I Am Here

I am nestled in my blankets with the fresh and heavy dampness of my hair
around me,
Hearing the refrigerator hum, and the ticking of the pink-rimmed clock that I've had almost for as long as I can remember.
So those old memories pulse like the colors in my closed eyes,
And tingle faintly, like the numbing roughness of my singed tongue --
How I used to scribble in my notebooks,
                                                  I am here
And longed to be remembered for each moment as I lived it. God, put this in Your photo album, tuck it in Your pocket. Let me just say I recognize I am. Right now.
And tell me how You savor days like candy in the corner of Your mouth, for the long ride home.

Maybe I desire because I can't understand, or maybe very transience is beauty.
Maybe I just want to know that I can be delighted in, as I delight in You, this wonder.
One thing is clear: time is only lengthened by points of meaning.

The Yard In Winter

Face down to resuscitate the earth. Breathe the frost away, smell the fertile spring awakening under warm breath. The milky bitter grass. The scalpy smell of roots, the death. The life,
And the sweet content of the ground beneath, heaving like a chest in sleep, and me upon it.
Resting, a child on its mother's breast. The heartbeat of the world beneath my cheek. And gleaming
In the skies, there is my father, and through his eyes there winks the spark of stories. There connect and intersect the paths of slaves to freedom.
Follow me north.
Did I know each nest? And now I kiss your neck, your fingers, you who whisper, Shall we say love us more? Or love us less? Which shall pain you more? I sigh into your dry and smoky skin. Your sleeves are fringed with lichen. And I am leaving you already...
For the same sky under different branches.

And I said You never change. But change the way we understand. To know You.

Hunt

Lisping on the edge of words unspoken,
And shifting from one tender foot to the other.
In the darkness, I suck condensing air with a shallow gasp.
I am hiding because I want to be found.

If I plunge my hands into the softness of your stomach, will I find you real?
Are you only a silhouette on the damp grass, testing sounds and fighting tears?

Candle I

What am I waiting for?
I am waiting for you to come down
On me, like the sun on Vermeer's milkmaid, (be starlight)
On me in my frumpy flannel nightgown,
Kneeling in my room tonight.

I'm home. You're home, sister. Cause a stir at the dinner table with the band
on your left hand ring finger (tease me that way; I forget what it feels like).
Take pleasure in collecting thoughts while picking meat, washing dishes. Blow out the candle. He's coming (could I light it again?), breathe in His fragrance with the flame.

Unpack and explain to yourself why you need all these things. Whisper, "what freedom in a room like Vincent's!" Bury your face in your grandmother's quilt: it's no crime, but a thing to be held lightly.
What is gifting this year? What can be made from my hands but a patchwork of half-thoughts and a quavering love, a few colors, a hint of peppermint and pine? What of the children enamored by bright plastic for a week, and a string of lights?

Sometimes I feel this life is too offal to be right. Is this bowl of red meat worth it, after sloughing so much white?
Our jolly old record plays, I look at the gleaming bulbs in the window. Something did happen here, in this world where someone was telling earthy jokes and someone holding out one more day, to see You born.

In Trutina

Lucy and Schröder in a cardboard box,
Herman and his dogs,
Neanderthals.

Andy Warhol offers me saltwater taffy under the barn door.
Will the absurdity of this moment induce me to succumb?
Yellow hay is strewn around his shoes.

Quivering in balance,
Between pungent printed pages and a bundle of letters, wrapped in diaphanous white, from four and a quarter years of patience.

Wrapped in blinding white,
I will carry a rock in each hand,
And climb this fragrant summit,
Damp in the scents of myrrh, cinnamon, cane, and cassia.


"In Trutina": Carl Orff

Umbrella

It was easier for me. I've been learning floating anyway, so relaxing was an exercise in life. Resting was a prayer in itself (but I admit to thinking how funny it would be if I held the ceiling handle, like our mother does).

I wondered if you felt carried as I did, or if you felt the pressure of causality, the burden of decision in a complicated way. Your voice sounded flushed. Nevertheless, we made it safe.

-

However do they drive so bravely? There are several things I am stepping out to learn. I am climbing in behind this wheel with real fears from all that I have (never) done before. Signal, Merge.
Single, Merge.

-

Rain pounds our faces faster and harder than we are prepared for. City lights blaze over black water like music and clinking glass. We taste wine on our lips. Or maybe it is blood, from biting them. A white flash - and the danger is behind us. We have passed.

Maybe, I hope, you understood,
That as I sang the words of those songs,
I meant them for you.

In some ways they were written for us,
For last night on the ride back.



Credits: "Umbrella" by The Innocence Mission.

Penned Again

Glittering like bits of blowing tinsel, the stars gathered in a patch of
midnight sky, the Pleiades one bright smudge against the darkness.
This will be a brief meeting, a one quick feeding in the lawn before being
penned again.
- Eat of the earth's richness while you can -
But my plate is too full: feed my soul.

Press my eyes closed. I will feel it is you by your fingertips.
Hold me as tight as I hold you. Tighter. Your bark is rough on my lips.

