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.

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.

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.

The Jump

Six or seven and
my first time
on a horse--
an old thing
who ambled
and stopped
on his own.
Impatient for the
younger, faster option,
I traded the old gentleman
for my turn
on the rogue.
He wasn't, really--
only confused
by my amateur sawing
at the bit.
Pull back evenly!
They called from the fences
as Chico's hooves
thudded faster
and my best efforts
fell woefully short.
It was embarrassing, mostly,
so I bailed--
swung left leg over
and shoved off.
Given how fast he got
before my uncle calmed him
at the pasture's far end,

it was (probably)
the best decision
(other than preemptively
learning how to ride).

These days,
it is too easy to bail . . .
and I'm the one who has to
go and catch that horse.

Afternoon Pond

You can feel it in your body--
just where are your feet?
Your center has shifted,
pulled forward and down,
like moving against wind
or knee-high water.
Walking is too much work,
so you sit and watch
the gull's crumpled-airplane-angle
toward pond, the heron's
spear-tipped tranquility,
and the turtles--
how they poke from domes
of horn, their deliberate
lives quickened by an
almost summer star.

It Doesn't Take Much

It doesn't take much--
flour, water, yeast and salt,
and hours and such.

Brew tea. Fix toast and munch.
Observe a snow gust's somersault.
It doesn't take much.

Hen sets on her small clutch--
body's warmth over fragile vaults,
and hours and such--

feathers ragged to the touch.
Work of waiting without halt,
it doesn't take much.

Ceiling came too close to hutch
for candle flame--a burned spot
from hours and such.

This living . . . despite smutch,
learning to exult--
it doesn't take much.
Just hours and such.

Common Cold

Recall, oh little, much-loved one,
you have been in--and
(more importantly) out--
of this before.

The impulse toward tightness
and dimness and sleep,
the hounding in toward only
one scant hope (to be small
enough to do no harm)--
this, my dear, is the sneeze
and not the ultimate use
of the nose.

There is still the most bountiful
breadth of smells: manure and
lily-of-the-valley and summer rain,
bread and coffee and warm blasts
from washing. These remain.
And you, too, will walk among them,
rejoicing.

Largo ma non tanto

Those were the lessons
of the most lovely song . . .

the voice lugged by handle
worn to wire's skeletal curve
through loft overlooking pews'
dim lines and one red jewel
of everlasting light.

In that holy place,
for months I rubbed
the same phrases,
trying to wing life
from box and strings,
taught by a woman
refined, perseverant,
and indefinably sad.

But I was little more than eleven
and could not reach.

Evening Ruminations

I hate the answers I mouth
from fear rather than conviction.

I hate the weakness which runs through soul
and brain and claims an ineffectual voice.

I hate the ugliness I sometimes bring
into the world.

But I love the candle's bud of flame, the reflections
caught in an old and empty decanter.

I love the rim of wall and roof in soft-lit room
and the dripping dark beyond.

I love the surprising grace of sharing a book
after a long, hard day.

Adventures of a Speck

I am learning to walk
with air between my fingers,
knuckles relaxed, accepting
that I will never move the earth,
but ride it, spinning, through
distance longer than thought.
Thirty-one times I have whirled
all the way around the sun.

Healing Conversations

I find him heartening,
that fellow who, half-healed,
likened men to leggèd trees.
There are lots of us blurry folk,
divine spit on our lids,
telling God what we see.

[Untitled 4]

At church, in stained glass:
white and gray clouds, blue sky,
an orange-brown butterfly
with perfect veins.

The pastor approaches the
inevitable subject. "Shit,"
mutters my neighbor,
stereotypical in her polyester
pants, her orange-white old lady hair.

I feel the ember dread of hell
upon me, of late --
the objective horror of it,
the hot breath like the sulfur's
last sensation before the mower's
searing of tattered wings,
smashing of gently fuzzed body.

These are things we try
not to think about -- like butterflies,
symbols of new life which never live
for long, like all the little frogs
we unwittingly squeezed to death
as small children at the water's edge.

Are You cruel? I ask. Well, are You?
Are You? the scales loosening
from wings of faith, the wings wilting
in gray gravel and dust.

But somewhere, still, I trust.
I am following the monarch memory
through generations of my own faith.

The Practicalities of Ghosts

The Brock County Cemetery was not given to ghosts. It was small and orderly with far too many of those flat grave markers that make mowing easy. Jill Bright was not given to ghosts, either. Fairies, she thought, absently, working grass seed into the bald spot on her brother's mound. If I had to pick something, it would be fairies. The rainbow-y, friendly kind. A cricket sang, hiding from the hot sun in the grass roots around Freddie's headstone.  

Several plots behind Jill, a beheaded silk arrangement fluttered like a dead bird in the gust of a passing car. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. I'm getting sunburn, she told herself. I should have worn a hat. Hastily, she sprinkled water from her water bottle over the seed, then over a tissue she fished out of her pocket. She rubbed the tissue over the words "bravest of brothers," removing the mulberry-tinted droppings that grackles had splattered over her brother's tribute. And he had been—always the brave one, with Jill trooping along behind.

