naming song #1
I have no name
today my name is Opal Bear Mother
Bear Mother Boogie
Cloud Watcher Wind Rider
a name every day I become
I have no name
today my name is Opal Bear Mother
Bear Mother Boogie
Cloud Watcher Wind Rider
a name every day I become
The way I love you is impossible to describe
The sun forever chasing the moon
Sea water crashing upon the sand
Autumn leaves drifting to the ground
Devoted
Stars twinkling against the black night sky
Petals stretching in spring air
Snow dancing across frozen ground
Fated
Water leaping into the arms of a pond
Sunlight kissing blades of sweetgrass
Soft wind whispering sweet nothings to the trees
Reverent
The way I love you is inevitable
As though it was in my nature
it rest folded just so
when I lift it from the arm I tell myself to note its shape
this gentle drape means something
so I take it up with care cover the shivering limbs
and feel my heart reach out a bit further
tenderly attentive to this borrowed place
When you tighten under pressure,
know valves are meant to release.
There are a million tender cells
begging to loosen your grip.
It’s easy to forget, how much easier it may be
to follow the pumping thumping beat.
Consciousness sees
what the sand crab sees
with its two little beady eyes
atop antennae
The sand crab gives
what it sees to God
and God, without hesitation,
whispers Thank You
A few neighbors and I were standing in the road
talking while our kids shot baskets
on one of those portable goals
you can raise as they grow.
We were chatting, encouraging the kids on,
when a large bird fell out of the sky
onto my lawn. Some kind of hawk,
it stood there screeching, flapping its wings
but unable to lift off.
I hurried inside the house and grabbed a beach towel
to wrap it in, thinking there were vets and rescues
that cared for raptors — by the time I came back to it,
the bird was dead, ridged claws clutching clumps of grass.
The neighbor who knew birds best
declared it a falcon, peregrine likely, likely juvenile.
Probably poison.
And for the first time in forty years,
I thought of my childhood friend, Frank Miles,
how there toward the end he wore a knit cap,
even on a warm spring day, to hide what the chemo
had done to him. Never grew up, never got old,
dead at age eleven, not fully grown —
how he turned to me while we sat
in the dugout watching the good players
on our team take their turns at bat, Frank,
the honorary mascot, asked through eyes
that were wiser and wetter than my own,
the one question I still don’t have an answer for.
Woman,the word between us
