After Brief Parting

They slip easily into familiar patterns
Of complaint, of petition and casual affection.
I am still aching empty.
Fill me with your strongest grasp
Affirm that I didn't lose my place
In line when I stepped out of your sight.

When we fall into familiar patterns
(I sit here, you lean there)
When we read or play or eat
I am not fully convinced that I belong.
Then you give a secret and dime's worth
Of your sparking, wild hopes--

I see that your home is at my center.
With you, I am complete.
Your echoing faces hint at your relief
That nothing changes when we wave good-bye.
We belong together and your hands fit in mine.
Your hopes set off wildfire joy in me.

Nightingale

My wings are clipped and my throat is tight.
When terrors fever in my brain
And I wake weeping in the night
There is your hush and your swish of movement.
Lullaby songs brush through the tendrils of my hair
and your whispers force my thoughts away.
Before I can wake fully, an adult whose cheeks flush
at the thought of that imaginary monster death,
when my body stills and my breath is deep,
you are there, rescuing me with your voice.
You sing on, until I fall back into sleep.

Bare-foot in the Kitchen

I am flecked with the juice of pomegranates,
Bare-footed and listening to the poetry of ages
Read by men I will never meet.


This day is a clear one,
To my mind and my eyes.
I see so much today and I am happy.


I am grateful for the gift of rare days.
Peace is so flitting in these chaos times,
But I pad the nest anyway.


Strings and cloth scraps here.
This side needs extra down.
I cover the sharp sticks of life.


There are still years before I will launch them
As a mother eagle with her young.
They will soar higher than I, I tell my heart.


Today, it has been time and sight.
An eagle's sharp vision, by heaven, has been the gift
And my arms will, cradling, enfold it.

Patronage

I came here to quiet my mind.
Pages of words, here, form a babbling brook.
It weaves in and out of the shelves
Puddling around the repurposed catalog bureau.

I sit in a chair.
I sit by the window
in the room for quiet reading.
This was the forbidden zone.

Now that I am Adult
And can keep myself still
I have a front row pass
Adjacent to the man clearing, quietly, his throat.

Refraction

Your wide brown eyes shatter behind the crystal
Refracting purple and bright
Dimensions grow slowly inside you
It is in the dark and in the stillness
And you won't let me in.

Sometimes, in the sunlight,
Color comes out in the filaments of your hair
I get a glimpse through your joy
I can see through the dance
When you think that I'm not looking.

Clock hands sweep in arcs
Your shoes don't fit
Your voice holds tones I haven't heard
The heart in your chest, oh that heart
Is a hidden cache.

Dangle the key before my eyes
I won't flinch when the prism
Bends the light to hit me full in the face.
Show me the key hole. Turn the key
To the treasure you are.

In Storage

"She's come home from the city"
They think and nod their sleepy-town heads.

Between houses with my family,
We hang our hats with my dusty-violet grandma,
Resting our young-kid chaos
Into her lonely, still solitude.

I know this is the place I sprouted,
The place I learned reading, love and distrust,
But I find that my feet can't reach the ground.
They refuse to be planted.

So, here the five of us wait
For the green light
For the great thumbs-up
For the yellow-brick road to light up
And lead us to where we are meant to be.
You can only go forward
To home.

By the River

We talked of the terrain of countries to where we'd been
While the children dug their toes in the mud.
The river flowed faster tonight
After thunder ripped through the air.
My mind filled with Nevada desert at night
The sky so pierced with light
I could feel my soul rise to meet it.
The air so clean, like breathing holiness.
I long for the pause of different places,
Where the terrain takes my hand and points:
"Look! Do you see?"

I travel this unfathomable earth.
I wander and take my love with me.
Love follows me around like a unwound yoyo,
Jolting and leaping over the stones on the ground.
It gathers moss, yet carries me.
My eyes fill with words and I, too,
Feel them galloping across the field toward me.
I will race with the wind.
I will challenge that river.
Skipping rocks off the surface,
I will write of the water's secrets.

Long ago, in a galaxy...

I believe in the force.
I believe in black-and-white.
Humans revel in the solid line
While needing the freedom
To make their own smudges.
It comes as little surprise
That more than 57,000 New Zealanders
List their religion as that of Jedi.
I have two padowans of my own
And one princess.
As I sit in this parking lot,
Composing these thoughts,
A man has put a sun shield in his car window.
Life is full of irony and
full of the forces of good and evil.
That sun shield is screened with the faces
Of one wookie, Carrie (buns intact),
Sir Alec and Han Solo, himself.
I know the force is real.

Life Changer

Transport me
from this dirty garage to
fields with low-flung fog.
My back aches anyway.
Might as well be slogging
Through a rice paddy.

Change up
my mundane tasks
for another's.
I could wear the wide straw hat.
She could lug my purse,
filled with lipstick and Legos, around.

