Dishes pile in the sink when you're with the one you love.

Creature of memory, she- never, unless Einstein- Aliens have landed-lived, loved

The enormity of small events colliding:
the feeling built slowly
all day
pearls sliding one by one onto a string
sending tremors back and forward
along the whole strand.
Every moment felt as if it had already been lived
already carefully examined and savored.
It felt too familiar,
like snapshots of life pinned
where the wandering eye would memorize every detail,
a school or an office, memories pinned above a desk,
the everyday bustle meaningless, and only those
celluloid squares framing life, the real story
the one happening just now, filling every corner
with the sensation of seen-this-before.
Not only, lived-this-before.
Stepping from one image to the next, walking through walls
like the paper filling of a plot, one sheet at a time,
flipping, flipping
and no one, (or is there?) to tell the heroine,
turn the page, he's right behind you,
open that letter from your uncle,
grab an umbrella.
Creature of memory, she
had always been. But this day
made an ocean of her sunny fishbowl.
Now in the depths of it, in the reaches,
she remembered things she had not yet dreamed.
Two women with the eyes of fishes, eyes of the dead
one looking forward, the other looking behind,
sisters never seeing the eyes of each other.
Speaking truths that pass like ships
One knowing what was, one knowing what will be
one who is, coming for counsel.
A merchant or a thief (it's one and the same)
holding a green glass bauble before a boy.
He is slippery, untrustworthy, but he means no harm.
That image, there, the dish on the stove
this girlish sashay through the kitchen,
breathtaking sprinkle of stars in the heavens,
A small step for man,
the steps of a careful dance around piles
and boxes in a crowded flat.
She has lived it all, so attentively, before.
This time she is careless, bored,
overwhelmed, and paranoid by turns.
No one writes you back, she observes.
You can never write anyone back. You don't know
what it meant to such an author at the time, or what it still means
no experience is truly shared
if our lives are moving targets.
You can only write forwards, write for the moving targets of the future
those who can never, unless Einstein,
unless traveling against that flow,
those who can never write back,
only forwards for them too, trapped in the flow,
no reciprocation, equal and counterpart, action-reaction.
Yes, your cipher worked.
Well done. I am here. Aliens have landed.
it will not say, the message you can never get.
I have heard you. I am here too.
because they have shared what you
once were, a sloughed skin
your futures will be their pasts,
or is it their futures your pasts,
and you will look past each other
at the screens of each other's experience
encrypted
and they will always long for who you were
when you, in past, in passing, left tracks.
Beads, pearls, colliding on a string
separately resonant, but when you
string the last bead and fasten the clasp,
will it slip gently around your neck?
Are those pearls cool on your skin,
or warm, holding a trace of body heat?
Were they a gift to your past or future self?
Two-way mirrors set at right angles.
If the affair is remembered before it can be lived, loved,
she is always haunted by the shadows of what comes next.

frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.

