Slice by Slice - A Writer's Life

Jesus at the Monoloco

2011-08-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

So many choices on a hot Antigua night—
platos fuertes, nachos, entradas, ensaladas, postres, bebidas.
Jesus makes his selection
and the local crowd drinks Gallo beer.
He remembers the Egyptian Sphinx
on the beer maker’s tomb
next to crypts for the city’s poor
stacked eight high in rows of thirty or more.
The words of the prophet are written on the tenement halls.

The yearly rent?
100 quetzales

If you can’t make it
they bust open your grave,
throw your body into the city dump.
Population explosion is the explanation—
No room at the inn.

Dinner at the Guatemala City Dump

2011-08-18T22:40:00.002-05:00

The chicken truck has not arrived
so ten-year-old Carlos hasn’t eaten today
His father is dead—stepfather, aunts don’t want him
His world is the dump
His brown eyes worry its horizon for the chicken truck

Black buzzards are everywhere
clustered like congregants on an overhanging slab
motionless in the leafless branches of the jacaranda tree
perched atop crucifixes at el cemeterio La Verbena
Red eyes fixed on the guajeros below, they wait for their chance
at maggot-laden beef and not-quite rotten potatoes

I shade my eyes, pull my t-shirt to my nose to shut out the stench
of methane and sulfur and watch as a long yellow truck lumbers
down the dirt road—Taco Bell time
Older guajeros run to place a palm along its side.
Carlos holds back, knows his place
The truck rears up and he watches as the limber ones climb
the cascading boxes, their bodies and the trash
one continuous tumbling motion. There is plenty today
so it’s easy to be patient, but his stomach rumbles
as he waits his turn

At Pangea Antigua, elbows resting on crisp white linen,
I idly fork morsels of filet mignon, avocado mashed potatoes,
asparagus steamed to perfection
The jalapeños béarnaise glides down my throat
in one exquisite motion that, for a moment,
erases the image of Carlos dining amid the trash

The Blind Madre

2011-08-18T22:39:00.000-05:00

In the alleyways of the barrio, families who once breathed
El Altiplano’s mountain air now divide themselves into blocks
of corrugated steel and inhale the sulfur and methane that oozes
from the Guatemala City dump. They left hoes and shovels
on the plateaus of Quezaltenango to squat—tenants without land,
farmers without fields—on decades of stratified waste.

The names of the barrio sectors imply promise—
La Libertad, La Paz, La Esperanza—
but reality is a soiled mattress in La Esperanza,
where blind Petronilla draws her eight children to her side
and waits in darkness for the husband who will, one more time,
pummel her body until the stain of a thousand pomegranates
spreads beneath her paper-thin skin.
Afterward, the man of the house will snarl
at Juan Carlos, Silvia, Luis, Edgar, Jesus,
Santiago, Gladys and little Petronilla, as,
one by one,
they drop curtains across the wells of their dark brown eyes.

Dios te ama

2011-08-18T22:37:00.000-05:00

Gabriela sits on the sidewalk across from la Guarderia’s entrance,
crisp blue jersey and denim skirt contrasting with the sagging white plastic
that covers her barrio home. Her Mary Janes dangle over the gutter
where torn coffee cups and bits of paper drift in brown water.
Ragged laundry sways above a patched-together tin roof.
Across the street, glue sniffers crash in a corner, eyes glazed,
doped-up smiles on baby faces, but she looks past them

to a group of girls dressed in identical plaid skirts and white blouses.
As they approach, they glance at her, then whisper
as they disappear through la Guarderia’s rust-colored gate.
A gaunt brown and white cat peers out from a nearby doorway
and looks the other way as the guard slides the gate shut.
A moment later, like spent petals of the tumbergia plant,
laughter drifts over
the wall that separates the school from the barrio.
Gabriela stares at the gate and fingers a strand of dark brown hair
before slipping through the curtained doorway of her home,
past a wall where faded black letters proclaim:
Dios te ama.

The Flight of Cuatro Ojos

2011-08-18T22:33:00.001-05:00

Oh cuatro ojos, what do you see in the barren landscape
of the Guatemala City dump? High above this forty-acre ravine,
can you make out the addict’s syringe,
the dinner rolls from Kentucky Fried Chicken,
the soiled toilet paper from Hotel Antigua?

Do you watch, with interest, the guajero’s child
who trudges each day to sift the waste of millions
for plastic her mother will sell for a few quetzales?

Which of your four eyes keeps a check
on the vultures that circle above her head,
on the still-moist condoms beneath her feet,
on the headless dolls she gathers, with gratitude, to her chest?

Cuatro ojos, it seems, are not enough to take in the child of the guajero—
un corazon not ample enough to hold the ache of her existence.

Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō

2011-08-18T22:31:00.000-05:00

On a gray November morning, we gather—
Nipponzan Myohoji nuns and monks in saffron robes,
Veterans for Peace in black and white, and the rest of us—
to walk single file for twelve miles bearing banners for peace.

With a pewter-colored Maine sea to our left, we journey
past shuttered Grange halls, past summer homes with yards
ringed by gold-capped fence posts, past bungalows wrapped
in peeling clapboards, past Home-and-Garden greenscapes.

Brown oak leaves spiral seaward as we connect
with each other, the passersby, the road,
the hands raised in windows and doorways,
the mothers whose gleeful children see only a parade.

An ancient sky blends everything into a single expanse
of shuffling feet, fluttering flags, chanting voices,
rustling grass, honking horns and, above it all,
a white dove rising on a wind-whipped banner.

Over asphalt, cracked and smooth, we continue past tawny fields
speckled with cattails and guardrails draped with withering rose hips.
Baptist church bells toll a welcome as our feet mark the cadence
of the Japanese drums. Over and over, we repeat our mantra:

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…

In this, we bring the essence of the universe to a single question:
If, in the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was God,
what is this word? How does it explain strafing gunfire, roadside bombs?
Pakistani boys scrambling for ice at Chota Lahore relief camp?
Kabul’s street kids hawking chewing gum for twenty cents a pack?
Children throwing grenades and donning suicide vests in Kirkuk?
Corpses of the unknown lying in wait in a Baghdad morgue—
No. 5060, with a bullet to the right temple,
No. 5061, with a bruised and bloated face,
No. 5062, with a tattoo that reads, “Mother, where is happiness?”
No. 5071, with eyes open, as if remembering what had happened?

Like the lotus, I seek to bear, simultaneously, seed and flower,
to feel the heartbeat of the poor, the exploited, the desperate and dying,
to walk and send my lonely voice aloft into this struggling world.
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…

The Photographs in My Dreams

2011-08-18T22:25:00.004-05:00

With gratitude to Jim Harney, for the words and photographs that filter the message of this poem. Jim was artist-in-residence for Posibilidad, a Bangor, Maine, based nonprofit organization that seeks to put a face to the suffering U.S. economic and political policies cause to the poor around the world. Jim died on Dec. 26, 2008.

Apparitions in the dark hold me hostage to stories of children who roam
garbage heaps and play in playgrounds laced with uranium-depleted sand.
Baby-faced boys heft AK-47s and stare at me with vacant bravado,
brace themselves, arm in arm, like buddies in a beer hall, as if their youthful
solidarity could protect them from the forces that stole their birthright of joy.

Guatemalan women file silently past in striped skirts, embroidered blouses,
shawls draped over shoulders, hair upswept into elaborate headdresses.
Their faces are full of beauty, arms laden with small wooden crosses
emblazoned with the names of the martyred. Their gaze forms an inquisition,
so I turn, burrow into sheets of cotton, pull the quilted comforter beneath
my chin and mutter a fretful sigh before drifting again among women

who strap babies to their breasts and turn their tired eyes to me,
an American mother, who, like them, wants most of all to keep her children
safe. I am unable to ignore the pleading in their dark brown eyes,
the resignation on faces too used to injustice to hope for anything more.

Night after night, una madre de los desaparecidos, crystalline complexion framed by brilliant white kerchief,
stares at me from the wells of her eyes. An icon of desirability,
she has little to offer those who might love her—
no joyful receipt, no hopeful trust,
not even resistance. She is the face of El Salvador’s outrage,
yet she does not weep or rage. The grip of her expression
ripples through my slumber. Finally, I break away

and, with relief, smile at an elderly woman who sits quietly on a wooden bench,
arthritic hands folded on her aproned lap. She leans against a stone wall;
perhaps it offers a cool respite from the Chiapas heat. She is my grandmother,
seated in my childhood kitchen. The lines of her face tell a story,
but it is not my grandmother’s story. I frown, until her smile shows me
there’s reason for hope. I weep with shameful gratitude.

Remember the martyrs left behind in the jungles of Guatemala. Presente!
Remember those fallen victim at the wall of death along the US-Mexican border. Presente!
Remember the undocumented, decapitated by el monstro de hierro in the Arizona desert. Presente!

If a homeless migrant can feed a gringo on the streets of Arriaga, what is not possible?
If an Iraqi dentist can clean an American’s teeth in Baghdad, what is not possible?
If the photographs of a single man can give voice to the voiceless, what is not possible?
If a God of the living could fill us all with the courage to act, what could be possible?

Look into the eyes of the children. Feel the anguish in the gaze of the madres.
As the shutter opens on the heart of their resistance, open your own eyes
to the stories behind the photographs. In them lies the hope of the excluded.

At the Food Cupboard

2011-08-18T21:58:00.016-05:00

We stand, bodies touching in the too-small anteroom,
feeling the blast of cold each time someone enters.
We laugh at the awkwardness of this crush waiting
for a door to open, for a line to form,
for questions to be asked or orders to be given:

What’s your name?
Do you have your card?
Sign here.

The minutes tick on. I avoid eye contact. What would they think
if they knew I was here not to get, but to give food away?
They grow restless and, after a while, someone complains—
You’d think they’d open the door a couple minutes early on such a cold day.

Murmurs of agreement. Stories begin.
Of the time a woman was scolded at a soup kitchen—
When you see a piece of paper on the floor, pick it up.

Of the time a man was stopped in a food cupboard hallway—
You’re not supposed to be here.

Since when did she own the halls, he wants to know. Says he felt
like plastering her. He tightens his lips, stares defiantly
at the still-closed door, and the others applaud with their laughter.

