Hart to Hart
A daughter is a lake Giving back the earth Trees, sky And a mirror A breath of self care A balm A smell I can make myself A son is the wind Over the lake’s still surface Where i can no longer see myself Where strange angels Beat dark wings Some planet core Gravity tugging My heart all out of shape So it can become more Than itself
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Hive
Yet another winter time for rage came and went like a bee sting. A third death taunts me lungs furred with the white plague of pneumonia, or ribs crushed on the cold shoulder of Rogue Angel a black diamond run one fetal shivering in blue storm snow, alone. Who would have known speed and yearning both hurl life to its hard edges? I smelled his scent against the single entrance yellow- green, a spring pollen no bee can resist, And me a reluctant queen with my own brood to consider. In my world no mother is royal. The drone of wage labor, one outlet from the hive with pathways pre- defined, dances stone-set. Re-dancing the pattern one hand rocking the cradle, mourning sleep with errant sun salutations. Even royal jelly won’t ward off the loneliness of love spent exhaustion Where are my sisters? Who made this hive so solitary? When can I sweep the purple fields of swaying lupine? Is that my toddler or yours humming herself to sleep alone, in the careful hexagon folds of her well-tended crib dreaming of her own chance at the perilous throne?
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Body English
for Peter Howard It’s what he said, edging his orange Rossignols into the white shoulder of the mountain a perfect cut our breaths hung in sub-freezing clouds words unformed as he spoke: body english. It’s a spell, we knew magic that lets you dance with the mountains, runes in the snow also that he drew with the tip of his black ski pole: overlapping S shapes nested like spooning lovers. We all leaned in knowing gravity is no kind lover it’s the stuff of planets, supernovas and black holes tugging us down the valleys tumbling us forward fast enough for present to overtake future for risk and pleasure to merge. The sorcery of the cosmos and the mountain he explained was child’s play the moment when the parent lets go of the swing and the child must find her center, her rhythm, and her core power pumping legs back and forth gathering her own gravity in defiance of both abandonment and acceleration of bodies much larger than her own. It means, we decided remembering some younger heart we had lost somewhere along the way before fear and courage split into opposite charges like quarks when love was a gesture of […]
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Beech Hill Hike
one day hiking up Beech Hill, i saw that I was walking through not a lush, fertile forest, but a ruin, an archeology of hurt, and saw that part of that hurt was in my own inability to notice the damage done, to mourn the greater loss I could barely see Life in rows along Eroded rock walls whispers Of recent farms, recent By tree life, not ours. Stray sentinels uncut by Relentless plowing, they hold Memory of their own losses A howling of lonely roots Some humans hear only in their blood, if at all Those humans were land Hungry, indentured generations Finally free on new land No time to discern the beech, chestnut and blueberry And those who tended A wild abundance with gentler hands and hearts. Old world roots of pain and loss and desire drove deep into the rock and resurfaced on new land. New walls rose from split earth Potatoes and corn ached toward the sun Strange new life in rows. Now, we tramp amidst the crooked stone walls, feeling for our own Lost roots, aching down through thin Soil into the whispering Rock, trying to find the way back home.
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Bucks
What distinguishes Rex rabbits is their tolerance for human touch Our Rex is colored like a buckskin pale fur soft as clouds ears and paws dark as thunder He's a charmer What I know is the lively touch of untamed bucks just in the chinck of living When foundations crack and splinter there he is, someone I haven't seen for awhile Walking down the path arms outstretched like an old lover what he recognizes is and is not me
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Revision
for Wes McNair This is not a poem, yet Just one form gratitude Can take A little tip of the heart as Though it were a hat Some visible gesture You might recognize Perhaps the heart has Many languages Mist on a morning lake Muting the low lullaby Of a lone loon or The bent red back Of the two colored bolete Raising its upright masculine Dance of death and life. Whose heart is this anyway? When I hear the loon When I bend to the mushroom Whose heart is beating? Clearly I am not alone. They too are lonely For better company A tip of the heart Now and then Some ancient gesture Of the hips and hands Bodies still in love Beyond their own flesh And voices creaking Open again in song When the power runs Out of AirPods Under unmoving hats. The language I’d forgotten Came to me in the Pauses and spaces Around the words The gesture you Recognized and shared With us all. Long ago, when the mills razed The beeches and oaks, when The red and yellow boletes ceased Their fertile dance and the Beating between us all grew Quiet, Keats made a mushroom […]
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Thunder Water
For Vera It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden Within each lake is a powerful being, my native friend told me. When it thunders, she said, collect the water in small pots and glasses everywhere you can, and drink. While catching storm water from a raging sky, in blue and black and white pots, I swam naked in the dark cove afraid and at home, gulping lake and sky as I swam. There is a way to open to the chill of autumn water a cold quotidian greeting of skin and shifting thermoclines as dry leaves rustle in the wind. There is a self just beyond our reach In the wild of the waters that beats as we approach. What I felt, then saw, under water was swift and black and gone. For the moment, I stopped breathing and rose. I was ready and I waited, still as morning. A small wind tugged at the dark silk of the water and in the ripple a loon emerged turned, and caught me with its pliocene red eye. Why are they so aloof, I asked my friend. […]
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