15 Thursday Mar 2018
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Palisades Park, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Waterfalls, Wonder, Words
Today, I’ll hike to the waterfall
To look for a sentence
or, even one word–
One moment of wonder
Captured, and brought back
To this quiet house
With its walls and windows.
It’s out there, somewhere,
Waiting, like wonder does.
13 Tuesday Mar 2018
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There you were again,
On the beach of Mauna Kea,
With your towels and brushes,
And your intense fascination
With red boats.
I took your photo,
Because it’s easier than painting,
And I’m writing this poem,
Because it’s also easier than painting
The way you searched the canvas
For perspective: stepping away,
Then closer, strokes from below,
Then from above. Okay, I’ll say it,
It was like you were dancing,
And taking liberties with the distance–
From the water’s curvaceous edge,
To the tip of that blood-red canoe.
11 Sunday Mar 2018
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Cats, Feral Cats, Hawaii, Hawaii Cats, Missing, Poem, Poems, Poetry
You called out
beneath plumeria.
So like mainland tabbies,
But missing
The tip of your ear.
You laid out
On the concrete bench,
As I stroked your back,
With my full palm,
And said, Sweet Hawaii Cat,
You’re sweet, Hawaii Cat.
I called for you today,
But got no answer–
And I started to miss,
Not the waves, sand, sun,
pineapple and plumeria trees,
No, it’s you I miss, Hawaii Cat.
It’s you I miss.
11 Sunday Mar 2018
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Cruelty, Forgiveness, Goddess, Hawaii, Legends, Pele, Pele’s Curse, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Revenge, Tourists, volcano
Even the T-shirts are tired of themselves,
But don’t take the lava rocks.
Pele’s curse is a real thing:
Cancer, heart-attacks, financial ruin.
Just ask Karen, who took coral and sand,
Then lost her dogs, her house, and her husband.
He gave me a heart-shaped rock,
And I got kidney stones; it’s true,
Pele has a bad temper.
Thousands of pounds of rock
sent home to the island each year:
Place this back from where it came,
They scribble out to some unknown.
Absolution, it’s that easy:
Your hollowed-out heart,
An envelope, a stranger,
And a cruel goddess
Who is supposed to forgive.
09 Friday Mar 2018
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adventure, breakups, Divorce, Dreams, finding yourself, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poems About Kids, Poetry, sons
You always flew on wings
adrift of sky and dreams,
A journey to find–
What was it you said?
It’s not enough to be alive,
If you don’t feel alive.
Yes, that was it.
So we watched you leave,
As the sun struggled
To get clear of the clouds,
At least, those were the lines
In the poem I wrote then.
But all I remember now
Is your back–
And how you didn’t turn
To wave goodbye.
09 Friday Mar 2018
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1
There are people we meet
Who are old;
They get older.
Her green house,
our gray house,
separated by a few feet
And a porous shrub.
The black and white manx
Meandered between her yard,
with its ancient birch,
glorious hydrangeas,
And ours,
with its withering grass.
07 Wednesday Mar 2018
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Germany, Hawaii, Home, Island Fever, Loneliness, Longing, Mauna Lani, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Poland, Prague, Suffering, Travel
It’s a real thing, he says,
Musing of moving from Mauna Lani
To Austria, Poland, Prague, or Germany.
Haven’t been to the ocean
In three months, he says,
As he pecks out letters,
One by one, on the keyboard.
Of course, we later joke
About wanting island fever:
A life absent of snow, of the ice
We slipped upon, of gray days.
But to trade the aspen,
With its bare arms,
And its crystaling rime
And silence, the way it pleads,
The way it trembles
Among its roots, from start
To start to start–
That anticipation, that loneliness,
That incredible wonder—
Even in paradise, the heart
Has its hole. It has its terrible
Brokenness, and its frantic
Longing to be away.