When the door opens, I murmur an apology, step to the head of the line,
wonder what they think of my eavesdropping. They shuffle along,
leaning on walkers and canes, oxygen tubing attached to nostrils,
faces weathered by life. Patiently, they fall into line, loosen threadbare jackets, remove caps. They are the old, the infirm, the young with their young.
They wait alone, with a partner, with families, friends.
Silently, they sign in, take a ticket, keep moving and accept bags of groceries,
chunks of USDA cheese and a frozen chicken. Their eyes are downcast
until I ask, Can I carry that for you?

They smile with a gratitude too deep for such a simple gesture.

I haul their groceries to Caravans filled with waiting neighbors,
to rusty junkers and Chevies loaded with the detritus of their lives.
As we walk, I ask how they’re doing.
They drop bits of their existence into mine—
a heart condition, back surgery, exhaustion,
how hard it is to grow old.
I am touched by their openness, by the need
we all have to tell our stories,
by their quiet resignation
to life on someone else’s terms.

It is the first time the tiny woman beside me has come here.
She turns to me, and I am struck by the life in her eyes.
There is no sign of the bitterness I was privy to earlier.
So eager to believe in the goodness of the outstretched hand,
all she can say is, I didn’t know there was a place like this.

I want to share in her joy, affirm her thankfulness, but the best I can manage
is a Happy Holidays as I set the bags carefully on the back seat of her car.

Things Undone

2010-07-13T15:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I left my desk,
ignored grocery list,
crabgrass and
rows of bolted spinach
to watch maples leaves
dance.
As the cardinal whistled
and the catbird mewed
and the chipmunk chattered
and the katydid called
and the purple finch waited
while would-be courters flapped wings,
I sat, eyes closed, face tipped
to sun’s warmth and cooling breeze,
breathing in balsam.

Beneath the reservoir’s muddy waters
life stirred in languid motion.
Something broke
the dappled surface
to catch a water boatman,
as sunlight filtered
feathers of pine.

Of death and coping

2010-04-27T14:29:00.003-05:00

You slip quietly into bed, as if hoping
I will not awaken, then lie silent while
I wait for the kiss that does not come.

Soon, your breathing grows deep and even.
Your body relaxes against me, and I am grateful
for sleep’s sweet release from the sorrows you carry.

The throttle on your engine of grief is stuck wide open,
so by day you careen through the landmine of memories
that, if faced, would lance your imagined veneer of coping.

But now, with darkness descending, you turn, trailing quilt
and bed sheet, your silhouette a rampart on some distant shore.
My fingers glide across the valley between us as fear rises up.

Outside our window, the wind rattles the branches of the blue spruce.
Within its boughs, a cardinal gently folds a wing over his sleeping mate.

2009-10-24T07:24:00.010-05:00

For Orley… On the day before her birth
August 31, 2009
With much love, from Nonny

At sunrise on the day before you were born,
ten Great Blue Herons perched on kelp-covered boulders
as the briny water of Belfast harbor lapped around them.
In predawn stillness, they waited. One after another,

they turned their slender necks to bathe in the hint of yellow
that lightened the August sky. Seagulls skimmed tank grey waters,
cormorants stood motionless on bobbing buoys, and the Great Blues waited.

Some distance away, your mother stirred in her sleep. Without wakening,
your father folded a protective arm over her belly, drawing the two of you
closer to him on the last of your prenatal mornings. Back in the harbor,
one heron flapped his wings, breaking the stillness of the ripening day.

Rising skyward, he cut a path through sea smoke toward cedar
and soon disappeared amidst the silhouette of the distant shore.
Within your mother’s womb, reassured by the steady beat of her heart,
you, too, turned toward the light of day.

REMEMBRANCE

2009-07-18T07:19:00.007-05:00

WINTER, SPRING, SUMMER – 2009
FOR ANDREW, WITH LOVE

As you left, late in winter, on a day
that could not have been more beautiful,
I watched you drive away, my heart’s breath
catching. The sky was a brilliant blue;
the white snow framed your leaving.
Cold March air wrapped itself tightly
around our old uncertainties.

Day after day, snow piled up, stillness gathered.
Only in my dreams did you come to me, sometimes
as a small boy in wilderness, needing
what I couldn’t provide. I’d waken, fearful,
and hope you were safe, imagine you peacefully asleep
in a cozy cabin. Stubbornly, I’d push away the edge
of understanding, not ready to realize that this journey
was about giving up a mother’s mantle, about blessing
the release of this young man into life’s wilderness.

Winter slipped quietly into spring. Life emerged again.
Once, I paused, hoe in hand, my mind wandering
to your woodland greenspace and you pausing as well
to inhale the sustaining aromas of pine and cedar,
a pensive look upon your handsome face.

Once a mother’s child, now you are a man,
and life calls to you from mountain and forest
and the air itself. Today, as I prepare to see you anew,
I feel again the old fears. The future is still uncertain.
But hope is ever present, and I try, most of all,
just to love you and to let you go.

Beginning

2009-06-01T10:12:00.002-05:00

For Dana from Judy

May 24, 2009

Did we begin one year ago with vows and promises

spoken in a circle of love? Or months before

beneath a star-lit sky with you on bended knee

in snowy ground? Or during long days of wondering,

of joy together and heartache apart? Or in thousands of words

sent and received from city apartment to seaside cottage?

Or in the long unknowing, with each of us awaiting sweet release

into the pink dawn of this new day, this gentle nestling,

one into the other, this sudden awakening in a darkened room

to hear tidal waters rushing beneath our anniversary bed?

Perhaps, there was no beginning.

Perhaps, we have carried each other’s heart within our own

for as long as we have dared to believe in this thing called love.

The Photographs in My Dreams

2008-10-24T11:35:00.004-05:00

With gratitude to Jim Harney, for the words and photographs that filter the message of this poem.

Jim was artist-in-residence for Posibilidad, a Bangor,Maine, based nonprofit organization that seeks to put a face to the suffering U.S. economic and political policies cause to the poor around the world. Jim died on December 26, 2008.

Apparitions in the dark hold me hostage to stories of children who roam

garbage heaps and play in playgrounds laced with uranium-depleted sand.

Baby-faced boys heft AK-47s and stare at me with vacant bravado,

brace themselves, arm in arm, like buddies in a beer hall, as if their youthful

solidarity could protect them from the forces that stole their birthright of joy.

Guatemalan women file silently past in striped skirts, embroidered blouses,

shawls draped over shoulders, hair upswept into elaborate headdresses.

Their faces are full of beauty, arms laden with small wooden crosses

emblazoned with the names of the martyred. Their gaze forms an inquisition,

so I turn, burrow into sheets of cotton, pull the quilted comforter beneath

my chin and mutter a fretful sigh before drifting again among women

who strap babies to their breasts and turn their tired eyes

to me, an American mother, who, like them, wants most of all

to keep her children safe. I am unable to ignore the pleading

in their dark brown eyes, the resignation on faces

too used to injustice to hope for anything more.

Night after night, una madre de los desaparecidos, crystalline complexion framed

by brilliant white kerchief, stares at me from the wells of her eyes. An icon

of desirability, she has little to offer those who might love her—no joyful receipt,

no hopeful trust, not even resistance. She is the face of El Salvador’s outrage,

yet she does not weep or rage.

The grip of her expression ripples through my slumber. Finally, I break away

and, with relief, smile at an elderly woman who sits quietly on a wooden bench,

arthritic hands folded on her aproned lap. She leans against a stone wall;

perhaps it offers a cool respite from the Chiapas heat. She is my grandmother,

seated in my childhood kitchen. The lines of her face tell a story,

but it is not my grandmother’s story. I frown, until her smile shows me

there’s reason for hope. I weep with shameful gratitude.

Remember the martyrs left behind in the jungles of Guatemala.

Presente!

Remember those who’ve fallen victim at the wall of death

along the US-Mexican border.

Presente!

Remember the undocumented, decapitated

by el monstro de hierro in the Arizona desert.

Presente!

If a homeless migrant can feed a gringo on the streets of Arriaga,

what is not possible?

If an Iraqi dentist can clean an American’s teeth in Baghdad,

what is not possible?

If the photographs of a single man can give voice to the voiceless,

what is not possible?

If a God of the living could fill us all with the courage to act,

what could be possible?

Look into the eyes of the children. Feel the anguish in the gaze of the madres.

As the shutter opens on the heart of their resistance, open your own eyes

to the stories behind the photographs. In them lies the hope of the excluded.

Wedding Haiku

2008-05-27T04:54:00.000-05:00

From Adrienne, for my wedding day...

Encircled with love,
One soul in two lives are joined
As lilacs blossom.

To Consecrate a Dream

2008-05-27T03:55:00.005-05:00

For Dana from Judy
May 24, 2008

Long before I saw your face, I’d memorized its laugh lines,
pictured your boyish grin, envisioned the blush of friendship
rising in your cheeks. I knew that kindness dappled your eyes
like sunlight on verdant water. Without ever hearing your voice,
I recognized its gentle tone in the coo of a mourning dove
and heard the peal of its laughter in a Sunday bell tower.
Day after day, I imagined myself steeped in the comfort
of your patient loyalty, and though I’d never felt your touch,
in my dreams your fingertips slid through my hair,
parting it like silken sea grass in flowing water.

In the haze of one summer dream, you arrived, arms overflowing
with honeysuckle, and though I did not know you, still I knew you.
From a place of longing, your eyes beckoned, cradling a brilliant joy.

You emerged from that dream in a warm and final knowing
to speak my name and gently usher me into this space called love.
Tenderly, you traced the lines of my life, sharing, with grace,
the burden of sorrow and the blessing of joy. Behind us--
a lifetime of waiting. Ahead--whispers of bliss. And so, I listen,
heart in hand, as you sing to me, your notes gliding—pianissimo, adagio—
through lyrics of affirmation, while your arms wrap me in an embrace
that will consecrate all the rose-hued dawns and starlit nights,
all the songbird openings and spring-peeper closings
of the days that stretch languidly before us.

Today, we stand at first light of a time called future.
Together, we sing a new song of love, loyalty and friendship.
Step forward with me, Sweet Heart, into the music of this dawn.

May 24, 2008 -- The Wedding Day!

2008-05-07T06:28:00.001-05:00

When You Find Yourself with the Beloved by Rumi

When you find yourself with the Beloved, embracing for
one breath,
In that moment, you'll find your true destiny.
Alas, don't spoil this precious moment.
Moments like this are very, very rare.

