You asked for wind,
you got gale force–
even if you petitioned
for threat of rain, mostly.
This morning, the mulch
delivery is delayed, branches
brought down yesterday.
This morning, you discover
what your spellwork cost:
The dragonfly bird bath
broken into a coven
of pieces. You
had the nerve
to conjure wind.
Nature didn’t leave
you unanswered.
The sky is a menagerie
of birds like islands
murmuring in solitude
but no feathers touch
the cornflower expanse;
each is a wisp, a ghost
of baby powder
but less
tangible;
pareidolia
(as ever)
my mind making sense
of ambiguous stimuli,
merely cumulous
dreams in the day.
Here is Roald Dahl’s rhino
with wings, drifting purposefully
amid one-bird flocks
to trample an orphan
from an unlived
life.
There is an owl, and wise
to the coming storm,
rising higher as I watch
his witchcraft expand
with gravity.
And then there’s the phoenix,
curled beak plumage afloat
like an angler’s illumination,
distracting, distracting,
wings pressed tight
in a dive,
in a dive…
does he come to divine
or devour?
In 1977, just after my first birthday,
an astronomer discovered what would become the first of a collection of space objects
called centaurs.
And because astronomy loves mythology as much as I do,
this icy hybrid asteroid-comet became known as Chiron:
the tragic centaur teacher of the ancient Greeks,
a symbol of our core wounds
those we work a lifetime to heal.
Astrologers – astronomy’s hippie cousins –
posited that the phenomenon often dubbed “midlife crisis”
could be an effect of Chiron’s 49-51 year trip around the signs of the zodiac.
The majority of us will experience only one return of Chiron to our natal sign:
a transformational, revelatory period
when things come together or fall apart (or both)
when we begin to heal our oldest wounds and transmute them into lessons
when our past and our future collide, and divide.
My Chiron return begins today, at age 49 years and 266 days,
at the comet’s tail end of the most spectacularly explosive episode
of my life.
All color and stardust
still reeling from the impact
I can see a little me
barefoot in her driveway
looking up at the stars
and I know they are the same stars
but also
that they couldn’t look more different to me now.
As a child I gazed up with all wonder and inexplicable possibility
Now
I know what’s out there
and, charting my path,
I’m returning to her dreams
and etching them into the night sky.
6/19/26
Even as a teenager
Who knew?
Her ability
to talk
on the phone
& track
every one
—plus
fearlessness
telling others
what to do,
who knew?
—the bliss
that skills for
executives
looked like this
Constellation Freckle between my breasts
began as a melanated heart-shaped label at my birth,
a grave marker from a past life,
the faded scar from a fatal wound or grief.
The cluster began its quiet separation
from pop to pointelism to abstract art,
Sharpie-drawn dots on an expanding balloon,
individuating as the volume of breath and blood increased.
After skin-saving mastectomies, the surviving freckles stand
in ruined monument, a rubbled pyramid of metamorphic rocks
in the valley between reconstructed breasts
a rune to release and bind the past.
When I die, I hope they reconvene like magnets,
vibrating in one last muddy embrace over my quieted heart,
a patch over frayed threads straining across my chest cavity.
May their next rebirth appear in the shape of a sword.
Every day I’m asking myself
…is this a poem?
And I’ve come to notice
A poem is not somewhere you go
A space in your brain that you sit
Like a comfortable chair
Oh it is important to walk
without having a reason
minus the counting of steps
Yes you can add a sidequest,
seeing the pre-twilight gold spread itself
around the oldest tree scape in town-
Watching the birds come and go-
fresh air, subjects of beauty
to gather up as ready nourishment
yes, your physical body needs it
your mental body needs it
but there’s more happening than that
Shall I call it openess? Remembering?
Experiencing the dream within the dream
Spontaneous fermentation
Your village neglected
to teach you how to ride drag.
Eating enough dust
to develop an appetite for
Caring for the weakest and slowest
by gently nudging
Stragglers back into the herd
where they will not be
Picked off by wolves and rustlers.
No one ever gifted you
a length of rope
Spending hours
throwing loops at everything
Discovering the
geometry and physics of patience while
Learning how easily one
can break something fragile with a
careless placement of that loop.
No range boss chose you
to ride for their outfit
So you could learn
the language of the herd
And that your hands, seat, and eyes
Signal your truth
more than words.
Is this why you are
so lonely, so violent, so broken?
