Trickle to the Sea

I am always afraid of mediocrity.
But if I say nothing, chance nothing,
sling nothing out into the air,

nothing will set forth
or turn colors,
peach and green and umber.

And so call, spread out, cast off silently on a river.
Earth itself needs to see
the things it grows while sleeping. 

While snipping a bowl of string beans...

While snipping a bowl of string beans,
I thought of
how your name tastes on my tongue -

- smoke and brick,
cedar chips
and coriander seed.

first love

how did i choose?
     i was so young
with you.

i opened my eyes

and yours was the first
face I saw

     it was over.



i loved you

from the day i was born



and the moment i saw your face
i knew you were true.

Easter 2013: Tallis Canon

All praise to Thee.

I am so thick with memories. It is as if
I'd never washed at all -

the mud and wet hay,
that soft fur, the kid goat's muzzle,
the gray bare trees
and cerulean sky.

Ducks guzzling in puddles,
chickens squawking,
the cow chewing stolidly,
the white mother nanny
hard and disinterested.

What happens when we grow -
do we blink in the light,
shy away, then go
and find the world too small?

Or can we somehow enter again
our mother, choose from the beginning
to give all burstingly?

To wait for months underground
and wake as freshly,
undaunted, lean and fasted,
singing greenly
what we lived for in our first undoing.

I am finding
it was safe under snow and
Almighty wings.






"All praise to Thee" and "Almighty wings" taken from the Thomas Tallis canon.

Spring Peepers

I have not looked at your face
this way in a long time.
I forgot that peaked chin,

those eyebrows asking questions,
infant delicate.

The water of your pond-brown eyes,
the slipped chisel on your nose, those
indented happy accidents.

Lips more resolute
than I remembered.



I have not heard spring peepers in so long
I almost did not notice. There are sounds now -

Red-winged blackbirds,
song sparrows, a raven picking bits

of sticks to nest with. I stopped to watch,
but he chid me, dropped them
innocently.

I left a trail of prints in the chilled mud,
spreading my toes,
hoping they'd be smiled at.

Born Today

What is a new day,
taken like a vitamin,
a fresh Q-tip,
the tang of citrus?

What are days for
except to parcel up our lives
as tidy gifts,
bombs,
and time capsules?

I wrote once,
           People shouldn't be allowed 
                              to be this angry
And another time,
          Why am I so unconscionably happy?

One day I cringe beneath the weight
of my own head's hair,
another feel the lift
of every leaf.

No wonder you named me 
secretly,
in a deep place where I could not scream
and did not want to know
what that wetness was,
dripping down my throat -
your cold hands 
pressed to my temples -

because what other 
throb than this
burns through
pores and cleanly
births me?

White Mountains

This is the

world.

Love created it.

God moved His hand here, 

over a sleeping body.

Signs pass, mountains pass. Snowy camels, crouching lions.

Perfect Nubian Dairy Goats.

The slant sun amber on the pines.

I would like to live on a mountaintop,

To turn an age you can turn over in your hand, 

that feels the same.

We repair slowly. 

I am free.

Love can unmake it.

I would like to live on a mountaintop. 

"That's where the sun touches last."

"Love made the bond. Love can break it, too."

-Terrence Malick's The New World

-Naarita Arnold-Avila