May 23, 2008

2008-05-07T06:20:00.003-05:00

The Minute I Heard My First Love Story by Rumi

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you,
not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere
they're in each other all along.

May 22, 2008

2008-05-07T06:18:00.002-05:00

She Tells Her Love by Robert Ranke Graves

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

May 21, 2008

2008-05-07T06:16:00.005-05:00

Come Fill the Cup by Omar Khayyam

Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling.
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter - and the bird is on the wing.

May 20, 2008

2008-05-07T06:16:00.004-05:00

Hope is a Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson

Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings a tune without words
And never stops at all.

And sweetest, in the gale, is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That keeps so many warm.

I?ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never, in extremity
It ask a crumb of me.

May 19, 2008

2008-05-07T06:13:00.001-05:00

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle;--
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven,
If it disdain'd its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

May 18, 2008

2008-05-07T06:12:00.001-05:00

Sonnet XVIII  by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

May 17,2008

2008-05-07T06:08:00.003-05:00

Sonnets from the Portuguese, XIV  by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
'I love her for her smile--her look--her way
Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love, thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

May 16, 2008

2008-05-07T06:05:00.002-05:00

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

O my luve's like a red, red rose.
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my Dear,
Till a'the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
I will luve thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o'life shall run.

And fare thee weel my only Luve!
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

May 15, 2008

2008-05-07T06:01:00.001-05:00

A Book of Verse  by Omar Khayyam

A book of verse, underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness -
Ah, wilderness were paradise enow!

May 14, 2008

2008-05-07T05:58:00.001-05:00

My True Love Has My Heart   by Philip Sydney

My true-love hath my heart and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given;
I hold his dear and mine he cannot miss;
There never was a better bargain driven.
My true-love hath my heart and I have his,

His heart in me keeps him and me in one;
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;
He loves my heart for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides.
My true-love hath my heart and I have his.

May 13, 2008

2008-05-07T05:57:00.001-05:00

Song: To Celia   by Ben Jonson

Drink to me, only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be
But thou thereon didst only breath
And sent'st it back to me:
Since, when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee.

May 12, 2008

2008-05-07T05:55:00.002-05:00

The Ragged Wood by William Butler Yeats

O, hurry, where by water, among the trees,
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have looked upon their images
Would none had ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?
O, that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry
O, my share of the world, O, yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.

May 11, 2008

2008-05-07T05:54:00.002-05:00

Sonnet 43   By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

May 10, 2008

2008-05-07T05:50:00.002-05:00

Come Slowly   by Emily Dickinson

Come slowly, Eden
Lips unused to thee.
Bashful, sip thy jasmines,
As the fainting bee,
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums,
Counts his nectars -alights,
And is lost in balms!

May 9, 2008

2008-05-07T05:47:00.004-05:00

Love Sonnet 116 --William Shakespeare


Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

May 8, 2008

2008-05-07T05:41:00.002-05:00

To Say Before Going to Sleep by Raine Maria Rilke

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
I would like to be the only person
in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.
And would like to listen to you
and outside to the world and to the woods.

The clocks are striking, calling to each other,
and one can see right to the edge of time.
Outside the house a strange man is afoot
and a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.
Beyond that there is silence.

My eyes rest upon your face wide-open;
and they hold you gently, letting you go
when something in the dark begins to move.

May 7, 2008

2008-05-07T05:30:00.001-05:00

A Love Song By Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

May 6, 2008

2008-05-07T05:28:00.001-05:00

Love Thee
by Eliza Acton, 1799-1859.

I love thee, as I love the calm
Of sweet, star-lighted hours!
I love thee, as I love the balm
Of early jes'mine flow'rs.
I love thee, as I love the last
Rich smile of fading day,
Which lingereth, like the look we cast,
On rapture pass'd away.
I love thee as I love the tone
Of some soft-breathing flute
Whose soul is wak'd for me alone,
When all beside is mute.

I love thee as I love the first
Young violet of the spring;
Or the pale lily, April-nurs'd,
To scented blossoming.
I love thee, as I love the full,
Clear gushings of the song,
Which lonely--sad--and beautiful--
At night-fall floats along,
Pour'd by the bul-bul forth to greet
The hours of rest and dew;
When melody and moonlight meet
To blend their charm, and hue.
I love thee, as the glad bird loves
The freedom of its wing,
On which delightedly it moves
In wildest wandering.

I love thee as I love the swell,
And hush, of some low strain,
Which bringeth, by its gentle spell,
The past to life again.
Such is the feeling which from thee
Nought earthly can allure:
'Tis ever link'd to all I see
Of gifted--high--and pure!

May 5, 2008

2008-05-05T11:57:00.003-05:00

i carry your heart with me by e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind

can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

May 4, 2008

2008-05-05T11:54:00.001-05:00

Touched by An Angel by Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

May 3, 2008

2008-05-05T11:48:00.001-05:00

Water from Your Spring by Rumi

What was in that candle's light
that opened and consumed me so quickly?

Come back, my friend! The form of our love
is not a created form.

Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember

when my soul heard something
from your soul. I drank water

from your spring and felt
the current take me.

(I love you, Honey, with all my heart.)

One Thought Each Day... Until May 24th...

2008-05-02T04:09:00.004-05:00

I've decided to embark upon a pre-wedding project for my fiancé. It's entitled "One Thought Each Day... Until May 24th." (May 24th being our wedding day!) Each day, I will post thoughts from me for this man from my favorite poets and writers. Some might be from my own original writing, others, like the one to start this off, pieces of writing from poets or writers I adore. All seek to capture what it is I am feeling as we move closer to our wedding day...

May 2, 2008: From Rainer Maria Rilke...

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person--it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances....

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

(I love you, Honey, with all my heart.)

The Wedding Toast

2008-02-21T15:21:00.009-05:00

The shuffle of dancing shoes and swish of satin is silenced now.
Here and there, atop white linen, cake crumbs scatter a trail
to a champagne flute that stands, as if at attention, as if
it were remembering the exact moment when you raised it
high into the air, as if it had watched you turn toward me,
your face bursting with hope, your eyes encouraging me
to meet your toast, to raise the matching flute, to interrupt,
with a tinkle of Irish crystal, the hushed anticipation of all
who strained to hear the gentle promises you made
with brilliant earnestness on that Saturday in May.

Did you know, at that moment, that through all the Saturdays
to come— those spring days when we would feed each other
coffee cake on a porch newly warmed by a higher slant of sun;
or August afternoons when we’d slip our kayaks soundlessly
through lily pad bouquets, hulls rippling wakes of river water;
or Indian Summer mornings when fallen leaves would stream,
like confetti, over Bald Rock Mountain trails; or winter afternoons
when, snowshoe bound, we’d try to tease one more hour
out of the waning daylight— our future would meet the promise
of the toast you made that glorious day?

A Diamond Anniversary

2008-02-21T15:16:00.002-05:00

For Mom and Dad, on their Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary
February 3, 2008

With Julia and George beside you, you long ago joined hearts
and stepped with the certainty of youth from a white-clapboarded,
steeple-topped country church into brilliant February sunshine.

For 10 years, you affixed tin pins to diapers on babies’ bottoms,
sent growing girls off on yellow buses, shared evening meals,
birthdays, Christmas trees in a four-room apartment, driving truck,
saving up, making do, finding love’s treasures in the midst of hardship.

The next 10 years you spread your wings in a new home,
built from scratch, with hands hardened by experience,
serving Sunday dinners of pot roast and potatoes on china plates,
watching your half-dozen swimmers splash and float
in the neighborhood’s only pool, with willows weeping out front,
and tulips rising, faithful as lovers, each spring.

Beauty, like a pearl, often comes from the sand of life—
And the next 10 years you spent together and apart,
Your children marrying, moving on and away.
Everyone discovering strength in solitude
but joy and comfort in unity.

In the midst of the next generation’s bounty,
nine grandchildren toddling about,
you faced adversity. Losses ruled—
health, business, even flames that burned brighter
than a ruby’s eternal flame. Out of ashes, though,
You nested anew, started again, and life turned golden—
a daughter returned, grandchildren grew in summer sunshine
as year after year we gathered, lakeside, to swim
and soak up the sun, sharing laughter and life stories,
growing the circle of family and friends.
10 years of quiet optimism and both of you settling
into sweet serenity with new eyes to see each other,
new hands to carry a cup of coffee and a morning paper bedside.

In this, your current decade, you stand poised and ready
for all the joy that comes from loving well, from imprinting
the hearts of so many children and grandchildren.
Turn now to face each other, as you did sixty years ago,
with the comfort of all that loving, all that believing,
all that constant and abiding faith.

Winter Solstice

2007-12-27T08:12:00.001-05:00

For Dana, Christmas 2007

Chickadees swoop and dive, then hide coyly amidst the cedar's icy branches.
The wind rattles, sends eddies of snow careening like white tornadoes
across the yard. Nearby, the brook that raged last spring lies frozen.

Months ago, these same birds soared in summer's glory, arrived early
each morning to beat the August sun. Their songs filled our house
with sweet breakfast music. Gold and purple finches, wintering now
in Florida or California, added then to the summer rainbow outside our kitchen.
Day after day, these timid visitors had their fill, then flew off, perhaps to some
shady glen, only to return, as if for cocktails, in late afternoon.

Our days passed in similar leisure, rising with the sun to sip coffee and juice
and mark the feathered newcomers on a calendar filled with notes of trips
on foot, by sea, up mountains, through forests. An endless array of sun-soaked days
and evening choruses of crickets and peepers. We harvested, too, from vine-ripened
tomatoes and sweet succulent lettuce. So much bounty, so much beauty.
A cardinal alights, now, on a snow-covered feeder, her buff-brown tail flicking
to the beat of some distant avian chorus, her orange beak pecking away
at sunflower seeds. She turns her head left and right, its jaunty plume erect
but ruffled in the wind. Bits of husk fall to the snow. Her magenta mate watches
from a nearby branch, then dives toward her, driving her from her perch.
She acquiesces, content to scavenge from the seeds he scatters.

Now, as the solstice approaches, we begin the upward climb through winter
to another spring, another summer, another autumn. We kiss good-by
on frigid mornings, return in darkness to woodstove warmth. Night after night,
we nest beneath quilts, taking pleasure in the comfort of bodies folded together.
While chickadees and cardinals fill themselves at winter feeders,
we sustain each other with a love that deepens with each passing season.

