Desire

What place is this
where a keening urge revisits
with such intensity
despite no real self knowledge
or sense of the other?
Whence comes it?
What bodes it?
Where goes it?

It brings a mild panic
the kind that accompanies
the unknown.

What guessing
when feeling takes over
and primal senses lead the way.

On the one hand,
sure knowledge
that a casual affair
simply will not mesh
with the parochial past,
the schoolgirl steered by nuns
the one-man-woman
at the end of a thirty-year marriage
with no other sense of a man
than the one who failed her.

This feels
a leap
an abyss
a crevasse
a depth uncharted
with no clear egress,
and yet,

a hint of promise--
down the road not yet taken.

Honesty

To
what degree
honesty?
Why bother?
Why now and not before?
How honest?
What's it mean?
To be perfectly honest,
I am myself indifferent honest.

An honest day's work
an honest living
good and honest
in my honest opinion
honest Indian.
I cannot tell a lie
cherry trees and axes
One Hail Mary
for how many lies?

Shed an honest tear
errors of omission
honest disbelief
an honest appraisal
honest defeat
the whole truth
honest and true
and nothing but the truth.

An honest heart
honest simplicity
honest doubt
be honest with me
an honest woman
an honest man
What a fool honesty is!

Do you swear?
I do.

Holding a Heart

It's tough to hold the pieces
of a shattered heart.
They shift,
slip between fingers,
evade containment.
Too many to safely hold--
Don't try.

How could you steer this ship
back into uncharted waters
with full knowledge
that you'd be leaving the helm?

I'd shut my heart to you,
set it aside,
and closed the box
that held it.
You reopened it--
for what purpose?

Confusion works
as an excuse.
Brokenness too.
But the guilt you've voiced
the glimmer of awareness,
of self-centeredness,
calls all excuses
into question.

How could you take me
from darkness
to light
and back again?
Where is the safe, warm feeling
that should have come with love?

You're losing me
to your own brand of darkness
And it's a damn shame.

No one wins.
It's not even a draw.

Like a boat
lying at mooring
bow against the current,
like eider ducks
rafted together
swimming upstream,
like seagull sentinels
lining rooftops,

I wait.

No forward motion
No chance for retreat
Just bobbing idly
in time to the waves
or standing still
in rooftop sunshine
waiting for release.

Maybe it's time
to put on a captain's hat
and woman the helm.

On ending a marriage

This was quite a week for me. On Wednesday, a significant chapter of my life ended as I stood before a judge in a small courtroom in Ellsworth, Maine, and raised my hand, vowing to tell the truth in a proceeding that would bring to a close a marriage of twenty-seven years. It was a moment fraught with emotion. Though the decision to part was difficult to arrive at, it was the correct decision. That certainty, though, did not make being in the moment of divorce easy. As I gazed around the room, taking in quirky details like the fact that there were two American flags and a framed print of U.S. presidents ending with Lyndon Johnson, it occured to me that a marriage begins and ends with the words, "I do."

What exactly do we promise with those words at the outset of a marriage? All the traditional things--to have and to hold, from this day forward... But more than that, we promise to love each other forever. To stand united against the burden of time and the pressures of daily living. To stay united after the thrill of new love wears off and throughout the things that put stress on a union: children, disappointments at work, worries about money, problems with siblings and in-laws and friends and life in general. It is a tall order, and one easily filled for a while but not necessarily forever.

My marriage came to its official close this past Wednesday shortly ater 9:00 AM. It was a moment marked by an astonishing void of feeling--I was as emotionally empty as the courtroom was of spectators. No one, save a kindly judge and disengaged bailiff bore witness to its end. In that silent room, I took a step toward the future. It is a future, like most, that is entirely unknown. But it holds within it the seed of hope, the joy of possibility, the energy of promises yet to be made and kept.

And, as Emily Dickinson would instruct, I choose to dwell in that possibility.

I bookmark the day of my divorce with two poems: "Release the Gulls," which comments on the ways a marriage can go wrong, and "On searching for sand dollars," which celebrates a new sense of self--one that rises joyfully to the challenges of a solitary life and is open to the possibility that that life could be shared in a way that surpasses my present powers of imagination. Here's to the journey...

On searching for sand dollars

Early on the morning of my divorce,
I took to the beach
with my dog
and a mission—
find two sand dollars,
one for me,
one for a partner-to-be—
someone to step into the void
to brace against the solitude
to make the breaking of a couple
bearable.