Her arms prickled now, the fine hair standing upright like fuzz. The cricket fell silent. She scrubbed until the tissue turned dusty between her fingers. Then she straightened up and stared over the flat cemetery. Impulsively, she took one big step onto the middle of her brother's mound and flung the tissue shreds away. "That's it!" she shouted. "Come out!" 

There was a ghost after all. "Isn't new grass such a hopeful thing?" it chirped. "Like a wound healing over. You're standing on the seed."

             

"Oh, for heaven's sake, who cares!" Jill leaned toward the ghost, "Shut up, Stupid. Just shut up and listen for once! You left him alone! You with your 'laughter is good medicine' and 'hope for the best' and your everlasting antioxidant-rich juices! You saw that look in his eyes. He was scared and he was dying, but you pretended not to know. He had to carry it all by himself! So you lost each other." 

Her voice grew soft, regretful: "You lost each other before he was even dead." She reached for the ghost. And throwing her arms around her own shoulders, wept at last.

Theory and Practice

Dr. Robinson, my first captain
of poetry's starship, would have no slumping,
no folding of arms across the chest
in that re-purposed college classroom.
He sent us traveling--two dozen satalites--
around and around, intending each one
to arrive, in one's own mind,
at some central truth.

Poetry matters because
life matters. We live our poems
well or poorly, and sometimes we miss
the inestimable music.

I want, Dr. Robinson, "the reconciling
of opposites." I've lived the images
of solitude, loneliness, laziness, longing
with eyes open as Illinois miles,
or reticent as roots beneath the snow.
I've watched monarchs emerge
from emerald tombs. I've plucked
bright sulfurs, wing by ragged wing,
from the old car's grille.

The reconciling--that
is what I want.

Untitled 2

Sometimes it appears Christianity does not work:
we are Peters lopping off ears and later denying.
We are widows persistently wailing, receiving neither
justice nor husbands nor sons back from the dead.
Each day appears to mark yet another failure of love.
We abandon; we are abandoned. 

In these Holy Saturday moments,
our minds sort the spices of sorrow--
acidity of anger, pungence of regret,
sweetness of summer remembered--
as all the difference in the world
lies buried in the ground.

Monday Prayer

Help me choose
    to watch the white sun rise and pink the clouds,
    to light the candles at evening,
    to do the dishes, to close only
    the screen door of my heart.

Let me observe
    the daily graces, even when
    bright hope blurs in some dank fog.

Burn on, Holy Fire,
    Comforter, inspire
    each small act with prayer, with praise:
    each quiet mingling of desperation and mercy.

Basement Places

In each morning's beloved ritual,
Grandpa paused between the gathering
of various pet foods and
the stepping out of doors.
I, loitering in child-sized boots
on cracked back porch linoleum,
watched him descend five cement steps
to a doorway under the pantry window,
saw him disappear, then reemerge
in his everyday armor: long sleeved coveralls
and rubber boots nearly to his knees.

I could stand on the back porch and look
up through the outside panes of pantry window
into a window-ledge vision
(hid from the inside house by boxes),
a world unto itself: place of clouded glass,
old lace curtains, and the rounded, blue-green
forms of old electric line insulators.

And beneath, the basement.

Once, I stepped down there myself,
took in the L-shaped room, the old sink,
and the entrance to the furnace room
housing (family lore suggested) Mrs. Coalmonster.
In the end, it wasn't the monster
but the fleas on my white socks
which quenched my thirst for exploration.

Events, a wise woman once said,
can bring both gift and wound.
And thank God for even the fleas,
said another. It's so, I think,
with our behind and underneath spaces
where breath sticks in the half-light
of shadows and dust.

Fear flecks against my ankles, shame bows
old shelving. The sink is dry, is dirty, and I
distrust, even, my belief. Having lost the strength
of my own faith, I'm left with only
this small excitement leaning
toward what God alone might do.

Christmas Cactus 5

The grace flowers bloom
whether I ask them or not,
whether I notice or not.
Their red wings swell, unfurl,
shrivel around precious seed
day by day atop my desk.
Luscious color crowns
a desert presence, unperturbed
by hints of sharp darkness rolling in.

Take a moment to contemplate
the red winging, the pink fairy tip
within each flower;
take a moment for noticing--
and let the rest . . .
rest.

Unnamed

Oh, that I could reach
down in myself and wrench
a skyfull of lightning,
a broil of blue-black clouds--
and thunder! the kind that
splits one right in two,
leaves soul bare and blinking.

But I suppose that might be
a bit much. I have instead
these rows and rows of sunflowers
beside the highway,
and he saying that things were sad,
and I: "They weren't so bad"
and not
Why, why, why
did we all carry
the thorn?

This Little Light

You are a higher wattage than most of us.
It must be tiring sometimes--
the brilliance of your emotions,
the intensity of your visions--
such passions contending
in such a little boy.
You are the brightest light--
drawing your peers like moths
or scattering them like beetles.

It's all right, buddy--
in the end, we are all the same,
so tiny and so huge.