The Power of Doubt

2007-12-04T21:33:00.001-05:00

We met two weeks after St. Valentine's Day. A random
invitation to a poetry reading. You, alert in the last row,
hopeful gratitude splayed across your face, sending
sideways glances at me as I read three poems. Me, body taut
at the podium, heart drumming a nervous beat, eyes scanning
the audience of six, avoiding contact with you.

Afterwards, I sipped hot chocolate and listened to you
open your world. Amazed that here you were, and here I was.
Amazed that after weeks of not meeting, here we were, meeting.

For the longest time after that night, I would stare at you
as if you were an apparition, a ghost from relationship past.
Tantalizingly present but treacherously close to disappearing.

Even now, with night after night of slipping into peaceful slumber,
day after day of awakening into comfort and joy, something
as simple as a phrase in a book can shake relationship's tree,
can bring loves' leaves quivering to the ground.

Oh forever-after love, come, stay. Cast your imprint on our hearts.
Hold your finger to our lips. Ease away the spike of fear
that keeps us from folding, at last, one into the other in peace.

The Music

2007-10-12T07:04:00.000-05:00

Autumn evening, a choir gathers--
a tendril of song connects
your bass, my alto--
separate notes
but one voice

I slide my eyes your way
listen as your voice rises alone
watch your fingers strum the guitar

my fingers yearn to stop
the strumming, return your touch
to my face, my hair, my body--
remembering entwined evenings

still your voice continues
in tones as silver as your hair--
still the guitar fills the room

you slide your gaze my way
drink in the smile
that makes you smile
feel the heady reminder
of where we find ourselves
in life, in this love

then,
back to the music

I Crave Your Voice, Your Mouth, Your Hair -- By Pablo Neruda

2007-10-12T06:53:00.000-05:00

DON'T GO FAR OFF, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

And Because Love Battles--From Pablo Neruda

2007-10-12T06:35:00.001-05:00

A new discovery of mine--Pablo Neruda, Pulitzer prize winning poet and Communist politician (real name Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto) who lived from 1904 to 1973 and was beloved but exiled from his birth country, Chile. Here is a lovely poem for you to enjoy from Pablo Neruda...

And Because Love Battles

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

Bouquet

2007-10-09T04:41:00.000-05:00

You return bearing flowers--
a bridge from that distant place.
Each petal trembles
in my receiving arms.
Stemlike, I drink in hope, emerge
from the drought of your leaving.
Where do you go when you can't be
in this place called Us?
What voice beckons your return
with rose-filled hands?

Love in a line

2007-09-28T11:44:00.000-05:00

Heart-shaped rocks on a mantle,
love in a line, collected,
in various colors, odd sizes,
with edges sharp, smooth,
none a perfect rendition,
none abiding strict rules
for curve, apex, intersection.
Some are spotted,
others unblemished, virginal.
All collect the dust of time.
All inconvenience him.
To her, they call up hope,
sweet remembering.

Let Me Wonder

2007-06-27T08:04:00.000-05:00

Early, on a spring morning--a rustle in a thicket.

A doe, white flag upright, breaks the stillness

in a single bound over field grass dripping with dew--

eyes wild, soft ears erect, long legs retracted under sinewy torso.

I gasp, as startled as she to find this other creature in this solitude.

For one silent moment she seems to hover at the apogee

of a long, graceful arc--her entire being suspended and vulnerable.

Winter morning, city poised in pre-dawn stillness,

I walk in silence, dog at my side, his breath and mine

marking the rhythm of our efforts with frosty exhalations.

My boots keep time to the percussive beat of his nails.

From our left, in a frost-covered backyard, comes a stir

and flash of fur. I turn to watch three does scatter.

The smallest casts back a glance as wistful as the one I feel.

III

That same morning, as we return to our yard, we are stopped

by the sight of the three does in the clearing just past lawn’s edge.

Now, there is safe distance, so the does, too, pause, as if to take

our measure. I hold my breath. The dog is taut, uncommonly calm.

A breeze whispers through the hydrangeas.

Deer, dog, and human--we suspend fear, engage in wonder.

Then, as if at some signal I do not notice, they disappear,

one by one, into the tree line. The smallest is the last to go.

Each day, each moment in each day,

each breath taken in each moment in each day

brings life. Offers questions.

Let me be with the deer.

Let me feel my breath come in, go out,

just as the breath of the deer. Let me love

the questions. Let me wonder.

Spirit Child

2007-06-15T07:30:00.001-05:00

For Cerri's graduation from Liberty School,
Blue Hill, Maine
15 June 2007

Cerridwen Elektra--
Light-stepping daughter, fairy cloud nymph, bright goddess child,
rider of rainbows, believer in magic, keeper of wisdom, seeker of truth--

You speak from the voice feminine, with spirit true and heart bountiful.
You bound through life with confidence, grace and clear vision.
Like summer songbirds, spring frogs or fireflies at dusk,
you bring sweet sound and soft light to all you meet.
You claim yourself, yet open that self to others,
speaking truth with loving kindness and seeking knowledge
with a curiosity born of brilliant joy of learning.

You stand on the edge of uncertainty with a clear understanding
that all that you are is enough to sustain all that you will become.

You are spirit child.

There is a place for you in the house of joy.
Go firmly into that future, in shades of red with spangles,
knowing you carry with you heartsong from us all.

First Notes

2007-05-21T20:12:00.000-05:00

You strum your guitar
and croon softly in the night--
love lights on G clef.

Tagged for a Meme by Adrienne

2007-05-18T12:33:00.000-05:00

Hello all--

My good friend Adrienne tagged me for a meme, which, if you did not know is "a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultural counterpart of genes" (dictionary.com).

Adrienne's friend tagged her to post a meme on her blog listing eight random things about herself. She did so, then tagged me to do the same (that's the passing on by imitation part of a meme).

So, there you have it - now for the rules:

1: Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2: People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own eight random things, and post these rules.
3: At the end of your post you need to tag eight people and include their names.
4: Don't forget to leave them a comment and tell them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are my eight random things:

1. I love heart-shaped stones, sea-glass of all colors, sand dollars, and seashells.
2. My favorite skirt is a kicky little denim one with two pleats in front.
3. My favorite color is blue.
4. I write poetry. (guess you know that if you've ever looked at this blog...)
5. I have stickers that are anti-war, anti-discrimination, and pro-Belfast Co-op on Bluebelle, my cobalt blue Jetta.
6. I'm afraid of power saws.
7. I've changed an air filter and spark plug in a lawnmower.
8. I live in a 106 year-old house on the coast of Maine.

I haven't got 8 people to tag, but I'll tag: Jamaal,(am I spelling your name right Excalibur?) Allison, & Elizabeth.

On Naming

2007-05-13T19:16:00.000-05:00

To close friends,
I have called you
Soulmate--
Love of my life.
I have whispered,
This could be the one--
a forever-after love--
the partner I've never had.

To you, I speak of sliding into love.
I ache when you leave, wistfully turn
to your empty pillow, and ease
the spike of loss by inhaling your scent
amidst the sunshine of sheets hung
with yesterday's laundry.

Morning after morning, I sit with you,
expecting these moments to go on forever.
I watch you sip your coffee, knowing
that you will place spoonfuls of bananas,
almonds, dried cranberries on your cereal.

I've felt a spur of excitement at the sight
of your car in my driveway, a pang of loss
at the empty space created when you leave.
On those mornings when you're not with me,
I am stymied by the grapefruit's other half.

Still, I will not name this burgeoning feeling,
will not claim this side-by-side living
is a living together, will not imagine
you with no other address
but the one I call home.

In every way save for naming
I have called you my own,
but a part of me has a breath
that catches slightly, a heart
that slips in my chest, eyes
that dart away, lips
that purse at the question:
Is this the one?

The Dog Who Loved With All His Heart

2007-04-27T22:18:00.000-05:00

On the night before my Boxer died,
he lay quietly by the wood stove,
basking in its warmth, taking comfort,
I hope, from its soothing heat.
Suddenly, as if infused with strength
or some clear vision,
he raised his head,
held it perfectly erect,
and stared into my eyes
steadfastly and with dignity
for one long moment.

What was he thinking?
Did he know then,
what his tomorrow would bring?
Could he see the time was coming
when those same brown eyes
that kept my gaze that night,
that once danced in joy,
that once sparked with energy,
would become vacant chocolate pools?

It was in those eyes that death's moment became clear--
the body, still warm, the chest not rising, the spirit stilled.

For this Boxer, at least, death came without warning.
Overnight, almost, it came. Too quickly. Too profoundly.
And now we're left too sadly.

Life ends in silence, if you are a Boxer
whose body has turned on you.
Not with wracking sobs--
Not with whimpers of grief--
Not with moaning or crying--
but with big brown eyes full of pain,
Soft brown ears lying flat and lifeless
against a tired head. Short, docked tail
listless over hips stiff with arthritis.

How does cancer steal into the vibrant body
of a pleasure seeker? A smell sniffer? A sound listener?
A squirrel chaser? A bone chewer? A ride taker?
On what insidious avenue does it start its journey?

Oh puppy. I will miss those shining eyes,
those clacking nails on asphalt, your amazing love.
My heart rises in grief.
Gone now, the bouncing Boxer--
the lima-bean-welcome-home dancer--
the dog who loved with all his heart.

If I could bring you back, we'd take more walks,
and I'd talk to you more often on them.
I'd throw more sticks, let you sit in my lap
and sleep on my bed, feed you scraps
of the things you loved.

Instead, I'll take your ashes to our beloved beach--
stand with the people who filled your heart with love--
and as I close my eyes I'll hear the sound of the waves
and picture you chasing the gulls, braving frigid waters,
racing toward me, ears flapping in the sea breeze,
before I'll dip my fingers into the dust of you,
hold my hand high above my head, and let you drift
and settle with the mussels and sea glass
--one last time.

Slow Waltz in April

2007-04-14T18:55:00.000-05:00

At twilight, on a cold spring night,
when spring itself was holding back,
unable to take charge in the face
of winter's last-minute blast,
in a kitchen where garlic and shrimp aromas
mingled with those of steamed rice and broccoli,
and a sweet chef in blue jeans and Henley shirt
did double duty as pot scrubber and dishwasher,
two lovers waltzed to classic jazz,
turned in slow circles past dishes to be done,
past left overs to be stored, past computers
that waited with papers to be written or read.