Step after step
as the sun turned
the pre-dawn sky and water
from grey to lilac to pink to blue,
I found
sea glass
in just as many colors
in triangles, squares, rectangles
in fish shapes
in shards and minute specks
half curves from bottle necks
circles from bottle bottoms
buffeted by sea and sand
or clear, with still-sharp edges.

No sand dollars.

The volume of glass stunned me.
It was as if the ocean
had sensed the shattering
of my marriage
and heaved itself up
to spew its contents
on my shore.

Slowly,
the urgency of my mission ebbed.
Step after step,
a calm acceptance settled over me,
and I marveled
at the abundant potential
for the joy that surprises
when you let a mission come to you
instead of seeking it out deliberately.

I stood
and faced the sea,
the bag of sea glass
heavy at my side,
and breathed in the salt air smell
of a brand new day.

As I turned to go,
my eyes fell
upon a single,
solitary
sand dollar.

Perfect
for my party of one.

Release the Gulls

Early Saturday morning,
as the sun was just clearing
the tree line over Long Island,
my dog and I crested the rise
above our beach
in South Blue Hill.
Below us
at the forward most point
where two strips of sand
come together
in an upside-down vee
jutting out into Blue Hill Bay,
a flock of sea gulls,
fifty or more,
had banded together against the wind
to soak up the winter sunshine.

I released the dog
for his usual meadow romp.
The rush of his body
through frozen field grass
set the gulls to flight.
They arose, as one,
then split into two bands of wings
beating in a frenzy of escape,
breaking the unity of the whole.

The instinct to unite
is strong.
It holds marriages together
to silver-wedding status
long past their instinctive ends.

Why this mindless prostitution
Of self?
We measure out priceless days
in frozen dinners
and processed mac and cheese,
do our dirty laundry,
pay the bills,
and tune each other out
as we tune into
the nightly news.
We sleep in beds
without headboards for anchor,
and fill the buildings
we call home
with yard-sale remnants
from the broken bands
of others.

It’s time to move on now,
release the gulls,
feed the self
with honesty.

On crossing paths with a coyote

In late November of 2004, I came upon a coyote while driving home in the dark one night. I could tell from a distance,as I watched him trot across my country road, that this was no mere dog. He had a substance to him that made me slow down and pull into the parking area of the South Blue Hill Community Center so that I could watch him. By now, he had reached the middle of the field, a distance of about 100 feet from my car, but not so far that he escaped my headlights. He turned his head to stare full on at me or at least into my headlights. His eyes lit up. His fur was full and fluffy around his face. He stood stock still and showed neither fear nor interest in who might be behind the spotlight he suddenly found himself in. He held his pose for a minute, maybe two--long enough for me to marvel at his beauty without really taking in what an extraordinary moment this was. And then, he was gone. Without a backward glance.

The image stayed with me for quite a while. Like all of my experiences in the Blue Hill environment, it left me feeling grateful. Life on the coast of Maine is an existence of natural superabundance. Everywhere you look there is almost a surfeit of beauty. And so, like many of the gifts I receive on a daily basis from my natural world, I tucked this image away.

It surfaced in my thoughts a week or so ago as I was going through a personal situation in which everything that I had previously had absolute confidence in was suddenly called into question. The experience was shattering on many levels, and it got me to thinking about confidence and remembering the "supreme confidence, bordering on indifference" of this solitary coyote.

I seek to anthropomorphise the coyote in my poem, "Coyote Confidence." If he could speak, I muse, what advice would he offer me so that I could avoid leaving myself open to such heartache in the future? His answer is not entirely satisfactory for a person like myself, for whom romantic guises or the strategies of courtship seem foreign at best and dishonest at worst: Hold close and guard your heart.

Coyote Confidence

In a monochromatic rime of winter,
white slabs of river ice
tilt askew
like Civil war tombstones.

Nearby,
water ripples in a bordering stream
beneath milky sheaths of ice,
pulsing its way
around solid stoppages
to the sea.

In a late night field,
by the South Blue Hill Community Center,
a lone coyote pauses,
its silver muzzle
reflected in headlights.
It fixes a cold stare
that transfixes me
for one silent moment.

He seems to take my measure
before turning
to lope gracefully
toward the tree line.

Such supreme confidence
bordering on indifference.

What would he have voiced
if he had chosen
to break the stillness?

No doubt
a word of caution,
for surety of being
in a soul like his
comes only
when the heart
is guarded
and closely held.