01 Thursday Mar 2018
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Bird Poem, disappointment, Future, Hope, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Winter, Winter poem
The second Winter was the cruelest,
The way it buried our hopes.
Even the ground had opened its mouth,
Like a baby bird, waiting to be fed.
I swear the grass was starting to green,
And I’m sure I heard a frog that night–
We sat outside and said we smelled spring.
We were wrong, as we always are
When we try to divine the future.
The only animal who tries to divine the future—
The only one who knows disappointment
In buried grass, bare branches, and silence.
24 Saturday Feb 2018
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aspen, Aspen Colonies, Aspen Trees, Dreams, God, Mothers, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Shades of White, Spirits, The Perception of White, White, Winter poem
If snow could form into tree,
It would be the aspen.
Snow, one of a thousand
shades of white,
The perception of light and brightness–
And Spirits, rising up like like colonies,
Covered in it. The snow. This aspen.
Our hopes. Our dreams. The good dreams,
That is. The ones where fairy god mothers
Float down and save us.
Did you know, aspen bark heals?
They say it takes away pain–
Like a friend, a lover, my mother
rubbing my back until it burns.
And, like a child, that’s what I want it to be.
Yet, its naked trunk rises like winter–
So unafraid, so unalone,
So rigid, intractable and distant.
Yes, if snow could form into tree,
It would be the aspen,
And the cold, white stillness of what seems
A winter that won’t go away.
21 Wednesday Feb 2018
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The aspen is clothed,
Its limbs reach toward heaven
Alight with rime and worship:
A great one has passed
At ninety nine years–
The lives that are touched
At ninety nine years–
Mine, my grandfather’s,
The time overlaps,
spreads over the landscape
So that all are touched,
All are clothed.
It is zero today,
And I wanted to write
That hell is cold–
Until I saw the aspen
Clothed in hoar frost.
All the world has become
The aspen, outlined in ice.
20 Tuesday Feb 2018
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I said the aspen was naked,
But maybe it’s me that’s naked.
The older I get,
The more naked I feel,
Like the aspen stripped by winter.
Its bare limbs standing still
In the fog, are they my limbs?
How terrifying!
How vulnerable!
How lonely!
Will it wake in spring?
Will I wake in spring?
02 Tuesday May 2017
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We must move together,
One mind, one soul,
One body, one purpose,
Says the herd.
We’ll bend our necks
To the ground,
Bite off blades of grass,
Like so: the Mustang,
The palomino mare,
The old sorrel gelding.
See how our heads line up?
Front, right legs forward,
One ear to the herd,
The other to the sky,
And bird sound:
The high pitch
Of the kildeer,
nesting in grass nearby,
The chattering of the geese,
The barn swallows,
returned to their nests,
Above our stalls.
We hear their song,
A composition,
Carried by the wind,
Through pine,
Through aspen,
Through crocus
And snowdrops.
We must move together,
One mind, one soul,
One body, one purpose,
Says the herd.
26 Wednesday Apr 2017
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1.
Under the wings of Canada Geese,
Rushed time:
Moments we wept
In our loss,
Wept in our fear,
Abandoned each other.
I stood alone,
Amid an ocean of dry leaves,
As the sky flew by in freedom,
And helplessness.
2.
How can I forget
That great yellow butterfly,
As big as a barn swallow?
It hovered around you,
Like a message
You wouldn’t hear.
Finally, it landed on your bare shoulder,
As you stopped work,
Leaned against your shovel,
Encircled of frail spirit,
And our children,
Chasing, laughing around you.
While I, woman in flight,
Watched silently from the back door,
Knowing I was letting you go.
28 Saturday Jan 2017
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Aspen Trees, Hope, Lilacs, Loss, Mt Spokane, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Ponderosa Pine, Yearning
The way the sun lit the branches of the aspen,
Traced the snow-lined needles of the Ponderosa,
Shone off each blade of grass in the dry circle
underneath that great pine, surrounded by snow.