In the heat of that kitchen,
with a Spaniel and a Boxer cutting in,
that slow dance added a course
to an already sweet meal, an already
luxurious day--an hors d'oeuvre
for the winding down
into love-steeped sleep.

One more first, in a short line of firsts--
One more pleasure never felt before--
One more reason to call this love.

New Love

2007-03-30T23:18:00.000-05:00

Onion skin, tulip petal, skim of ice, eggshell,
tissue paper, lace doily, paper snowflake, Maybasket,
crystal flute, spiderweb, hydrangea blossom, vegetable seedling,
plate glass, pasta noodle, spring green leaf, new love.

Some things are so fragile only fear contains them.
Just to hold them is a worry. Just to touch them
is a worry. Always worry, always worry.
Things of beauty, delicacy, tautness,
they stretch and pull against themselves,
they fall in pieces in light breezes.

Brand new, they push against odds, hold hope, suspend disbelief.
Beneath their crystalline exteriors there is something fragile,
something soft and thin, something waiting to break.

KINDNESS by Naomi Shihab Nye

2007-03-18T11:12:00.000-05:00

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Sea Ice

2007-03-13T19:58:00.000-05:00

Tidal flow lifts, then drops, great sheaths of ice,
leaving giant slabs scattered over boulders
as the sea recedes. Shattered shards,
like milky white sea glass coated with winter's brine,
heavy and immobile, wait on salt flats for tide's turning.
Together, these pieces present a shoreline jigsaw
of sea ice buckling, suspended, not quite interlocking.

The act itself produces energy, thunderous noise,
transformation from one to many.
Solid ice, groaning under its own weight,
splinters with crystalline crashes, comes to rest
on ocean's floor only to resurrect at next tide.

A beginning can be similar with its elements of union
yet to be, barely hoped for. A wary dance in halls
of emotion, no dance card, no road map, just endless
stumbling in the heartland, sometimes wandering,
sometimes diverging, sometimes finding the way.

Not quite partners, each brings a heart
that buckles with rising hope, a heart
that settles as layers fall away, a heart
that eases as formality ebbs and comfort flows.
Energy is siphoned from each, combined, and
sent back out in rays of brilliant emotion.
Over and over, day after day, in a gradual knowing,
until high tide arrives and fingers interlock
into the familiarity of union.

On Things Unnoticed

2007-03-10T21:18:00.000-05:00

One summer night, with twilight approaching,
returning with head down, lost in thought,
I entered the field by my house--
the one I'd driven past each day for two years
the one I'd walked through with the dog,
stepping over hollows of new-mown stubble,
the one where a swing was tucked up into the branches
of a lonely pine sentinel, where sun's rays slanted
in rising and setting, where crickets sang,
where mice roamed, where rain fell, where wind blew,
where frost settled, where snow piled up,

and on this evening, I glanced up to see
a bioluminescent world of blinking orbs.
The shock of their beauty startled me,
forced the air from my chest.
It was as if the whole unnoticed field
had exploded in a mating dance
of fireflies, just for me.

The Uses of Sorrow

2007-03-10T18:16:00.000-05:00

By Mary Oliver in her book of poetry entitled Thirst
Beacon Press, 2006

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Doesn't Every Poet Write a Poem About Unrequited Love?

2007-03-10T18:08:00.001-05:00

By Mary Oliver from her book of poetry entitled Thirst
Beacon Press, 2006.

The flowers
I wanted to bring to you,
wild and wet
from the pale dunes

and still smelling
of the summer night
and still holding a moment or two
of the night crickets

humble prayer,
would have been
so handsome
in your hands--

so happy--I dare to say it--
in your hands--
yet your smile
would have been nowhere

and maybe you would have tossed them
onto the ground,
or maybe, for tenderness,
you would have taken them

into your house
and given them water
and put them in a dark corner
out of reach.

In matters of love
of this kind
there are things we long to do
but must not do.

I would not want to see
your smile diminished.
And the flowers, anyway,
are happy just where they are,

on the pale dunes,
above the cricket's humble nest,
under the blue sky
that loves us all.

The Place I Want to Get Back To

2007-03-10T17:58:00.001-05:00

By Mary Oliver, from her book of poetry entitled Thirst
Beacon Press, 2006

The place I want to get back to
is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let's see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;

and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

Naming the Moon

2007-03-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

This year, bitter cold grips March, and it's hard to call
tonight's moon the Full Worm Moon, no earthworm casts
on snowbound earth to herald return of robins. Rather,
this seems the Full Crust Moon, with snow cover crusting
after daytime thawing and nighttime freezing. Endless cycles
of release and reclaiming, of breath of spring and blast of winter.
The Full Crow Moon is a distant possibility, for on warmer mornings
I've lately heard the cawing of crows, signaling winter's imminent demise.
Soon, sap will ease in maple trees, and the Full Sap Moon will fit.
No matter the name, this moon, on this frigid night,
in this last month of winter, just two weeks before Vernal Equinox,
harbinger of luscious spring, is the last full moon of this dark season.

Names, Shakespeare said, are inconsequential, but somehow
it seems important to put banners to things like moons
or beginnings or endings. Somehow, there's need to name,
to pinpoint endings, to herald beginnings.
The moon itself rises faithfully, named or not, but life
begins and ends with perhaps more ease
when its moments are left unnamed.

Photos on the fridge

2007-02-27T11:30:00.000-05:00

It begins with photographs
removed in categories
from a refrigerator door.
First, one placed at eye level
of you smiling, relaxed,
tilting your head toward mine,
happy to be where you were.

Others follow-- snapshots of the two of us
taken by one of us with arm outstretched.
Laughing, wondering if heads would be cut
from camera's frame or if point of angle
would include us both. We marveled, later,
at how great we looked together.

A few remain-- innocuous ones,
simply good of you or me,
calling up times of joy, now heartache.
Removing them all is too final a step--
too hard to admit-- too laden with grief.

That will come later--
in a few days, a few weeks,
when the heart is steeled
and resignation is forefront--
when the mere sight of you
stops the healing process.

For now, it still helps
to place a finger on your sweet smile
as I sip my morning orange juice.

Certainty

2007-02-26T10:35:00.000-05:00

Sunday morning, 7:00 AM
I slip beneath the covers of your bed, press
my body into the shape of your own,
borrow heat, listen to your measured breathing
and wait on the edge of confidence.
Caught in the sharpness of need, of desire,
uncertain if this dance is lust's masquerade
or love's reflection.

Some things are certain.
Ice thaws in heat.
Bulbs awaken in softened soil.
Moonrise follows sunset.
Midwinter branches leaf green
and verdant in Spring.
But between us, much is in doubt,
our future held hostage by seasons past
and a need to harness seasons future.

So we press the current living--
this here-and-now space--
into the box of certainty,
clamp its lid
and step forward
without change.

Locked in

2007-02-24T22:12:00.000-05:00

This year, mid-February is a locked-in month--
snow bound under crust, weighted down by
rock-hard chunks of ice. None of this softens
in the heat of the rising sun that climbs earlier
and stays longer in the February sky.
The sun that strokes this alien landscape,
wraps icy fingers around its substance.
Forbids thawing, suspends stirrings of spring forms.
Holds everything in stillness, without motion.

The wind returns each day, works in union
with the winter sun, licks simple thaw
before it can leak into the sky.
It rises under the floorboards of my den,
falls from the attic through my upstairs ceiling,
slips around window panes, casts a cold frame
on this space I call home.

There is so much inertia when faced with
a force like this. So much effort is needed
to change its direction. The present course,
no matter how bitter, seems preferable
to facing blinding sunshine, harsh winter wind.

Perhaps the fear of what lies beyond
a challenge to the elements keeps me
stolidly inside, warm by the wood stove.
Perhaps the uncertainty of what will replace
this winter landscape makes me hold it dear.
Perhaps I simply cannot imagine a time without
everything that is now the essence of everyday.

So, instead of meeting this winter head on,
instead of challenging it with scarf and hat,
instead of slogging through its ice and crusty snow,
I sit in the comfort of the warm woodstove,
seeking comfort in the certainty of spring's return.

Sunday Afternoon

2007-02-20T23:57:00.000-05:00

Sunday afternoon, stolen moments--
sun slanting across single pillow
two heads resting peacefully,
two bodies warming blankets
bristling with anticipation.

Lovers pause, ready to slake thirst.
Single stroke of flesh produces heat.
Touch of hand ignites union's memory.
Lips bruise, limbs entwine, all is motion,
friction, desire masquerading as love,
even as Rilke's infinite distance
stretches endlessly.

Movement toward that wonderful
side-by-side living.
Wary dance around other
whole against wide sky.

Sun lightens afternoon ceiling.
Outside, only cold and ice--
Inside, the promise of desire's fire...

Irrevocable words

2007-02-14T21:40:00.000-05:00

This morning, a nor'easter slipped up the coast of Maine,
piled relentless, blowing snow, as if to
tease the hard working shoveler, as if to
toy with those who'd have order restored, as if to
dump something accumulative into our laps,
something unexpected, hard to fathom, just here,
leaving us with no recourse other than
to accept the very fact of it.

Words sometimes arrive like nor'easters.
Out of nowhere they fall and begin
to pile up--leaving mounds of questions,
self doubt, worry. As destructively
as an avalanche, they grow in volume until
the weight of even a single word
has the potential to crush things--
sweet confidence, sheer faith,
blind hope, solid trust,
true belief that as things stand,
so they are.

The Tides of Mothering

2007-02-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

For my mother, Valentine's Day, 2007

First memory--

Aroostook morning potato field
frost-bound rows, sun over forest horizon
and you, a young mother, not quite 30,
kneeling to shake soil from harvest roots
filling ash basket, dumping Katahdins
into tongue-and-groove cedar barrels
strung out row after row across this field
in this county vista in Houlton, Maine--
September, 1958.

At your side, a six-year-old daughter
not wanting this cold morning field,
toes and fingers cramping,
tired of mother's expectations
and beginning to cry.
With her, you return to your apartment,
shake the field dirt from her high-top sneakers
and prop her feet near the warming heat
of the oven of your ceramic stove.

