Posts for June 5, 2023 (page 10)

You are breath    
made of the finest woven light    
the mouth of the dark with its shiny moon teeth   
You will not always be lost    
There are always flowers      
for the land is a speaker  
of the worship places    
Story will always find you  
take you over the edge    

Someone is always leaving 
You grow tired of the heartache
The heart is a fist
caught in a knot of regret
Memory, pieces of gold confetti,   
opens all the doors of our hearts    
a way to dance through the heavy mess    
In the immense house of beauty and pain     
each of us is a wave in the river of humanity    
Make an alliance     
with its thousand arms     

You must be friends with silence to hear    
winds becoming words    
the raw stalks of beginning    
a singing tree   
every cell of creation opening its mouth  
to sing us into love    
like a seed falling where there is  
a song emerging from the floods   
In the song of beyond, how deep we are     
in the fog of hope

The last time we visited your home,
before the retirement center where you finally slowed to card games and singing in the halls,
we sorted the sacks. 

Each of us carefully examined the hoarded treasures –
bags of used panty hose you wanted for future crochet projects,
bags of hangers from dry cleaners,
and bags of cleaned and folded wonder bread wrappers. 

Grandma, momma, and I sorted different sections of your home – while you tried to justify their remaining. 
Grandma – worked outward from the small pathway which led from the front door to your chair.
Momma – dug through gift wrapping, mice traps, and old hats left from all four of your deceased husbands.
I – explored the slopped decaying spiral staircase with mis-matched planks –
some smaller than the length of my shoe,
leading to more sacks on the second floor –
Lots more sacks, a mattress, and piles of clothing higher than my 10-year-old form.      

What drove you to need so much? 
Did it start outside with the rose garden that turned to bramble covering the backyard?
Or did the demon fear take root during hard times.
Your life encompassed so many, so much.
The upheaval of the San Francisco Earthquake, WWI, WWII, the Great depression, the loss, one after another, of four husbands.
Unable to evade the destruction, loss, and hunger –
each neglected need replaced with trinket, hoarding to suppress the pain.     

A mouse scurried across my summer sandal and then the excess,
I ran for the stairs and fell to the dirty kitchen floor. 
peering upwards to the leaning stacks of newspapers threatening to intomb –
Unraveled by how one tears down a house from the inside out,
My heart hurt for how empty you must have been. 

For ten degrees cooler

a tall tree at forest’s edge

near the parking lot.

The world turned
sideways just a little,
like salt crunching
between my teeth,
lke eating hotdogs
at the beach,
like finding a pearl
and cracking your teeth.  

I clipped my wings
just a little
maybe so I’d stay
close to home,
not get high enough
to sore among
stratus clouds,
dry and thin
like old skin
you can see
through, cords pulsing
like chemtrails excreted
across the sky.  

My breath scorched
every word, just a little,
every word ever spoken
while the children
listened, just a little,
burnt tongues
alivating over
breakfast sweet-buns.  

I swallowed them,
all the way down
my golden pipes,
and flapped
until my wings
were strong enough
to lift my feet
off the ground,
just a little.  

I know it’s elder abuse
And it shouldn’t be funny
But when I saw the president
take a fall at the Academy

I imagined Tim Conway
shuffling across the stage an inch at a time

But how I tickled myself the most
was imagining Carol Burnett
as Dr. Jill

sun drops behind dark
treeline   empty vivid sky
pink  orange  lapis  black

This is only a test.
Sympathetic system sympathetic to triggers of silence.
Flight in the fleeting face of fear,
Fighting for control of the bus careening down the road in your driverless kid fears.
Legs come up short.
Alone.
Abandoned.
Forgotten.

STOP.

Go to your happy place.
Dappled green sunlight on palm-sized leaves,
Crunch underneath moss and barking trees.
Breathe in deep the damp gravel and wormy dirt.
No cows or demons of doubt can harm you here.

You are safe.

You are secure.

You are loved and not forgotten after all this time.
This only a test.

people are much more interesting when you don’t categorize them
but you’re a dandy,
it made me nostalgic for things that never happened and only existed in the moment;
                        when we shared cotton candy

the way they wrote in the beginning, when he was away, bridging a continent and ocean, mixes their old love languages now to reach him across two countries and a separating sea, languages she struggles with, wants to be sure of, to get the right words in the right place, cariño, ven a bailar conmigo, I can teach you the steps you don’t know, y me puedes enseñar tus secretos, I miss your embrace, your whispers in the night, te amo, te quiero, and in time his reply arrives on foreign paper under a foreign stamp, equally careful in which words accompany which of the many different heartbeats he has named as hers, if and if-ever, pero yo no sé mañana, I barely know today, pero yo se como soñar, of you, of us.   

I want to believe in miracles so
I look at the stems of my orchid
in early morning light, my eyes
not yet adjusted to day, still
bedded and closed. I mean

the pedicels from which each bloom
grows, off the main inflorescence.
And I name the descending colors
of these thin thoughts in my
full and earnest mouth:

forest green
olive green
spring green
yellow green
& cream

It pays to be specific. To record the
stillness. Like a prayer on a roasary.
Each color a bead announcing
the mystery of what pushes forth
despite our best attempts at despair.