Branches design to blind me as I run,
(Run? Stumble, as inebriated as I am with the sap of stars)
Cold mud numbs my spinning feet to the point of pain.
I will not will not stop until I fly, or fall. It has begun.
I will not linger at the threshold. I will run down the aisle to your arms.

Two Coins

My lips aren't close enough,
My mouth, my throat, my ribcage...
-I'm wishing it was safe to sleep outside-
...I cannot swallow this into my
Heart.


1.
You tuck my arm in yours, fondly,
And guide me firmly through a crowd I can almost see -
Stifling in a different way.
I smiled, surprised to realize I might have been afraid.


2.
It was the naturallest thing in the world, the way you slowly recognized me, smiled. Our talk was smooth as the awkward unpolished good can be. But it ended just as naturally, reached its fresh end, and left me wishing differently.  What I meant to be a gift became a trade, and a gift the other way. You gave me more before I could object. You left, and I could not help feeling cut out from a catalogue, posing softly by the corner until you returned.
Conscious affectation of unselfconsciousness. Relaxation. Shuffle again.


You have your mother's eyes, your father's face,
And a strange way of being brother, ever loving everyone
In a way that I have yet to understand, without mistakes. 


Rejoice with me, I have found my almost-idol under the table
In the dark, groping over a filmy floor and squinting down sideways so a ray might glint on the surface.
It was vouchsafed, and by a gracious grace. The shadow on the stairs went down.
What You grant I will take, only not my will, but Thine.


I am left in the frost with two warm coins.
What do you live for?
All these songs have been heard before. What will make them live?
When there is nothing new to say, say what is.

Draw Me A Picture of This Kind of Fine

With you, it's like being continually in love with the world.
Are these the eyes that you see with?
You love the light of the morning, the deep dark arms of the night,
The steam in your cup of tea, the texture of tree bark.
Are we blind in love? Or is it then that we finally see
The truest true of things?

Let me only walk awhile with you so the sound of wind's fondlings makes up our silence.

You baptize your hands in a bucket of hot soapy rags. You are quiet and alive as morning sunlight.
You speed along streets as a bringer of peace, on your bike.
You write music in lamplit corners while the rest of us sleep.
You come back later to make sure I'm alright.

Let us breathe deep the delicate scents of time,
To remember later when we are grown too old for journeys,
And can only remember life.

Mashing

We are young, passionate, and carried by a bass beat booming.

Yet I want to jostle past these gyrating bodies to the chilly damp trash dump for a while, smell the cold stink of waste rather than the too warm, too arousing stink of sweat and breath and human energies. This mobbish delight is blinding. I catch my breath and imprint the quiet on my ears the way I imprinted caught glances on my mind in dancing. 

Makes me want to laugh, the way I try hard to keep myself bound while losing myself to movement, to music. Forget without forgetting the real true pure in the stupid, stupid, stupid. What do I want to prove? That my body can move like anyone's? That I'm not afraid to be wild, to be free, to laugh in a crowd of costumed students shouting "Friday night!"? That I can be free in what may amount to slavery? Truly free to sway/jive/bounce for joy in a dance of sugar-high, this-is-what-fun-is-supposed-to-be?-young-people, dance the dance my little brother taught me, lose sexy to silly and be drawn to raise my hands high, not to celebrate youth but to plead violently, meekly, for Jesus in the dark ceiling untouched by disco lights. 

This makes me smile and press bandages on our arms, when the crowd boom boom booms and takes your money.

I can't stay for the next song. Just let me walk home slowly, letting the sleet beat against my hot face, allowing my numb feet to linger in chilled puddles, to only want to feel that clean sting. 

Can't help murmuring "forgiveness" to the lamp-lit trees overhead. These are they who rejoice in being just what you made.

In a quiet, dim room now, press my lips on those smooth, smooth pages, waiting open on my bed. Egypt was glad when they left. 

Bruised Leaves

I.

Kneaded, pounded, steamed, thumbed,
Pica for tree bark or the flesh of my arm,

The crackling of oil, the spitting of fat,
The splatter of rain on the tempered glass.

You won't mind my voice if I sing quietly,


Rosemary, laurel, lemon, thyme,

Balsam, yarrow, yew.

II.

I have blistered my arm with my own little mouth,

And left bite-marks along it in childhood.

I have nothing but skin to hold myself in,
At least leaves have release, when they blood.

You won't mind my arms if I hold you lightly,

Rosemary, laurel, lemon, thyme,

Balsam, yarrow, yew.

III.

Tie up my ankles and hang me, after,
I flower, aromatic, from attic rafters.

I've waited two years if I've waited an hour,

To rake where I'll nest, to bring lark song and laughter.

You won't mind my leaves if I love you rightly,

Rosemary, laurel, lemon, thyme,

Balsam, yarrow, yew.

Even

Cockles and mussels, cochlea and muscles, sinews of serpents and the lithe forms of flowers. Sinister spikes at head-height surprise eyes stupefied by color.