Next memory--

Cobalt-blue beds filling each corner
of a bedroom meant for two.
Four headboards with nursery-rhyme decals
pressed onto pine by a mother’s soft hand.
Tucked beneath the cow jumping over the moon,
that same daughter, one year later,
peeks through half-closed eyes one night
to watch you tiptoe in and leave a nickel
beneath her sister's pillow.
Secret thrill of knowledge,
loss of innocence.

Memories frame you in action,
never in repose, your life void of ease,
filling with a mother's burden and silent joy--
25 years old and four young daughters,
28 years old and, at last, a son,
32 years old and your sixth and final child.

Tucked into the pages of a leather-bound scrapbook,
a Kodak snapshot--circa 1949--trumpets your bloom time.
You, beautiful in cotton shorts, crisp blouse,
long lean legs, trim waist, hair crimped
in soft auburn waves that frame your hopeful face.
You squint into the sun, shade your first-born's face,
while your young husband, looking every inch
like James Dean, stands at your side,
taut cotton t-shirt, strong legs in denim,
one arm cupped around your shoulder,
the other astride a hip jauntily thrust forward.

Fifty-eight years stretch before the two of you--
brimming with the challenge of making do,
of holding home together, of giving up brilliant youth,
and, for you, of taking on a mother's mantle.
So much promise--so much left behind.

What were you thinking that summer morning
as your gaze met the camera's eye?
Could you imagine the journey yet to come?
Could you see, then, your 55-year-old daughter
with three children of her own--
exactly half the number of the crop you bore?
Could you picture yourself arriving full circle,
having weathered the tides of mothering so well?

Fire, Snow, Ice

2007-02-04T15:17:00.006-05:00

Red hot woodstove embers sizzle and snap, bear up
through smoldering green wood that refuses
to be consumed for someone else's heat.

Snow falls through the night, and I awake to white
inching higher on roof top, car top, stair treads, railings.
On lilac and the shriveled orange berries of mountain ash.
It silences the rustle of hydrangeas, fills knotweed stumps--
a specter of winter's beauty that compresses.

Fall's torrent of rain lies frozen now,
suspended from culvert's mouth.
At 18 degrees, it simply lets season
dictate motion. Inside,
you sit by my woodstove,
immobilized by my three words--

I love you.

Unwilling to put a name to your own emotions,
it pains you to hear the label I bring to mine.
Your worry forms embers of vague concern,
something unnamed, as if to voice it
is to wrap it too tightly around the solitary
space you've carved out of all these years.

Like winter's water, you're bound in place,
unable to match the heat of my emotions.
You eye me carefully, tender sweet kisses,
and wonder if there is room in your life
for my expectations. Meanwhile, the space
between us grows slimmer, and you rub
your thumb over the idea of just sipping
the nectar of this thing I call "love," which--
like wood to embers,
like snow amassing,
like water freezing--
builds slowly,
rises too high,
takes prisoners.

What then?

Simply take the words
to your heart, add them
to the wood pile,
the snow mound,
the ice-bound stream
and wait to see
what spring's release brings.

For Cerridwen Elektra, Christmas 2006

2006-12-24T07:53:00.000-05:00

Cerridwen--

One of the Old Ones,
Goddess of the Celtic World,
Maiden, Mother and Crone.

Old woman of wisdom, magic and power,
she speaks through our ancestors, our grandmothers.
All races and all generations know her only
when they shed preconception and prejudice.

Elektra--

Daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
cloud nymph and wife of sea god,
mother of rainbow and storm wind,
the bright or brilliant one,
a Goddess of clouds with silver linings.

She brought forth a race apart of daughters--
three thousand light-stepping daughters--
bright children among the goddesses
who look after the earth and the depths of standing water.

Cerridwen Elektra--

You wear your ancestral name well.
It honors wisdom beyond your years,
the magic possible when we believe,
and the power of the feminine voice.

You are enchanting,
a fairy cloud nymph,
a light-stepping daughter.
You stride forward into the world of all women
riding rainbows and storm clouds alike,
revealing always the silver lining.

Youngest of the Old Ones,
you are Mother, Maiden, Crone,
and I love you with all my heart.

Judy
XO

For Elizabeth, Christmas 2006

2006-12-23T11:41:00.000-05:00

For Dear Elizabeth--

The diva in our midst--
our beautiful mezzo soprano--

Oh little songbird,
you've filled our hearts with bel canto
ever since you were born.
It pours forth from you in coloraturas rich with heart,
in cadenzas strong with determination,
in crescendos solid with power and strength.

In tones pianissimo to fortissimo
you hold us enchanted, your own beauty reflected
in the grace you bring to your craft.

And so, dear diva, sweet songbird,
I wish for you in bocca al lupo!
And say to you, again and again--
I love you with all my heart.

Brava!

Mom
XO

For Andrew, Christmas 2006

2006-12-23T11:10:00.000-05:00

To my wild-eyed man-child--

The drum beating,
fun loving,
sweet talking,
liberty seeking,
music making,
beat keeping,
joke making,
laughter inducing,
Africa traveling,
techno knowing,
style setting,
diversity loving,
principle keeping,
automobile worshiping,
ocean loving,
nature thriving,
dance jiving,
life-long learning,
baby of this family--

whom I love with all my heart.

Mom
XO

For George, Christmas 2006

2006-12-23T10:54:00.000-05:00

In every family, there's someone who fills the spaces of the family's heart--
a person who is quietly watching, finding ways to comfort, always ready to listen, ever supportive, always loving.

In our family, it's you.

Ever since you were a little boy, you've had this uncanny ability to tune into each of us in our joys and sorrows. With your wonderful boisterous laughter, you've given us reason to laugh. With your shy sweetness, you've reminded us that we are loved. With your sensitivity, you've helped us through rough spots. With your generous spirit, you've filled us with the riches that a loving spirit has to offer.

You remind us that we share this world with animals soft and furry, large and romping, purring and barking, and you show us how important the interface with all of God's creatures is.

You are smart and kind and full of love.

I love you with all my heart.

Mom
XO

Christmas is for Grinches

2006-12-12T23:48:00.000-05:00

Hating Christmas--
there's something anti-American about that.
What's not to love about the
larger-than-life front-yard snowmen
getting hot air blown up their asses
as they sway with mittens frozen
in perpetual waves to passersby?
Who wouldn't pause in admiration
at modern miracle nets--
lights spaced exactly and blinking
over evergreen hedges
to the tune of Jingle Bells
piped into fluorescent light fixtures
above Walmart masses bent on spending
dollars not yet made?

Who doesn't love gifts that disappoint
and Christmas trees losing needles onto K-Mart asphalt
and credit card bills not yet paid off from Christmases past?

Still--
For every Grinch stealing Christmas
there's a believer--
someone happily sloshing through stands of pine
looking for the perfect balsam fir,
someone grateful for family gatherings
and the indoor smell of evergreens
and mulled cider simmering stove top
and presents wrapped on Christmas Eve
and carols before midnight services
and stocking toes plump with clementines
and tromps through silent forests
to find and cut the perfect tree,
to drag it over snow with pitch-sticky fingers,
to stand it in a livingroom corner,
and place an angel at its top and ornaments
from Christmases past on each of its branches?

For all the crass commercialism,
for all the slaughtered baby trees,
for all the gifts you never wanted
and the ones you did but didn't get,
for all the expectations unmet,
there's still nothing quite like
the silence of Christmas Eve,
when gifts nestle beneath branches
and Christmas lights alone
fill livingrooms everywhere
with silence and awe.

Christmas is for Yuletide lovers
and Grinches alike.
Let it work its magic
and send forth the peace that comes
to those who watch and wait
in wonder.

Sunday Afternoon at the Rockland Breakwater

2006-12-10T23:40:00.000-05:00

We march, matching strides, along Rockland's Breakwater,
with January thaw breezes and a warming sun out of place
in the last days before winter's solstice.
We step around tidal pools afloat with ice,
past urchins smashed by careless boots
past sea ducks that strike glittering poses
in smart black and white tuxedos
among the dowdy gulls.

Our bodies take pleasure in the act of striding
in the almost-warm sand releasing sea glass
in the slap of boots upon granite
in the caress of an out-of-season sun
in the lapping of the waves
in the explosion of spray on seashore boulders
in the taste of salt in the December air.

Our minds walk separately,
cueing into the possibility of discord
bearing up under an erratic pulse
giving in to the loss of harmony
believing imagination's folly.

At breakwater's end, we sit on a bench,
align our physical bodies with the swath of yellow
sun that beats upon the water. This warmth cuts through
the questioning, the worrying, the foolish presumptions--

I rest my head upon your shoulder
uncertain why it feels suddenly fine to do so
but grateful for its welcoming warmth.

Breakwater Journey

2006-12-10T23:30:00.000-05:00

Breakwater journey--
winter tidal pools hold life
all but suspended.

An Evergreen Beginning

2006-12-04T21:49:00.001-05:00

There is a place steep,
with canyon walls narrow
as inlets of water newly suspended
under the season's first skim of ice.
There, tongues tangle, one body slips
into another. Emotions arise
like trail-side stalagmites.
Inflections of voice and gesture
float to the surface
far from wary yesterday.

I think of you while passing
through a morning snow squall,
its white outs enveloping me,
suspending me, like the platform
of a body taut with anticipation.

I park my car, step onto frozen asphalt.
A winter wind slips past my neck,
reminding me of your summer breath
on the nape of that neck.

Later, I curl myself into the shape
of your slumber, and as I pace
my breathing to your own
I realize that we are different
and feel a sudden settling
into that difference.

There is no complacency,
nothing commonplace
about the place
we find ourselves in.

There is so much joy in this beginning,
no labor of love, just love's inhalation.

Tonight, as I watch the moon
cut a diamond swath across the bay
I cannot wait to feel the warmth
of your smile, to put myself once more
into your embrace, to feel anew
this thing without name,
this burgeoning emotion,
this evergreen beginning.

Perceptions, then and now

2006-11-11T07:40:00.000-05:00

Once, I imagined in the smiles of passersby
an acknowledgment of our mutual devotion,
as if it burned so brightly as not to be missed.
I saw us in the exuberance of the couple
who paused to kiss in the pale yellow lamplight
of a glittering new footbridge.
Our passion, like theirs, cut joyfully
through the harbor's dampening fog.
I easily transposed us onto the forms
of the pair who embraced as they passed through
a college parking lot, as if unable
to take too many steps, without reconnecting.
I saw us ten years hence in the quiet
joyful confidence of a couple long partnered,
still loving.
What a difference a moment makes
in the midst of so many hundreds of moments
before.