So Winter Begins

This is a time for remembering, as the first snow falls to the ground, as the winter wraps me in close in deep folds of cloth. A time for turning inward into the heart, beyond the rattle of beech leaves still clinging palely gold, rasping on their branches, the last sensory organs of a dried up season, the last glory and color of a changing perspective. A time for the stores of memory to unwind, a time to examine each garment for holes that would let in the cold, a time to shore up the foundations and the structures that support each of our beings through the long night. This is a time to sit by the fire and tell the story so that we remember who we are, and where we are going. In the dark one's identity is in question, in ways it would never be under the plain illumination, the clear brightness of day. A time of endurance and strength has come, a time of waiting while plans we have dreamed lie asleep still, waiting for us to wake up into them as to a new spring. A time that tests our preparation and our dedication, that seeks out the weak places in us and cracks us open in all our flaws, right there on the icy hillside. In this time, all our acorns must be in, and the long long arms we stretch beyond our valleys to distant lands be pulled back. We are small in winter, small and close, and we keep the heat in but the cold outside of us, and we know when to keep moving, and sometimes we stay still. And in the space where there are no cricket voices, that breath space of cold, ice cavity of a silence instead of a chest, where billowing steam on the breeze replaces the effervescence of a butterfly's lazy trace, there we hear our blood pound through hot vessels, there we hear the clear ringing of the mountain voices, a raven's startle.
I sit and I remember. I remember how the mountains never felt lonely, on those gray blank days when they were wrapped in snowy blankets. Quiet but purposeful, the mountains bowed to receive their caps. It was beauty on a scale only my heart could conceive of, large in the child's chest that housed it. I would tromp along willingly in the wake of its tug, my boots flopping in time with my flouncing scarf and windmilling arms, mittens securely attached. I didn't know why the resonant chords of the mountains, the fact of their presence, laid bare against the snow, should leave such a welling sadness within me, so solemn for an eight-year-old experiencing the weight of the world. The enormity of the love I felt consumed me without outlet, I could not relate it on a human level, nor understand it. I was simply covered, like an avalanche. I found myself running, running, struggling through snowdrifts, wading when it became deeper and entered my boots, urgently heading somewhere, collapsing in the blank hysteria of an empty field, white as a page, my footsteps laid out behind me. Those footsteps proved the pinnacle of my grief, that I would move a tiny mouse pinned to the land, so removed from the rolling vastness of the mountains I longed for, encompassed but never encompassing. I sought the memory I now hold, memory of flight. Memory of my true sight of the world, my falcon's eyes, with which I envisioned all laid out before me, beat wings with which I gave thanks for all laid out beneath me. A hopeless, sweet child I struggled in utter confusion, barraged by the senses I once knew how to make sense of, fledgling in freefall, not yet knowing to spread my wings. The mountains received my keening and echoed back my cries to the crisp, falling snow.

It's just another task, another tidying up.
Like pulling up last season's weeds,
Ripping out the eyes I saw with in
the summer, waving on their long stalks.
This movement is a turning, an effort
around the axis of the year, as I
balance an egg-shape of transformation--
of space inside me. If hope's a
feathered thing, I cannot yet tell
whether this shell contains a bird.
But my first inclination is to
another realm, glittering, airy
with the carapaces of insects
irridescent in the day that dies.
Who kept the long memory of ages
would know the fields of autumn
and call them with their truest title:
birthplace of the dragonflies.

In a time of great change and upheaval, fear is my inheritance, my shadow-self clinging and dragging at my feet, my belly, my throat. Fear is my keeper. I miss more than I see. But I see the great old tree at the bottom of the garden.

Waking to my disconnection I have nowhere to go but into myself, yet I flee. I may be on the fast track, but it's not a smooth ride.
And today I have been reminded that everyday life is the extra-ordinary one that I seek, and instead of seeking to intensely change and shape my life every day, I might find it intensely changed simply by experiencing it in the moment. Who or what might I fall in love with? The irreplaceable, vulnerable beauty of strangers' self-conscious postures on the subway, the way they carefully avoid making eye contact with me. The world is so big and so beautiful, I used to cry. Where is there room for me when even the smallest feather crumpled in the gutter shines, when each brick laid is laden with significance? Reading each nexus of power and information, reading the city, reading tiny details, reading the lines, and the newspaper flapping its way down the sidewalk, would I ever arrive anywhere? Or would I simply stay frozen in a moment's observation, of wood grains, of graffiti, of rain in rivulets, and the smell of new pavement, a sea of wobbling umbrellas? I will be examining an old locket, a cat, a faded flyer, the nearest mural, and the shoes of passersby. And if I examine enough cups of tea, perhaps I will look up to find some new revelation has settled around my shoulders. The world is big enough for me.

