Posts for June 13, 2025 (page 7)

How they remain present
absorbing, observing
whatever is–
a witness to the green world
within and around them.

What if we fall in love too often with people

And not enough with life

What if we are not falling enough in love with ourselves

But falling in love with the idea of who we are with someone else

What if we could love experiences

Such as the beauty of the morning sky as the sun rises

What if we could love more the joy that this life could bring us

If we would just invite in that love to ourselves

What if we loved ourselves so immensely

That the power and pleasure that came from that could crack a mountain in half

Pupils releasing ink onto the white of eyes

Like when seeing a shooting star against a clear night sky

How in wonder we see great magnificence

To know that a love towards others

Can be greater if we find it within

To then feel it like a rumbling earthquake

From our feet up throughout the spine

Each vertebra tickling with connection, electricity

To love such beauty around us

Like charcoal from a drawing imbedded deep

Into ridges of hardened, weathered fingertips

Like the dirt of nature’s heavenly landscape

All this splendor I can never have with another

For I can share all this beauty

The experience that is life

But the love I have for it

I can truly hold up close

To my wide-open heart

Ball it up to carry with me

This love for me so that I can

Love all that is greater than myself

the places that swell our hearts:
the swooping of an owl’s wings deep in the forest,
a bed of damp moss and pale tinted ferns  
unfolding their holy script,  
the mercy of sunlight stippling through the trees,  
branches that hold so much  
shaped like wishbones  
licking the sky,  
rivers that bend  
singing a song of clay  
brimming with secrets,  
the ancient pool of water deep down in the current  
writing down the poems in the middle of the night,
the aching tenderness of  
leaning my whole body into  
her voice,  
soft vowels flowing  
in the key of tenderness,  
kin to sea rhythms and leaf music.

No one knows what will happen next.
There’s an urgency inside us  
to think of a way forward,  
a way of listening back  
into the redolent darkness,  
the mouth of a great sorrow,  
believing that  
to crack open  
this broken world,
a brittle bread,  
is a kind of prayer.

Push back the gloom.
We are connected  
in the thick womb of time.  
Look at each other until we see   
the sources of light that come through us.  
Let it honey your mouth  
like the drone of delirious bees.  
Recite from the book of trembling,  
the keen knife blade flash of revelation,  
where the heavy lifting happens.

The world is beautiful,
humming us anew each day
from cradle to coffin,   
with great tender radiance
speaking our names  
into the book of intentions
and the delicate petals of our ears—
portable light to be drunk by us.  

There are kinds of joy that can save us.
Oh, let me take it in,  
the promise of connection,  
coming undone with astonishment, with reverence—  
a bell waiting for its chime.    

~  Cento poem, including the title, from lines/ phrases of essays in Robert Vivian’s All I Feel Is Rivers and William Woolfitt’s Eyes Moving Through the Dark  

I can not live so widely dispersed
my love  my care  my attention
thinned by the invention of flight
the connection of technology

these capitalist dreams from which we survey our surroundings
from within this pot we declare the water just fine
even as our very being boils away
we claim great strides at reaching these achievements of life span

when will we turn and see 
its true intention   
a health span

this poem
        this writing
                       this life
all works in progress

stories for the telling
         stories been done
songs for the singing
         songs done sung

in one version you appeared
     shy smile like a flower
     said “hello,” pianissimo
warmly clear-eyed then

in later version you give my
     fingers fragile squeeze
     lie quietly as grass sleeping
eyes clear once again

in passing

Cellphone vibrates me from sleep, from dreams, trembling
on side table, anchored by tautly-stretched cord.  It shakes,
threatening, predicting, portending  
                                                                  a fall

to the floor
before I can hold it
in my hands:                     

                         First thought of the day:  Your photo in the glass—
The one you took against green of grass behind your house, avocado
laced with gold against your torso wrapped in hunter-green.  Caramel
latte of your wrists & neck, lips like dusty, Easter rose
pressing through softest soil. 

                                                     You are everything of the earth, memory
of salt skin on my tongue, stability & solidity
pressed, pressing back, against me, spicy scent
of musk & coconut & summer berries.  I crash
like waves against you, crush the sweet nectar
til it flows.  I, too, am salt, you say, but not of the earth—
of the seas, storms over frantic waves in smoky-blue
eyes sweeping you out where feet no longer touch
                                                                                             the bottom.

Dive deep enough & you, too, are there; shattered shell
& mantle shifting, quaking, sand beneath my flow.  We are
both out of our depths & language collapses into metaphors
that fight definition, spirits groaning in lost languages
of longing.  You’ve lost sight of the coast & I
                                                                                am boiling.

Somewhere, lost in the eddy of intimacy, beyond frustration
or hurt or anger of the past, your past or my past or our
more recent moments of doubt & fear—somewhere before
& after seismic collision of cultures, uncertainty of words
pregnant with misunderstanding, singeing fires that always
smoldered in the hearths of our chests—what we have,
what we’ve found, all we are becomes perpetual
aftershock
of recognition— 

                                   Time & space contract, contracting—birth pains
in the darkness shivering, shuddering, in reverse, eternally
returning to the beginning; when waters under the sky
were gathered & given name; when dry ground appeared,
& everything, everything seen that was seen was called
good.

           We are genetic remembrance.  We are
formed of the land & the sea. We are
all creation & vibration & exhalation
of relief in the passing of pain.   

We are the bruise that love left behind; we are
not the pain itself—but the mark that remains

of rebirth.

What do I want with you?
days of wonder
the certainty of tides
to be seen
a sudden flash of light

no matter how slowly they fell
squeezing from a stone
only the weight of the rope
never stops at all
but we working

our bodies, ripe as avocados
Big dangerous
Fluttering inside
One agrees to ask for nothing
No matter how loud

would you learn the spells
That spark
what can become
new techniques for the healing of the wound
teach me to never bend again

This place could be beautiful, right?
let it be
Fine then, I’ll take it,
do the best we may
trying to—hope.

Note: A poem found in this collection of hopeful poems

For you, Mór-Rioghain  

How do I survive each orbit unscathed?
No angelic visitations invite holiness into my bed
or to my meager meadow. One crow, an acolyte,
grips my fence and evaluates. Who worships
at the foot of the towering fir up the road,
this crow or me?  

Day washes vision in white light.
Perched on my porch, I flip through the news in my palm,
read of hypocrites suddenly bitten by rancor.
They ruffle false feathers yet ignore pleas from constituents.
I disbelieve pseudo-seraphic senators.  

I petition the fence-fixed passerine to raise one foot,
to sign a benediction, a ward for safety.
My curiosity has become carrion within this pandemic anxiety –
to dig dirt alone in my garden,
to communicate with my neighbors by waving but no closer.  

Then I shut and latch my door
to escape judgement in the crow’s eyes.

The word is sacred and the pen is sacred.
The paper is sacred.
The graphite is sacred.
The ink is sacred.
The sacred eraser erases the sacred mistakes.
The language is sacred and it created all the other sacred.
As was known to the dusty scribes of Hammurabi.
As was known to the Quetzal feathered priests of the Jaguar God-King of Tikal.
As was written on the ink stained hand of Guido de Arizzo.
The quarter note is sacred.
The longa and the breve are sacred.
The rest is made in sacred silence.
The vibration is sacred,
Sacred pressure waves on my eardrum,
Inspired by the sacred writing on the sacred page.
The staff is sacred.
The double bar line is sacred, a sacred finality.
The images inspired by the sacred word and sound
Are the gift of the sacred,
Given freely all the time without any thought.
To make you free.
To give you thought,
And love,
Pain and sorrow,
Joy amid sadness,
Comfort in loss.