Corn Stalk Battalion

2006-11-01T20:41:00.000-05:00

Scalped, stripped, ramrod straight
they stand at attention in rows
that stretch across a cornfield
of foot-high golden stubble.
Summer's harvest remnants,
they stand, as if waiting to march,
to march without thought,
each stalwart stalk blindly
following the lead of another.

Like a thousand blonde
five-o'clock shadows
or soft, cool, summer buzz cuts,
like corn-fresh marines,
they're suspended somewhere
between fecundity and sterility,
row after row of sentinels
without voice, without power
plodding, compliant, persevering.

Sun beats down, dries the morning dew.
Cool breezes rustle parchment husks
like flags draped over returning coffins.
Pummeling sleet will freeze them,
redeeming rays will thaw and ease,
thaw and ease the constant burden
of the wait through winter's buildup,
its shortening days and ever colder nights
lancing deeply into the heart of each of them.

Soon, deep, deep snow will blanket
the lot, pile flake after flake
with winter rising, rising. until one day
they will all disappear--the whole battalion--
deadened corn stalks abandoned to the coming winter,
with only their tips visible, but soon to be buried
beneath a silent, suffocating siege.

The Coal of Anger

2006-10-28T08:55:00.000-05:00

Anger is not something that comes easily to me, though it filled the rooms of my marital home for almost 25 years. I grew up in a far different home, where anger was not usually expressed. My parents have been married for more than 50 years, but my mother was often left to her own devices to raise six childen without much assistance from my father who loved her and us but worked in another state and was often absent from our family. She did not easily give herself over to anger. Frustration, maybe. Annoyance, yes. But anger? Not often.

Perhaps because my mother did not vent her anger at those around her, I grew up not really understanding how that could happen in a healthy context. Instead, I absorbed the message that anger should be quieted in order to please others. Despite what I recall as little direct experience with anger, I learned, early on, the effectiveness of submission as a response to it. When my father was home, his word was the final one on all issues. He was, and is, a gentle man, and he never raised his voice or hand against any of us, that I can recall, but we knew that it did no good to argue with him. He simply prevailed. Always.

When I married a man who'd grown up in a home ruled by anger, I soon realized that he'd learned anger's lessons all too well. Fury has many faces, and the one he and his father most frequently chose to use was the silent simmer of anger. The patient silence of anger. The smoldering, frozen wait of anger. With just a glance from this man, I knew when his anger had descended upon my family. It remained among us, pressing its weight upon us in a suffocating fog of righteousness, until we'd paid sufficient penance for whatever action had brought this rage to our doorstep. It gripped and held us until we grovelled and pleased and cajoled it out of our besieged existence. It, and he, prevailed. Always.

I hadn't thought much about the parallels between my father and this man until very recently. Because my father had been so absent from my growing up, I could not imagine he had a role in my eventual decision to submit to the anger my husband doled out in our marriage. He and my ex-husband are different in so many ways. My father is confident, kind hearted and even-tempered. We always knew that he loved us, even in his absence. There was absolutely nothing about him that induced fear in me or any of my siblings. He was, and is, a peaceful, loving man.

My ex-husband is volatile--rarely physical in his anger, yet we all feared him and sought always to placate and to please him so that his angry side remained dormant. As a family, we spent so much energy sidestepping his anger. As a child growing up, I spent absolutely no energy on this with my own father because he simply never was angry. What I've come recently to realize, however, is that there are many paths to a life steeped in anger. Some of them simply prepare fury's way by molding those who are subjected to it into a pose of submission. I practiced submission with my father. I perfected it with my husband.

The problem is that you cannot hold onto anger for long. It seeks its own route of escape. As the Buddha said, "Holding anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

I've been burned by anger far too long.

Recently, I tossed the coal of anger back at someone who'd hurt me in a way so egregious that I could not hold onto my words or the fury I felt or the hotness that feeling created within me. I threw that coal not at the person who angered me but at the shameful accusation in his words. Immediately, in the place of a long simmering coal of anger, and the inadequacy of my usually submissive response to it, I felt justified and relieved of the weight of all of the excuses I'd made for this man and his treatment of me. If ever there was a feeling of closure, it came at the moment I lobbed that coal back at him. It matters not that there is no mutual understanding or feeling of good will to bring elegant closure to our relationship. It is, oddly, a relief that I achieved none of that this time. What is important to me is the profound realization that in this instance, I prevailed.

For now, that is enough.

Pantoum: Time to let the anger out

2006-10-27T19:31:00.000-05:00

It is time to let the anger out
I keep it always too much with me
Hard memory freezes me in its grip
I shut my eyes to dark thoughts

I keep it always too much with me
Like lichen, it clings to me
I shut my eyes to dark thoughts
To open up brings a shock of image

Like lichen, it clings to me
Holds me shuddering in its grasp
To open up brings a shock of image
A place I cannot go

Holds me shuddering in its grasp
I pull back, turn an outward gaze elsewhere
A place I cannot go
Where bodies bruise in union

I pull back, turn an outward gaze elsewhere
Change memory's slide to a blank screen
Where bodies bruise in union
Where innocence is lost

Change memory's slide to a blank screen
Dial the focus to a blur
Where innocense is lost
And once more I retreat

Dial the focus to a blur
As pain ebbs on silent haunches
And once more I retreat
To a silent space of darkness

As pain ebbs on silent haunches
For a moment, I steer memory
To a silent space of darkness
I am the keeper of the pain

For a moment, I steer memory
Hard memory freezes me in its grip
I am the keeper of the pain
It is time to let the anger out

Pantoum: Monarch Liftoff

2006-10-27T18:59:00.000-05:00

A single blooming stalk of purple aster
It bobs lazily in the autumn breeze
Brilliant against a crystalline sky
It bears the gentle weight of a monarch straggler

It bobs lazily in the autumn breeze
Its Halloween colors bleed into purple blossoms
It bears the gentle weight of a monarch straggler
Separate but touching, the two have become one

Its Halloween colors bleed into purple blossoms
It offers sweet succor
Separate but touching, the two have become one
Each fills the other, requites need, sustains life

It offers sweet succor
Like friends become lovers
Each fills the other, requites need, sustains life
In that coming together, something is lost

Like friends become lovers
now minus the anonymity of newness
In that coming together, something is lost
the casualness of early friendship

Now minus the anonymity of newness
they move into a side-by-side space
the casualness of early friendship
Takes shape in a single, lovely space

They move into a side-by-side space
and a different way of touching
takes shape in a single, lovely space
teetering on the edge of intimacy

And a different way of touching
the hesitation of new lovers
teetering on the edge of intimacy
in the moment that exactly precedes monarch lift off

The hesitation of new lovers
a single, blooming stalk of purple aster
in the moment that exactly precedes monarch lift off
brilliant against a crystalline sky

The Way You Carry Me

2006-10-08T07:41:00.000-05:00

You are sound asleep now,
in a bed I've never shared,
in a room I saw just briefly
on my first visit to your house.
I imagine your even breathing,
your body drawing up energy
for the work of tomorrow.

My body fights the urge to sleep,
leaves me in the awful need of newness.
I rest there without complaint,
with joy and anticipation.
My mind turns and turns
over the cadence of your voice.
I hear again the words you dropped
like silver
into the midst of my questioning.
How in all of your life
you’ve never known
a relationship quite like this--
how beautiful my face appears
in the dim light of candles--
how you struggle to put that beauty into words.

Those words caress me,
quicken my pulse,
feed my longing.
I rise to their thrill,
to the memory of your hands on my body,
into the growing seed of new knowing.

We are unlikely lovers,
yet love’s memory holds us.
There is something so brand new
about the way you carry me
to places I've never been.

The Rhythms of the Seasons

2006-09-21T22:48:00.000-05:00

Tonight, I moved the geraniums
inside to the diningroom.
Already, they are protesting confinement
by dropping pink blossoms onto my braided rug.
The back porch looks empty in their absence,
but the diningroom overflows with life suspended.
Green leaves so used to summer's spotlight
seem to close their eyes and sigh
beneath panes that filter autumn's lesser light.

At the supermarket I tossed matches
in among icecream and Shredded Wheat,
anticipating a fire in the woodstove.
Later, as I moved from window to window,
pulling the summer screens up
and the winter storms down,
I shivered, working quickly
to seal out the newly crisp air.

Somewhere,
in the basement, perhaps,
or deep in the walls of this old house
sounds the shuffling of tiny creatures,
instinctively moving inward
ahead of winter's cold.

Tomorrow, I'll haul wood from the shed
and stack it in the den.
Maybe add a wool blanket
to my four-poster bed.
I'll move sleeveless tops
to the cedar chest
and hang wool blazers in my closet.

There's a comforting feel to all of this
of the ritual of the turning seasons.
Even this first time,
in this new-to-me house
in this not-yet-known town,
I feel the ancient rhythms
stroking softly against time's passing.

Allegro and Adagio

2006-09-11T18:29:00.000-05:00

Words tumble out of you
in a torrent of energy,
each one leaping
onto the back of the next,
fusing into white hot
thought knots.

Your stories flit,
meander into questions,
lose their threads,
pick them up elsewhere.

Your words bounce
like ping pong balls
and plunge
like kayaks through white water.
They flash
like swimmers in the fifty free
or sprinters in the 20-yard dash.

They slow, though,
as you take a breath,
move close.
Then,
they soften,
with you,
into the stillness
of the moonlit harbor.

Above us
stars and satellites and planes bound for Iraq
are streaming in the night sky.
The same moon
that waned
over the quickened pace
of the earlier evening
still illuminates the scene,
but now,
in a darkened gazebo,
with a single cricket
chirping out his solo,
adagio,
your mood shifts,
and you draw suddenly quiet,
as an evening's peace
descends.

The Full Corn Moon

2006-09-08T19:15:00.000-05:00

Look up.
Be alert.
There's a full corn moon,
the moon that buys time,
keeps the place,
as we await
the autumnal equinox
and the real harvest moon.
That equinox balances
between day and night,
dividing itself equally,
portioning out sunshine and shadow,
presenting time with an exactness
far different from the nebulous hours
of the summer that precedes
the shift of season.