Is this my lake? Is this the clear water of my reflective self? Tall water moving. Old water sleeping. The reservoir of being. When I picture a container, perhaps it should be a lake: spring-fed stream flowing in, river estuary flowing out, standing in the footprint of mountain ranges, mirroring my silver soul with the upside-down summits. What dreams are bourne across those waters, what secrets buried in their depths? The echoes of any sound I make can be heard from miles off, transmitted in a perfect crystalline whisper. I brook no interruptions in my musings but my mermaid mind merges with the waves of millfoil. Mine is a feathery, rolling sea, and if I were standing on a moor in England the heather tossing in the wind would remind me of it, as alfalfa and mugwort do, in the sighing fields of home. 'The tide! The tide!' young Keats would bellow, from the lookout of a pasture stile, and I would bound with him, pointing out the undersides of leaves visible on the nearest oak or maple, meaning that a storm is on the way.

out-standing in my field

The plant that nightly makes meadows smell sweet is rightly named fragrant bedstraw, along with purple and pink vetch clinging to tall grass stalks full of grain, and daisies waving gently in the breeze, campion forming white pillowy clouds, and elecampagne sweet and low to the ground. Clover awash in white and red, and strawberry peeking from low-growing beds. Black-eyed susans and loosestrife, buttercups too, and parsnip and goutweed, goldenrod, alfalfa, dandelion, morning glory, aster, and the twinkling silver coming from the underbellies of waving leaves on the small aspens growing casually, five feet from the edge of the field, as if no one would notice their encroachment.

The sound of home is the rustle blue-green of these leaf beings on a summer night. A creature sound. They are tall and have stood there ever since I can remember. Can they remember me? I ask. I am a wild one, a small bark scrambler with barked shins, scratches where I scrabbled up the trunk, perfectly perching high above a burbling river bed. This is what the trees remember, my almost still gaze, blood pounding as I crouch, precious gasps as I wonder at the set of day, elated and pleased to be several dozen feet higher than usual as if I had gotten away with something.

My heart has always been in the heart of a certain field, a low point on the land but an open one from which the sky is apparent, and the nearby mountains make their presence known, the funny one shaped like an anvil. An itch that I've had since I was small urges me to run towards open sky, and standing here, I can see wide vistas. A glitter, the light reflecting off a metallic angel, that pilot and I the only ones who know the secret of this sky, its freedom. You and me, buddy. You and me. I don't envy him, whoever he is. He has to look at his instruments, and focus on work, and is surely above the brilliant color display. I in my field see it all pass before me. Like one of my trees, my glory is in watching the world passing by and furthering, becoming. Who else will take the time to notice? If I do not stand out in the field and gaze into this stretch of sky, my stretch of sky, with weather passing across the canvas in a brilliant ever-changing show of wonder, if I do not stand here, will someone else?

The colors of home are the light on hills at evening. How can green become so pink before it all goes dark blue? The clouds on up through the stratosphere each in their turn follow suit in a gentle blending motion. It is suddenly not fair that every sunset has been painted as if only in one moment, when sunsets are temporal events, changing from one moment to the next, now it is the most beautiful, no, now, now, now, until it's blue in gray or is it gray in blue? and I can no longer tell the clouds from the sky nor distinguish the patterns of the leaves and the dew brushes cool against my scraped shins and I turn my steps for home because the day is gone.

A Longer Trail for some

But I enjoyed the 30.8 miles of it that I hiked, in the best company possible. I had all sorts of worries and personal concerns that melted away with the first mile and a half of uphill incline. Nothing like straining at your backpack straps and wondering whether you will keep breathing in a minute or if your boots are actually crushing your toes to jelly, to drive away worries about things like what you're doing for the rest of your life. And oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, I found that what I was doing for the next few days at least was beating a pretty hot pace over and across the Long Trail with my friends, and it didn't matter what appointments I had made, or what I might think my parents might not approve of, or what serious thing I needed to sort; worrying wasn't going to fix any of that anyhow. My problems didn't melt, but I packed them away when I packed my backpack, and I conveniently left them on the shelf at home, along with other things that were too heavy or too useless to take with me. I needed to travel light. Getting things done turned out to be the order of business, and the first step to finishing is, well, the first step. The dao has never been so sweaty, heart-racing, rocky, and rewarding. All around me, every step of the way all I had to do was stop, and look around at the cathedral of the forest canopy and the velvet moss carpet and the weird mushroom priests. Any moment of the trail contained the whole of the experience and I wasn't afraid I'd miss any of it, because it was all around me. I didn't hurry because I thought I'd be left out, instead I took my time. What fell into place was my perception. I absorbed the mountain-ness from the mountains. I asked where my roots were, why did I choose this place, these structures and people, what led me to the path I now walk? I looked long into my own memories. I looked long across the view, and into the daydream of the mountain. The lighthearted dream of summer, and a deeper sense of well-being and purpose, a way of being, a -ness that grows like mountains do, older all the time. I laughed and bantered along the trail. I settled, like the mountain settles, into an understanding of myself as I am, as I am forming. The seed of the mightiest mountain is a single grain of sand. And if I build it out of weekend hikes, hands of cards, bunches of flowers, a really great porch and shade with the summer sun through the leaves, instead of church suppers and hook-rugs and big, sweet dogs and sweeter maple toast, I still might live to ninety like Grandma Frances. The secret is just living one day at a time. I just added a pebble today. I'm in the business of mountain-building, so excuse me if I don't take some time off. If I ever stopped, how would this mountain get built? I have the most lovely sense of not wanting to step out of my self and miss a bit of my life as it goes by. I deserve it and I will savor it. If every day can be as satisfactory, as filled with endorphins and fellowship and silent, quiet spaces in the cool and the green, I shall feel fortunate indeed.