I said, the way, as if it would lead to a thought,
But, in fact, it leads to fog, or the lifting of it,
Near the tiny Lilac bushes,
And, further still, across the blanket of snow–
A blanket that someone lay upon,
But not under, leaving an impression of a body,
The soft parts, blown away
From the crisp, frozen parts.
Look further still, through the lifting,
You’ll see the great Spokane Mountain,
And all the trees and houses
Which lead from here to there.
For a moment, you may think you can touch it,
Stretch, reach out your hand,
Trace your fingertips along its lonely edges,
And lift it into your arms.
03 Tuesday Jan 2017
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Mozart, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Silence, Song and Poetry, What is a Poem
The music is not in the notes, but the silence between.
–Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
2.
Even the world’s silence sings out to us,
The tension of what will come,
Always greater than what is.
Yes, a poem is a song,
Because everything,
Everything,
Is music.
31 Saturday Dec 2016
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Fingerpick C, G, Am, F repeat
Who are you,
And where are you beautiful.
Where’s your song,
That you must sing?
Lose yourself,
In all that is beautiful,
What’s torn apart,
What’s crumbling.
What’s Crumbling?
Improvise
Let me hear
Your sweet song.
What makes you cry?
What sets you free?
It’s you and me
On the edge of losing
All we have,
To eternity–
To eternity.
Improvise
Tell me now,
Where are you beautiful.
What makes you cry?
What makes you sing?
27 Tuesday Dec 2016
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1.
Let’s be honest,
No one cares how your poem
Is a reflection of you.
They care how it is
A reflection of them.
And when I say no one,
I mean me.
And you.
23 Friday Dec 2016
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There’s a rule among birds,
If it’s singing, it can’t be killing,
Which may, or may not, be true,
Except for the family of plump chickadees,
Who wintered beneath our cedar arch.
With their black caps and gray-backed wings,
They flitted from rail, to pan, to chair, to deck,
To aspen perch, peeking in at us,
Until I plucked my first A minor–
The 3rd and 5th string,
A melancholy chord found in most songs,
Even the chickadees’, it turns out,
When they hear you sing.
15 Thursday Dec 2016
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“We didn’t want anything else but freedom.
This world doesn’t like freedom.”
Abdulkafi Alhamdo, Professor of English, Last Call from Aleppo
What is Aleppo?
All that it was, or dreamed to be,
In rubble. Have you seen rubble?
It’s what hope looks like when it’s collapsed,
Reduced to broken chunks of asphalt
And twisted, distorted beams of rebar.
It’s brown. Not dark brown, but light brown,
The color of dust.
There is no truth, but suffering,
And the realization no help is coming–
No haloed army, no golden trumpets,
No white horses or heroes.
The choices you made,
In your heart of hearts,
Choice, like stone in your heart,
That is Aleppo now–
Stone in your heart.
21 Thursday Jan 2016
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Beaty's Butte, Beautiful Girl, Beautiful Mustang, Horse, Horse Poems, Horses, Mustang, mustang poems, mustangs, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Wild Horse Poetry, Wild Horses
Beautiful Mustang
Beaty’s Butte, Oregon 2007
Some things survive
Despite capture,
Despite fear.
Like memory,
How it felt
To take those first
Feeble, free steps,
Then stretch your neck
Toward breasts,
And the reward
Of warm milk.
The world was starving,
But some things survived,
Like the smell of sage
When your bodies
Lay down at night
And crushed the stems.
You dreamt of flight,
On strong legs;
You dreamt of rest,
Under the mahogany’s shade.
Some things survived,
Like the smell
Of your dam’s fur in rain,
The smell of her sweat.
The sound of her separation
survived, too,
The calling back and forth
From pen to pen,
Your first real lesson
On what it’s like
To be loved.
That way.
In the way
Of the terrible missing.
Some things survive,
Despite capture,
Despite fear.
Like memory.
Bits of Poetry 