holding his babies at my breasts,

The sound of love in first words;

Hope, like a childhood dream,

You’re embarrassed you believed.

And now, no plumbing the hole

With dirty hands, arms not long enough

To reach what was so easily given away;

(The hurt was not traded for living,

As I’d hoped,) no, I want them all back,

Though they bring you, with the sadness, too.

One Swan, One Last Kiss of a Bee

12 Thursday May 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hog Lake Falls, a cool breeze,

One single, solitary swan.

I think I see him preening

From this vantage, far away.

Last time I hiked here, you’d just died,

And I thought, how lovely to know

I can bring you with me,

Free of the dying chair,

The dying bed, the whole dying room,

And house, where you’d locked yourself away.

Such days are ripe with feeling alive:

Prairie smoke droop their heads,

Their beautiful faces turned down,

As they wait for the kiss of a bee.

Then they will finally look up at the sky,

Say one last prayer, go to seed.

Toward Our Once Bright Existence

03 Thursday Feb 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the end, we don’t know

How the end will come,

Peaceful, as we sleep,

Or, under the thumb

Of morphine. Memories,

Like flotsam, from the depths

Of our once bright existence,

Form a tunnel toward our exit,

Each day, one step closer,

Almost touching what was lost:

mother, child, father.

A Broken Thing

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’d be lying, if I said I didn’t know,

Years of turmoil, like a river,

With a dangerous undertow.

Like swimmers, outside their boat,

Unable to swim, thrown against rocks.

We were young, and bound together

By our children. Then, the talk:

You don’t love me, he said,

And, rather than saying it wasn’t true,

I asked, what does love have to do

With being married? We have kids.

We were pulled over, under a bridge,

Which spans the mighty Snake River.

We were both wrong, but does it matter?

Self-fulling, breakup chatter–

Prelude to the email I would find–

Betrayal, is not a kind way to end.

Twenty years later, still not friends,

Yet, we are friendly in our pain.

The sting of loss, defines a sting,

And taints our world, a broken thing.

Diminished, But Singing

04 Tuesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You must admit,

a song of sadness

Is a decent song;

A song of rage,

The songs we banged to

In our younger age,

That made us stand

And raise our fists–

Is better yet.

The rage is gone.

Somedays, sadness, too,

And happy tunes

Are few.

Yet, sing we must

To shake the silent woods.

Our souls,

They still have much to say,

Of getting past, beyond,

The dull,

Diminished days.

The Edges Begin to Blur

02 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A fog over the snow-covered hills

Of the Palouse, loosed delineation

Of hill and road and sky,

It seemed an infinity of cloud,

A shroud, over our eyes,

As we returned from a ‘last visit,’

The one where we said ‘goodbye.’

A great chain is about to snap,

The ties that bind crackle,

Grow weak, tremble, cry:

This too shall pass, everything must die,

But at last, we don’t believe it’s true,

Do we? Life is all we’ve known,

And its roads extend for our ever,

And ‘our ever,’ doesn’t come to a tidy end,

But it does begin to blur at the edges.

The Not So Little Things

29 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house. (Directive, Robert Frost)

1.

The frosty backs of horses at the bale,

The red fence, framing the snow,

This is the beauty I found

In the extreme cold

of December.

And I remember

Wishing for it.

2.

Do you want to save this bird,

It was a falcon,

And it ran, with broken wing,

At the edge

Of a barbed wire fence.

He asked me, as he knew

I was a lover of wild things,

And a nurturer of broken wings.

I do, I said, I do.

Then, he was out of the car,

Walking among snow

And wounded bird.

I watched him from the backseat,

The car, I would someday wreck.

But that day, it was whole,

And we were whole,

And he returned, victorious,

Gloved hands,

Cradling broken bird.

3.

I don’t know why he gave it to her,

But she was in possession

Of his cowboy hat,

And she knew

I was the one who wanted it.

I was in possession of money,

And funny prankster that she was,

My sister knocked on my bedroom door.

She was having a yard sale in her room,

And I was invited to shop.

I can’t remember how much I spent,

But the hat became mine,

and I was wearing it.

He laughed when he saw me,

His big hat on my small head,

And heard the story of its quick journey

From her to me–

He’d given it to her for free–

But I didn’t care,

I wore that damn hat everywhere.

4.

Before I wrecked his car,

I slid his truck off an icy road

At two am, in a snowstorm.

I remember hiking to the first house,

And a man answered the door

In his underwear, staring dumbly

At me. I was desperate for a phone

To call my dad, praying he’d pick up,

Otherwise, I’d be stuck

With the undressed stranger.

He did, and soon my dad was sliding

down the dangerous hill,

In the car I’d soon wreck.

Next, he held his metal two-ton jack,

And ratcheted the truck up, and off,

And up and off, back

Onto the road, where the ice melted,

And the snow turned to rain,

And the sky filled with lightning,

But we survived, and now,

We can laugh at this story.

Preparing for Infinity

25 Saturday Dec 2021

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In his last days, he contemplates this:

In the multiverse, our universe,

In the universe, our galaxy,

In the galaxy, our solar system,

And in that, our planet,

Where you find us,

Small as we are,

Celebrating

What it means to be eternal,

To join the stars,

To become one with love,

Two points on a line,

That extend forever.