green summer grass

Ah, the groans of summer
a lazy lawn-mower, shirt
left slung across the porch rail,
where a tall glass of ice water,
lemon and mint, sweats bright beads
of moisture in the afternoon shade.
The chlorophyll smell, grass greener
with two l's, fresh cool whisper
saying 'water, water;' lapping
little tongues of the earth's delight.

sensitivity

Right now I drink
the slightest sound.
I am a still pond
and my whole being
is dizzy with listening,
waiting, watching.
I am so wrapped up
in sensation, so wrapt
in my attention
the slightest dip of a robin's wing
is enough
to fill me completely.
I am a pregnant tummy
so full of my own being,
that funny egg-question of a soul,
tapping on the shell, hearing
echoes from the world, dreaming
of no time at all, resting
in the dark and quiet, changing
ever so softly.

Changing.

While the golden egg
of my mind waits,
I need not say or do
anything of import.
That waiting itself
holds a gift.
I will bear my mind's treasure
on some sandy shore
and swim back out
to the milky stars of silence.
I have no room for anything else.

I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world, and our slow-burning chosen apocali. Would apocalypses make more sense? It's sick that we could even think to pluralize apocalypse, but we are dying by chemicals and radiation and wearing away all the capacity of our own planet to protect us from the sun, from the extremes of nature's capriciousness, and so it is not just one thing but a whole host of endgame players, check and mate, the confluence of our self-will and the world's will, our intent suicidal and the world's, homicidal. In that, I suppose there is only a singular, apocalypse, to describe when it finally becomes too late for any actions to sway the course of fate and annihilation is assured.

Ritualized verse for everyday occasions

The inspiration for these little couplets or single lines I owe in part to Jason, and his recommendation for finding lost objects. Now it is not only Catholics who utter a short couplet prayer to St. Anthony:
"St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please look around,
my _____ is lost and cannot be found."
St. Anthony takes his time, but he has never failed me yet.

Anyway, the concept behind this little ritual struck my fancy, and I've been dreaming up little singsong rhymes for more occasions than I can count. The rhymes may not be very good, but I think what is important and healthy is opening up one's mind into prayer, addressing the universe in a formal-humble-intimate way using 'thou' and 'thee,' and taking a moment to say something beautiful about the world. Prayers of gratitude are shown to be much more effective than prayers of supplication in changing our perception of goodness in the world. The words you speak have never been used before in the exact same combination, so each of your sentences is a new creation. Might as well say something that has a positive effect, at least in yourself if not in the world around you. Here are some lines I have come up with recently:

When watering plants: Thou gentle spirits of earth and air, be well.

When in the shower:
To thee, o power of water I yield
myself to be cleansed; my wounds to be healed.

When picking up a musical instrument: O beautiful instrument, grant me congress with the air.

When lighting a fire:
Flame of the Earth,
strong before our birth
begin with a spark
from the deep and the dark.

When moving into a new house: This dwelling is dedicated to the Earth, whose shrine all homes are.

