New Home Day 4, March 2018

Gray skirts of afternoon trail

wind chimes, curled leaves, and

the rhythmic wooden thump

of cars above the pedestrian walkway.

Beneath the bridge--strange world

of sand, tire swings, and signage placing

the risk entirely on those at play.

Coffee shop festooned with colored lights--

men at the bar discuss anime and Lord of the Rings.

A man with tattoos on his forehead and soft black eyes

offers to buy me a drink.

Gestating Faith (December 2017)

My pew,  white femur
of a beached tree,
faces waves.
They fold in and out,
steady as respiration,
imperturbable.
Sun, low over
my left shoulder
on this winter afternoon,
skims grasses and dunes
with a vague warmth,
pink and fawn.
I am small
on a long strip of sand.
I am wombed
in lake’s heartbeat, lulled
by sun’s mother-voice.

2018

Down this long wooden stair,
slick snow piles on step and railing.
On every side tree trunks people the ravine
down toward the frozen lake.

My muffled hand slides
clumps of snow away
with every bend of knee;
padded fingers grasp
wet boards as I step,
carefully down the side
of stillness.

Attachment to life
curls, decided as my grip,
spirit agreeing (for once) with fingers--
not fear so much as looking forward,
as wanting to go on---
affirmation over and over
before a thousand living
witnesses.

I turn at the bottom,
look back at wooded slopes
I have descended,
feel like flinging out my arms,
like screaming one great cheer
of exultation.

Changing Light

Night creeps into the glass
figures on my window sill.
Shadows reveal layers
in the thick bud vase.
Its flowers hold only
a clue of red, a guess
of green. But the bluebird
and my mother's tiny cat become
three cobalt dimensions
and the street lights
are planets inside them.

Hungry Ghosts

The antique stores around the square
stock a half-sinister wistfulness. It smells
of cigarette smoke, manufactured fragrance,
and very fine dust. It looks like the residue
remaining in tinted bottles after evaporation.
It sounds like discs on endless repeat and like
all conversations which never can happen.
It feels like shelves of perfectly motionless toys.
It feels like Ecclesiastes.
 

Grace Note

Looking up at the moon
above these wires is like
lying under four silver-white
viola strings--and you
a throb of song.

Not A Mermaid

Sometimes she jumps, dolphin-like--
an arch of hope and then
breath, light, cool rivers of wind
over skin still wet.
She sees--off, out
even to a horizon!
And after--the smack,
the inevitable downing,
strange weight and slow
movement and everything
only through a sheen of water.
If only she could learn
to ride these waves
all the way in to shore.

Kite

The lucky one balanced out
of crazy, ripping circles
and that final dragging stab
into mud. It was always iffy,
which kite would work,
would climb invisible lifts
of wind and insist on heaven.
Then you could feel it--
that other world yanking the string
and cutting your small fist.
Terror and elation sang
between chest and mouth--
as if you, yourself, might rise,
tangle in electric wires or watch
the warm blue ball of earth
falling away behind you.

Cook County Nature Preserves

Tiny, still refuge,
rock in sea of noise--
car and truck traffic parts
like water around
your miniature forest.
Outside, an ambulance
shrieks. I am glad,
when my time comes,
that someone will be hiking,
shoulders easing,
limbs swinging,
body settling back
in stride with soul.

The Artist

. . . the more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. ~ Vincent van Gogh


"I love you more than you can know,"
Grandma brushes my hair from my face
at our final greeting.


And still, at night I sleep beneath
thousands of tiny white stitches
run from needles held
by Grandma and her friends
on Tuesdays in Arkansas.


I curl beneath scenes of appliqué children,
each with a companion: the worms in a corn can,
the kite, the frog in the pocket,
the Bible with the girl in Sunday best--
the indignities of sleep swathed
beneath a drool-stained hem,
beneath thread-bare trousers
and raveling dresses
whose soft fabric was salvaged
by one who never forgot the Depression.


Isn't this what we ask for--to leave,
with help from our own Tuesday Ladies,
some substance of our love?

