Fear.
i’m scared of spiders
and i’m petrified of love,
and you crawled up my leg
and bit me in the chest.
you left me shaking,
and i can’t even talk about it
without chills
ripping apart
my spine.
These women believe in God
like a real thing,
solid and unshakeable.
They shine with kindness
clean hair swings,
teeth white and straight.
They don’t worry
where the best produce comes from;
they carry Paul’s Market bags in the car,
and buy only the freshest, the finest.
Blue ribon lives.
Finding things was my claim to fame. Small things–
mushrooms among the mayapples. The pocket knife
in the weeds or my sister’s contact lens in leaves—panic
till found. Though littlest, I got high praise
as the best berry picker. But in school,
I couldn’t see the blackboard; from the piano bench,
the notes. My eyes were, in fact, sharp—warped—
long, myopic eyeballs with acute curves, legally blind.
Then, I was Four Eyed, not super-powered,
but near-sighted. Left to me what I knew all along:
a wide-eyed looking, an open gaze
beyond the eyes. It was the looking hard,
the full patient search done mostly by feel,
like dirty dishes–the greasy residue,
the burnt on crust that fingers find best.
I knew up close the trouble with looking and seeing:
the maybe fatal sharpness of what is found.
Can you imagine
Your day to day
Being followed
By a drumroll
Waiting for the axe to fall
Have you ever tried
To suppress your Energy
Because you see it swirling and spreading
Bumping into another’s
Who wants contact
But doesn’t know from who
And their Energy withdrawls
Indignant
“I’m sorry”
But I don’t know why
I apologize
For existing
With no intention of malice
The feeling is always fleeting
But leaves an aftertaste
A texture
That can’t be spit out
And when I was young I choked on it
For years
Until one day
I couldn’t speak
I moved like a magnet
Trying to connect to something
But I was repelled by everything I saw myself in
I’ve found personal remedies since then
Spiritual mouthwash
But everyday since
My Energy Explores
Looking for a piece of Iron
That might reach out
And won’t let go
I thought my goodbye would roll from a bitter tongue.
Instead, I put the feelings on the back burner
and brought them to a simmer with a low flame long enough
to evoke fragrant sweetness.
The last day of vacation
carries curious emotional weight.
In a matter of hours
we’ll be leaving this temporary
paradisiacal home,
trading the ocean of the gulf
for the ocean of life
we made this short-lived escape from.
Fifty-one weeks of the year
we swim in that ocean,
albeit, in all its various currents,
sometimes bound to where it takes us,
a daily riptide,
sometimes to where it throws us.
Ocean waves don’t care
who or what gets caught in them.
But even though some movements are violent
and we lose our sense of direction
when the sun sometimes sets,
the chaos is not without comfort.
My heart has always found rest there
and it hardly ever joins me
on these week long excursions
from the realities of daily life.
Two hours spend in the physical ocean,
mostly alone,
have me dreaming of a future week
where she sits in the beach chair beside me.
I won’t ever want to go back home then.
Today, I’m counting these last hours
to returning to that imperfect ocean of life
made so worth swimming in
by the simple fact
that I can find her there.
Prelude
hundreds of years of violence and supremacy
Prayer
for change, for holy vision
Song
be willing to learn the words
Scripture
God Is Love
Love God
Love your neighbor as yourself
Hymn
and her and them and he and she and they sing
Special music
listen for what is beautiful in others
Children’s moment
model for them the boldness of caring in word and deed—
adults, we need to hear this, too
Offering
see the need of others
give yourself
Sermon
can affect change if we listen and act
we must be the sermon
Song
together, we lift our voices
Benediction
we advance together, I pray
I eye perfect widths
cut strips wide enough to lay
for mulch between rows
corn & beans & tomatoes
& top with yellow
straw ahead of blessed rain.
tasks mount
errands undone
table full of work
unsorted bins and boxes
art projects await
memories and poems to write
applications to fill
connections to make
my mind scatters
anxiety flares
the weight of it all
inertia sets in
my simple life
complex-full
I open a screen
scroll past my day
but I know
work won’t be finished
without due effort
I turn off the device
select a fine hat
take one step
move a bit forward
in life’s race
I open a box
my carefree heart whines
wants to play
be patient
there’s a hat for that
on another day
Like Taos, you believed semi-arid
To be the normal state of love
For that was where yours was born,
During one of its infrequent downpours
…Oh, you poor soul, thinking the desert
Was always in bloom with blinding color.
When dry returned you raced
From scraggy pine to big sagebrush
Proclaiming it the Garden of Eden,
To you shifting dunes was her landscape.
Even Your crazy brother could see her love
Was more like the Garden of Halfway
You’d come to this place
From the sage monks of Salt Lake
Like a preadolescent ape with nothing
To do except swing from rosary beads.
You met her in the succulent show
At the National Guard Armory
Recent rain made the fleshy parts work.
In 7,300 days there were two procreations
& an occasional spooning. The morning
Of the five alarm, the firetruck blazing
By the empty bed on the sidewalk,
You could smell smoke. Flames arose.
You cracked like an egg with its yolk out
and the septuagenarian madre arrived
To put the knives away and to show you
Where the spoons were. Crazy brother
Rode out from Santa Fe with his train set
To demonstrate how in the high-desert
It takes a long while to slow up
When your’re going downhill
Your metamorphosis
Became the five-year pupa plan:
No flying trapeze
No red mustang
No roaming holiday
No breech of service
Only grim grind, school play, winking nod
& a white house in the strands of split level,
Not much Plush
But you did plenty good with the Flush.
Time past with the slow ticking of flat land
Until once again the crazy brother,
Who drug you along to Albuquerque
For games of holy volleyball.
He found the rest of his life
All you got was thrown off
A filly from San Angelo