... and it's raining

Who doesn't need a personal laminator?

It seems appropriate that today, given inclement meteorological phenomena, my task should be waterproofing pieces of paper.  Much more practical than writing poetry about how the slippery ooze reflects my inner state.

what's to come

An old standby.
'Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear.'

This song reminds me I am tinder.
Calcinatio: Burn faster, louder, closer
Be someone else's, be consumed.
If you're not on the rollercoaster,
You are standing still, ash.
Turn, world,
glare, sun,
and let me face the end,
what is the phrase?
oh yes, blaze of glory.

quite contented

Before breakfast at midnight,
We screamed in the snow
Then had a snowball fight,
Ate at my favorite SoCo.

We made awful puns
But I shouldn't complain
They think my humor's fun
And I've something to gain

Like maybe some pounds
From the tastiest food
But my laughter astounds
Who knew life was this good?

Rainforest, waiting

I should say I'm a fire hazard
Sugared petals, flames licking
Spontaneous whirlwind of
combustible crackling
lightning-eye silhouette
tinder-dry litter piling high
tense potential energy
pounding too fast
gasoline, along my veins
rich and incendiary
I have built this world from scratch
from half-formed, orphaned emotion
new hopes and joys,
utterly flammable, butterflies
still dusted
with creation. All my nutrients
bound up in the biomass
of the canopy. I am a
rainforest, waiting, for
the one I call enemy. Will you
light the torch and free me
to rage beond the borders of
your mind
fling open your doors and
stand terrified
as if you had no idea what
a fire could destroy, of yours,
in its unutterable self-destruction.
Don't strike a match, or
do you think you can stand that
close, feel the blaze of my hate
the glow, on your face, and still
retreat unravaged to the cool of the forest.

What I was missing

Stomping my feet in doorways,
puddles slowly spreading from cast-off boots.
Joy that settles quietly in a blanket
blowing my nose into my mittens,
already soaked with snowmelt
trudging-yes- I miss trudging!
The cold, the feeling of cold
and keeping warm as an activity
the primary activity.
Something constructive to fight
Putting on the heat and the windshield wipers in my car,
a complicated dance of agency between the fog and the frost
the crack of ice in a puddle
the whole world as my playground
breathing in snow-filled air
visibly magical now
looking up into a dizzying snow spiral
tasting metal, cold blood,
a glimpse of eternity frozen
my forgotten element,
enemy that I hold close
struggle made beautiful by necessity

See

I remember climbing up into the maple tree and sitting there in its arms and feeling held by the green bowers' embrace an expansive love enfolding me hidden, invisible, green fairy of the air I was, a small thing that could climb with skinny legs dangling, an apple and a book. What else the summerhood child of pleasures? My green libraries the sundappled pages that shifted all around me with the whisper of a thousand voices, each a character and each a friend, their names and patterns known to me within the wide world of my myopic inspection
daydream self that stumbled stopped dead at every dewdrop, pebble alive in millions, little worlds in every corner framed by my own fascinated mind.

What I could learn of, eagerly I climbed, remembering not the day I marveled first, saw the leaves on the trees, unlooked-for mystery revealed, two small windows--each one eye--and worlds were opened, trees, books, everything that I could fit within the frame and always and intently press the bridged glass-rim further up my nose, if the windows were only closer I could see more, know more, peer into the very corners of the universe, tease out test answers, life answers, read what's written on the board, read what's written in the wind, stay a little longer before the great show, spend another moment, breath forgotten, lost in delicate intricacy. Be quiet enough and read far enough long enough read the spaces in between the books upon the shelves, the curves between what is now and what is storied, stored. Futures, sometimes, maybes, more windows seeing past to untold worlds. Around the next corner, or the next, inside the next cover, beneath the trunk, the shafted sunlight, if I hunch my shoulders and direct the torrent, hold my head still with both hands, I might yet find the biggest frame.

Disappearing is how you can tell you were there

Disappearing is how I can tell I was there
Fading out, I feel a sudden elation
I existed! I was material, factual,
solid matter! I will go tell all my invisible friends
and they will be jealous.