A snake I killed myself by accident

On accident,

On Occidental door frames squeezing tight enough to crush its rippling spine, its supple scales, to glaze its eyes for a final shed,

of life.

I placed it, gently, on my window sill, covered it with paper, to think upon the ledge of death and the tender give and sway of life on this iron sphere, this sponge, of earth. 

This world is a warring place

Where which is real? The lullaby or the threat on the other side of the locked door, the folding of family laundry, or the rinsing of blood off the hands?

Press each heat-tossed sock a moment longer to your belly.

What can I offer but one clear bird-call in field where no one stops to hear,

Or in a forest where no one can?

What can a woman do, in the end, against the hardened face of a man?

The Ends

Sometimes I can trace to the ends of my hair,
To younger years, when I danced with my blanket wrapped around my back,
When I asked for stories from outside bathroom doors.

Today I read aloud from the other side of a shower curtain,
And I danced in the edges of a pond reflecting the moon,
With a shawl around my shoulders, my feet plashing softly.

The shadows of trees tell me I am old,
And the moon tells me more:
I am not wrong to love and be drawn,
Maidenly, to aspire to tender hopes.

Snapdragon Featherdown

One pine tree casts an astonishing shadow halfway across the lawn-mown grass - This is our backyard for four years or three and a half -
And I run in it, back and forth,
Touching the dry grooved bark each time I reached it,
Once or twice planting a kiss,
Wishing I knew how to cartwheel,
Blissful in the damp of the evening, watching serene stars slide behind certain traveling clouds.

I am frightened by the refulgence of my own heart
When it is worn thin to nothing but a vessel to hold treasures in.
I laugh and laugh at myself for laughing,
And laugh at myself for wanting to be seen laughing
By someone who might understand.

Well, we will share this vessel together. You sharing me, and me sharing You,
Breaming the bottom of our boat
So the light shows through.

A Plentid Day

A wren, under a Maxfield Parrish midnight sky,

Breathed on beatifically by the wild sea breeze,

And bathed in the glow of a half-bright, bridal moon,

Very silent, very shy.

Brown birds wear a bold face, smoke gold pipes, dwell in cedar houses.

Imagined inadequacy bleeds into reality.

Autumn and the call of wild geese are far ahead, and may not come with September. 

I have never loved summer until today.

Did I forget to follow the lavender, the rose, the two-day’s four-hundred-sixty-seven stella doras in their full-out happy, happy, love of being alive? Did I lose delight in blue? I want the eighteen sailboats in one patch of cove, the litter of visitors on the rocks, to mean as much to me as stillness and the cleanliness of all that is not human. 

You win me over, you love that I thought I had understood, that I wanted to deserve, that I feared that I could lose by being honest.

An irritatingly bad haircut. Reminds me of my pride, and so I am able to listen. I may be comfortable cold, but I decide.

Charles Wesley, Charles Wallace, the 9^th of 150 copies, thimbled cheeks, a honeyed right ear healing.

Paint, each stroke and line the longing of an unmet desire, a waiting, a patience, a pulling out of stiffened wooden drawers, and so blank paper.

But I have sweat and warm breath that fogs up the window.

I'll let violin complaints explain my spirit to a listening heaven. I still want to dance on the floor. 

The astounding turnip is imprinted with my fingertips.

I'll sweep under the table in the morning.

Get Up From Your Bed of Powdered Ice

Get up from your bed of powdered ice

You produce of the island, stretched lean and pruned in Pensacola,

Pressed down, shaken, and released in Pennsylvania.

Get up from your dreams of carrying your Mother

Who first began to carry you in Texas

And listen to your sister whisper “church yourself” in sleep.

Shake off your sore, your lame, your heavy lashes longing for the sea.

Feel the sunrise in your tired bones,

Refuse the flutter, but feel the sap of spring. 

4:42 AM, November 21, 2010

Who is committing suicide tonight?

Or why else was I aroused to stir my bed of four hours

To pace the halls, to the see the children safe asleep, as an “anxious mother full of anxious love”?

Hall lights greeted me like an ill-timed rooster, bright and brazen then as they would be twelve hours later. “If a man loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning…”

But this is no curse, this wakefulness, this restlessness.

It bespeaks of a thinning skin, a Ghost, and a responsive heart.

Glad to be assured, I glided back. Not to bed, but to be aware beneath a desk lamp, on a leather chair.

A few short days, and I myself will be hovered over, will lay my head on living-room pillows with the properties of peaches, wet cornstarch, and alligator hide.

Then I’ll be inside the arms that taught these arms the embrace they now are known for by my friends.

There I’ll smell fresh bread, the must of a barren chimney, the clean hot steam of the dishwasher as he hums during his morning shower.

There I’ll be at once aware of both my roots and my new limbs, and will marvel how both grow together so that I will not topple.

So here, as a mist-swathed moon glances over her shoulder in reluctant farewell,

I wonder who first owned this stolen hour, and how I may return it with impunity.

Quotes:

"Oliver James," Fleet Foxes

Proverbs 27:14, NIV