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.

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.

Forsythia

On the almost frozen ground

The young spring up, the old fall down.

O tender, tender, tender,

Why do you bloom in November?

Why do you bloom in November?

We Are Separate Flours

Grow me a garden of this kind of nothing,
Draw me a picture of this kind of fine.

Tell me why I can't sneak back inside
After playing school in the yard until midnight.

You hear me scratch at the window, and turn your head.
We are separate flours.
Together, we'll make bread.

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.

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.

In His Earth

The three of us slid out of Claire's car, I the only one unused to the growing plot,

The rising action, of this place.

He emerged and met us, slapped their hands, and shook mine,
and we stood in a square, talking.

Light, sweet conversation mellowed us as we faltered into words, the creamy air of the last stirring day of September awing us a little. It was almost as if our feet were planted under those old trees, by the silver car.

In time the word was spoken and we made a beginning, taking hoes in hand and two of us baring four feet to weed between the rows. We shifted irrigation hoses, spread ourselves out and cut into soft, caky earth with rectangular tools on rods.

I salvaged forgotten red onions scattered in the paths and hidden between lettuce and small greens. In tight rows, we stooped and kneaded soil with our hands. I knelt and let it saturate my knees. Vital odors permeated the air, clean in the unity of their composting growth, like sweating crowds singing praise and turning fresh. In His earth our minds turned to Him, and in both the clumps we formed we naturally talked of God.

The germ of division molded into mottled feet of clay. Metal met worm, words lilted across minds; conversations linked and un-linked as we stepped over lines. 

When the work was done, we crossed to the tents with their tables of ripened tomatoes, bright-colored crates littering the ground like lobster traps, and wagon loads of dark round watermelon and squash.

He generously offered that we carry home a harvest.

He leaned against the trailer bed edge, and cut up pink flesh into wedges, handing them around as we gathered. The thick brown earth on my hands was drying into dust. I smacked off a layer and ate, and watched the dripping juice stain my dirty hands darker where it fell. The seeds crunched and I swallowed most of them.

For most of an hour we savored food God had made, and laughed at the way we threw rinds, or fooled ourselves. When honesty caught the conversation, it came out smoothly, like breathing. Like I'd want it to be: bottled things aged carefully to perfection, but served liberally.

Good has power, and gentle can be rough and tumble, and clear blue has depth like the sky. There are new shoots even while things die. And knowledge doesn't make you wise.

As I carried my bursting paper bag back to my room, I bent and smelled the rich, sweet, varied scents of autumn's abundance, lent to me unexpectedly on a single rare Friday. I could not keep from smiling, and laughed in the shower.

The House of Blessing

We have prayed behind trees,
We have danced on young grass, young snow, in secret,
We have run barefoot on rocks in the rain.

We have met quietly in libraries,
We have staked ourselves in hallways
We have shaken with laughter, ached with tears.

We have watched a woman clutch men's hands and fling her body in a wheel of war,
Like a shot bird whirling, rolling on a road,
Like music, like a thrown stone, but "light as phyllo dough."

We have sung in the night,
We have talked until early,
We have sung in the morning, and made bread from memory.

We have carried tables up stairs,
Tangled fingers in sunny hair,
Un-knotted knots as we wished.

I have scrubbed behind closed doors, 

Told stories while stories were stored,

Eaten from the surface of the world.

You have woven home in close quarters,
Made beauty in a beater house,
Greeted change with grace.

You have blessed, and I have been blessed. Amen.

Red

Raining rhythm of piano keys
Like children's fingers on my collar bone
Like ripples in the water, where bleeding underbellies of lily pads sprout stems arching up like portals into worlds.
This is a creation where colors converge in soul speech. Where crimson sighs quietly in spreads of green. A pen cap, a candy wrapper, holly berries make me stand still, hardly, barely breathing. Spilling out at last, the one half-leaf pleads guilty for me as I pass. Where did my heart learn scarlet?
Darting from the path, I cannot hold my ribs from gasping laughter, desperate to believe vermilion asks for what I hope it asks.

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.