I Grow my Own Fruit

No one teaches me.
I teach myself.
That stumble is knowledge.
This cut is wisdom.
I took the poison and spit out light.

There is so much fullness.
I cup my hands over my swelling heart.
There are ropes threading through me,
Around me, the center of my beauty cinched
To contain the swarm of chaos color.

I cup the fruit in my hands.
I bite into the heart.
This is the antidote
And a thousand tiny whispers inside.
I know my own mind.

---
inspired by the paintings of Seraphine Louis. http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2014/05/fireblossom-friday-seraphine-louis.html?m=1

Lace on the Altar

There is a covering of lace on the altar.
When I kneel there, supplicant, beggar
Not wholly myself
I follow the whorls with my eyes
See the single, double, treble
Of the crocheted steps
See the tiny pieces
Making a whole.
When I rise, back straight , stomach in
I think of delicate strings singing on
bobbins,
Falling over each other to create
This bit of angel wing and cloud tuft.

Studio

I spit out the bulb of my voice
And it grew to a flower
A daffodil streaked with Blues
With leaves like piano keys.

I spit out my voice
And it grew to a huge thing
A birth like Athena
But from my throat.

My warrior's cry
Is a wave of sound,
Pealing like a bell
Through wires today.

I thought the bulb was withered
Being flung at death
And galloping over coffins
But it's arching toward the Spring.

Clear like crystal
Prisiming with sunlight.

I'm Nobody

I'm nobody. Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
                         -Emily Dickinson

Fame is for what we are programmed.
Fame is what counts.
What are you doing for that Name: Fame?
Is that all you can make of a human?

You haven't seen me for years.
You ask what I've done to gain
Fame and importance
Fame is for what we are programmed.

I've been wiping noses and tears
My gifts fill my kitchen,
Fill lines with alphabetic characters, but
Fame is what counts

I have sought small ways to put myself
Up in the sky,
That twisted thorn path is a long one
What are you doing for that Name: Fame?

I have swept those cobwebs from my mind
I follow my own way,
Never with a map.
Isn't that all you can make of a human?

------------------------
We're all about Frozen at our house, too, and my girl is counting down the days 'til the 18th.

I chose to write about the seduction of fame and how, though it was a path that I could have pursued, I ended up getting everything I wished for because I "let it go." I have to let it go with nearly every new avenue I come upon, not because seeking fame is not interesting, but because it is not the best that life has to offer for me.

I used a cascade form where the lines from the first stanza are repeated in the stanzas following.

Symmetry

I twirl the plastic ring from the milk
Around the surface of the table.
The day is dark with fog through the picture window
My reflection is your ghost.

I used to be a mirror
The strands of our pale hair entwined
The fibers of our sweater sleeves
Felted themselves into tiny balls as we walked.

I spoke too much.
You, not enough.
Unless I count the dissenting voice in your head.
I heard it in the downturn of your mouth.

I dug a hole, built a burrow around us.
And like the mole in Thumbelina trapped the swallow,
I wanted to hide you in the dark.
You wanted the sky. You wanted escape.

So I wait for the small ring to move.
Just a small sign from you, my reflection.
My swallow. My sister.
Dear mouse.

----
Fiction today. I've been a bit obsessed with the novel Her Fearful Symmertry by Audrey Niffenegger. Here, I let one sister [character] mourn a change in circumstances.

Pressure

I remember your breath.
I remember breathing.
I remember yes.
I remember good-bye
And good-bye
And good, so much good.

Poetry coats with rose-colored paint.
The breathing?
I was so scared.
Striping trust down to the depths of vulnerability.
I remember saying "never call again."
I remember that you obeyed.

My mind opens, cavernous.
My dreams relive this,
Send me trekking,
Across the Great Wall of You,
Of comfort.
Such solid ground.

Brilliance

I am quite in love with the sun today
It shatters the iceberg's surface into diamond
And slicks it with sweat.
The heat gets to the core of me
Bubbles, small like frog spawn, form inside this vessel
Of flesh.
Reminding me that life is coming
That life is in me.

The clouds ripple across the sky
Diaphanous, lucent fabric
Wrap me, cradle me
Remove my blindness by igniting my heart
Fine hairs rise on my arms
The electricity of brilliance,
Of organic, enlightened intelligence
Reminding me that life is coming
That life is all around.

A Complaint

A Complaint

Oh, Atlas
We must have a conversation

You hunch there, tensed and groaning.

Why do you hold it up, I wonder,
After all these centuries past?

The weight, you say, is greater
Than last year

I see, I reply

And the year before, you murmur to your toes

I stretch, close to touching the globe and ask, Then why lend your strength to its support?

It is my lot. Your God is putting the pressure on.

Not so, I say,
He has not changed.