Wonder

Now it pays irregular visits  . . .
I lift my head and suddenly
the trees are mysteries
in the half-light.
The corner bush
(crushed against stained siding
and mangled into geometric form)
becomes unbearably tender,
its evergreen fingers holding
a down of snowflakes
unbroken, unmelted.
 . . . the dusk has eaten almost all color,
but not the red slash of cardinal
foraging under the dormant apple tree.

While Tending

Shock of green parakeet
in two-toned foliage
outside Chicago

Lance of raptor stare
upon refilling
the bird feeder

Perot overbite
in ornamental pear

Hawk's talloned clench
round chipped red railings

Our flocking concerns, and yet
the tremors of
a heavenly host


 

The Trees

The trees
under this substantive white space,
this back-light of sticky snow-crystal heaps,
are revealed.


Here are no straight lines.
Each trunk and twig embodies
its own slow, sinuous progression.
A flayed stub of dead tree
lays bare this whorling--
its wooden muscles graining
up and around,
like a twist of clay.


Above, scaled bellies of old oaks
and all top-twigs stand
in high relief under
a gray-white hood under
a gray-white sky.
And I, beneath, awed, enveloped,
breathe my tiny breath
so much more loudly
than the forest.

 

Walking

Getting up, I dreamed already
of walking in the woods--
those few miles stashed
in the crooked arm
of Route Six and Torrence.
I had to wait 'till after school
and taking out the dog, and even then,
even walking leaf-incensed paths,
I still felt a'jitter toward myself
and the world.




Three others passed,
one wielding hiking poles and striding
shcrunch, shcrunch as if the trail
were more than a mile, as if she were
an arrow tight for distant heights--
and two gingering along, a man
and a woman who carried a broken shoe.
When next I saw her, both shoes were off.
She went so gently, touching the world
through soft black socks.

Mother

In snapshot depictions
of our family's life, I see
so much reading:
Grandpa and The Roly-Poly Pudding,
The Hobbit and my dad.
My sister reads to me. I read to my brother.
The one who does not appear to read
is Mom--who read us a chapter
every evening, year upon year, unremarkable
as a hug goodnight.


Also, she was behind the camera.

Relic

We are taking everything out of the house.
This includes your coat--
rough green-brown with large buttons, hard to manipulate.
The weight, as I lift it, surprises,
but hanging from my shoulders, I see
how men could walk in it, the thick fabric falling
below their knees.
I am a usurper in this heaviness
(Midwestern woman in the coat my grandpa wore);
I know only the lint of it:
Maui sunsets which still couldn't rival the Illinois farm's,
hot showers sneaked in the officers' quarters,
comrades who presented an enemy's teeth at a hospital bed, and
the enemy's wallet with faces of family.
I know when Japan surrendered everyone went out howling
but you sat and thought.

Surprise

Turning toward the chopper's sound, I see
a dragonfly on my shoulder.


And so


the message is not
dragged through the heavens,
but rests, instead, on my back--


lighter than sensation, filling
the softest edge of sight. 

No Island is an Island

"You're complicating my life,"
an offhand remark at work--
the speaker not knowing,
and not to blame,
that I hear in the words
confirmation
of my darker fears:
I am a complication.
On balance,
I am more trouble
than I am worth.




I suppose, we all complicate
each others' lives.
Our root systems snarl,
fibrous root to spider-lace tip,
around each other.
You can't--
you cannot--
uproot yourself
without taking from others.




As a creationist spoke
of Antediluvian forests, I pictured
strange trees knit by tangle
of root and branch
into islands riding
a broad warm sea.
In such a case,
complication
holds life together.

small poem (revised from a few years back)

Dewdrop, dewdrop,
jewel of a leaf,
teardrop world,
bright and brief.


Chime and glister,
sparkle, diamond, star,
harmonic flicked
from God's guitar.

Pencil In Time

Drawing,
I see what I couldn't see
at eight--my grandpa's
strength, a youngness
compared to older days
(sharp with proximity)--
and what I always saw,
the giant hands,
marvelously knuckled.
I hope one day to work
such storied hands.