In the time
of that delicious season,
a hopeful lover
looked ahead to days
of slanting sunshine
and the warmth
of side-by-side bodies
on beach blankets,
of fingers stroking sunwarmed hands,
brushing glints of sand
from blackberry legs and arms.

In those lengthening days,
it seemed there would always be time.

Now, the corn moon rises
in air that bends with crispness
and begs for sweaters,
not swimsuits.

Perhaps by harvest moon's time
tonight's chill will seem familiar.
Perhaps that moon
will offer
an autumnal balm
to ease the pain
of summer's transition.

Summer Heat

2006-08-27T00:02:00.000-05:00

A saxophone wails, soft and slow,
heating up the waning summer's evening,
sending out sultry tones
to caress the listening lovers.
The bass player plucks a beat,
deep and low,
throbbing in rhythm,
as the piano man's fingers
slide up and down the scale,
and the singer pleads, incessantly,
in silver alto tones,
and balloons waft lazily
into a star struck sky,
and all around us
lovers fold into each other,
responding to the beat, the wail,
the heat of the band.

Something Passes Through

2006-08-16T21:49:00.000-05:00

Something passes through the fingers of friends
whose yearning for touch exceeds the instinct not to touch.

In warm sunshine, with arms resting on beach chairs
and crickets keeping rhythm to tidal lapping,
something sparks between those sun-warmed fingers.

Unlike the glacier-pressed body of Long Island,
the bodies of these friends are fluid;
they lean toward each other,
despite best efforts to remain apart.

Unlike the heavy, sea-smoothed granite boulders
sprinkled with sunbathers and riotous towel colors,
these bodies move--like the tide--toward, then away from, each other.

There is acute pain in that tidal movement--
the kind of pain that blocks the flow of life-giving energy,
the kind of pain that calls into question the confidence of friendship,
the kind of pain that does not pass through, but

something passes through the fingers of friends.

An Open Heart

2006-07-31T22:37:00.000-05:00

An open heart feels light and free.
It bursts with joyful anticipation.
It ripples like a fresh stream
through dark water
alight with sunshine.
Its corners are soft,
and it is plump
with goodness and hope.

My heart is wide open
but clenching now,
closing its borders
rather than risking
a shattering.

How to keep the windows of my heart open--
How to let in possibility's air--
How to ignore the deep instinct
that has recently come calling?

Latches are tightening.
Shutters are closing on the lovely light
that has flitted softly between us.

A Victorian Contradance

2006-07-18T19:53:00.000-05:00

We sit, side by side, in a darkened cinema,
our arms occasionally brushing.
There’s a hint of warmth beneath each sleeve
that seems deliciously inviting.
My eyes stay fastened forward,
absorbing flickering images on the screen,
but I wonder what you’re feeling,
and I wonder if distraction is my parvenu alone.

On another day, in Coburn Park,
I eye your long legs
as they stride away
in blue jeans through blue spruce.
You’re conscious, perhaps,
of my lingering gaze
on your tall, lean frame.

Desire is swelling
too soon for comfort.
It begs containment.
There’s so much newness,
such nervous tension,
such clear uncertainty.
The dance has barely begun.
The necessary embrace is awkward
and quickly ends
when the music stops.

You step away,
turn your head,
and my eyes scan
your thick, gray hair,
and my fingers yearn
to sample its softness,
and my lips wonder
what your beard will add
to the kind of kiss
I’m waiting for.

At night, after you leave,
I lie awake,
listening to the ambient sounds
of a new neighborhood,
feeling the quickening beat
of my impatient heart.

What a dance this is—
a Victorian contradance—
where a demure maiden
with dewy décolletage
faces her suitor,
eyes downcast,
dark lashes shadowing
cheeks that blush with passion.

She steps close,
then away,
sometimes touching his fingertips
but in a way that vouchsafes her chastity.

Today, outside my window,
a modern couple
strikes a similar pose.
They face each other
with hands touching,
but in a moment
Victorian chastity disappears
as their bodies meld
in a tight embrace
of arm-wrapping passion.
I watch, enviously,
as they sway to imagined music,
oblivious to passing traffic,
comfortably united
and taking for granted
the ease that, thus far,
eludes you and me.

There’s so much possibility
in a beginning
but also so much risk
of getting that beginning wrong
by rushing to be
in media res.

There are steps to this dance
that cannot be hastened.
This is a time like no other.
If we can dwell in possibility,
as Miss Dickinson instructs,
sweet friendship is certain.
Deep passion can wait.

Coming of Age in Blue Hill, Maine

2006-06-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

For Andrew, on his graduation from Liberty School,
Blue Hill, Maine
June 16, 2006

After two years of Liberty,
managed well,
amid firefly fields
and hikes up Blue Hill Mountain,
bonfires on granite
and woodstove warmings,
with sea smoke in winter
and a springtime of emails from Africa
from the young man who returned
in place of the boy who left
this Blue Hill shore,

After two years of hammock snoozing
with lilacs and lupines framing granite steps
and perfuming front porch lunches
while lobstermen circled traps
and seagulls laughed overhead,

After two years piled high
with sea shells, sea glass, sand dollars,
stones smoothed by saltwater,
mussels picked from the sea and steamed with garlic,

After so many trips over Falls Bridge currents
at high tide, low tide, mid-tide,
with moonlit diamonds on rapids,

In the midst of so much time passing,
so much beauty thrilling, so much change happening,
I somehow missed the moment when the boy became a man.
For one day, I looked, and there he was,
tall and full of knowing what he wanted,
and I was proud and full of wonder at all he’d accomplished.

Mid-tide

2006-05-04T09:52:00.000-05:00

Every day, without effort,
the tide flows out
from beneath Falls Bridge.
It has its own pulse,
one that is pulled
by tidal currents
and propelled seaward.
From the standstill of mid-tide
it turns without thought
and takes its bearings
from a lunar pilot,
stirring calm aquamarine
into white water raging.

As it retreats
from the shore,
its lip retracts
from rocky promontories,
revealing kelp tresses
and caches of mussels
parched and thirsting
for sea juices.
Along sandy stretches
a booty chest is exposed--
sandollars, sea glass, periwinkles, slipper shells
an occasional four-legged star fish.
Heaved from the depths,
they wait to be plucked
by searching fingers,
stuck into linty pockets
or Shop 'n Save bags,
then dried and displayed
in a jar on a table
or made into earrings
that dangle from pulsing lobes.

Twelve hours hence,
as if at some silent signal,
the ocean inhales deeply.
Beneath Falls Bridge
water slows to a gentle swirl
then hovers
before turning inward
back to shore
to overflow tidal pools
and flow over kelp headresses
and barnacled boulders,
rising, rising.

The beach glitterati
that escaped the purvey
of beachcombers,
heave a collective sigh
as salt water tentacles
snatch them safely seaward
for another tide's time.
Sunbathers move towels back, back,
then stand,
shake out the day's belongings
and head homeward
as the sea pulls its covers
to the shore's neck.

My life waits at mid-tide,
suspended
between certainty and doubt--
hope and resignation--
presence and absence--
perseverance and letting go.

My life is swirling,
gently circling,
idling in flat water,
lacking lunar guidance.

Will it empty seaward
a final time?
Trickle inward
to fill niches
of soul and heart?
Rise up and rush over me
in a raging passion
that requites need?

It is the aimlessness
of mid-tide
that is difficult
to bear.
It foments questions
unanswerable
before tide's end.

The Guest House by Rumi

2006-05-03T13:47:00.000-05:00

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Bouyancy by Rumi

2006-05-03T13:40:00.000-05:00

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn't.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.
I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hids like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.

We're groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

Each Note by Rumi

2006-05-03T13:33:00.000-05:00

Advice doesn't help lovers!
They're not the kind of mountain stream
you can build a dam across.

An intellectual doesn't know
what the drunk is feeling!

Don't try to figure
what those lost inside love
will do next!

Someone in charge would give up all his power,
if he caught one whiff of the wine-musk
from the room where the lovers
are doing who-knows-what!

One of them tries to dig a hole through a mountain.
One flees from academic honors.
One laughs at famous mustaches!

Life freezes if it doesn't get a taste
of this almond cake.
The stars come up spinning
every night, bewildered in love.
They'd grow tired
with that revolving, if they weren't.
They'd say,
"How long do we have to do this!

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
Be your note.
I'll show you how it's enough.

Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

Water From Your Spring by Rumi

2006-05-03T13:30:00.000-05:00

What was in that candle's light
that opened and consumed me so quickly?

Come back, my friend! The form of our love
is not a created form.

Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember

when my soul heard something
from your soul. I drank water

from your spring and felt
the current take me.

Constant Conversation by Rumi

2006-05-03T13:25:00.000-05:00

Who is the luckiest in this whole orchestra? The reed.
Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.
All reeds, sugarcane especially, think only
of this chance. They sway in the canebrakes,
free in the many ways they dance.

Without you the instruments would die.
One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.
The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself.
Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,
that what died last night can be whole today.

Why live some soberer way and feel you ebbing out?
I won't do it.
Either give me enough wine or leave me alone,
now that I know how it is
to be with you in a constant conversation.

The Blocked Road

2006-05-03T13:23:00.000-05:00

Jelaluddin Rumi was born in 1207 and was a Persian theological scholar, teacher of Sufism, artist and poet. I've just begun to discover the beauty of his poetry. Here's one that spoke to me.

The Blocked Road

I wish I knew what you wanted.

You block the road and won't give me rest.

You pull my lead-rope one way, then the other.

You act cold, my darling!

Do you hear what I say?

Will this night of talking ever end?

Why am I still embarrassed and timid about you?

You are thousands. You are one.

Quiet, but most articulate.

Your name is Spring.

Your name is wine.

Your name is nausea

that comes from wine!

You are my doubting

and the lightpoints

in my eyes.

You are every image, and yet

I'm homesick for you.

Can I get there?

Where the deer pounces on the lion,

where the one I'm after's

after me?

This drum and these words keep pounding!

Let them both smash through their coverings

into silence.

Rumi

Excerpts from Rilke's letters on love

2006-04-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

...You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg of you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, wihout noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always a beginning--to be a beginner!

...

Some day,... some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being.

This advance will (at first much against the will of the outstripped men) change the love-experience, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.