Praying to Small Gods
August 28, 2009
Praying to Small Gods
The pose mothers take at the end of the day, in the silence,
cheeks blushed by night light, is the bowing of relief.
Sleep, the current that sways, ready to buoy
children into a kelp forest’s slackened safety,
there, but gone from her.
They kneel at the foot of the bed.
Between inhale and exhale, between prayer and answer,
they dwell in the pause. They have done everything
they could. They have done nothing much.
She Wants to Taste Everything
July 23, 2009
She Wants to Taste Everything
Strawberries send their sister-shoots
across the gravel path, leading the baby
to each spectacular fruit she can reach,
rain-taut and dimpled,
a connect-the-dot game for the willing.
She buries her face in the lavender bush
as content as the morning’s fat bees.
An earthworm entertains her
from my opened palm,
wiggling the Good Earth Dance.
She thinks the world is edible.
She wants it all at her lips,
devours milk and sunlight
just sitting in dewed pajamas,
her whole body a taproot.
Soon, she will learn to use thumb and finger
to pick her way through her desire.
For now, her fists are berry-stained.
Grass blooms between each knuckle,
the earth, compacted, snug inside.
We all have our berry-eyes on, berry lips, chins, knees. In honor of the soo soo sweet & petite Oregon strawberry, and for the marions, logans, thimbles, salmons, huckles and blues in our pails.
This is Why I Write
March 24, 2009
This is Why I Write
to save the breath within me
the one that will soon join a company of breaths become
fog voice robin warble the blues
sifting through a cracked kitchen window
I write to savor the breath that is still mine
but borrowed who knows
how deep air’s roots tap
who had it before me
who is holding onto the same tether
holding their breath, too
will I fail to get it all down get it all out exhale to the core
of course I will
will I dream by day
above traffic
within the chaos of children circling my shins
like gullible fish
dream by night
the pillow’s slack-spot cradling a brain
that plots too much
I cannot help but do it
like habit like a good drug
that sustains me no matter that mostly
my breath hovers above
a blank page.
For the VoiceCatcher Collective… for the great creative prompt!
In the Tenth Month
February 22, 2009
In the Tenth Month
for James
Most everything is clear.
The night’s moon halves
between fir limb and roof pitch
a blue pool spilling
into the steel sink, a shine
that out-weighs street lamps
and my own turning on.
Midnight rivers and tributaries
spider down my breasts, down
mountain of baby
covered in parchment,
submerged turtle shell,
to the shadows carried
in the moment’s underbelly.
The white kimono
inked in indigo flowers
no longer closes,
the sash atop my ribs
tail of comet
loose end of the script
still spooling over
the page, the quill quivering
before dawn floods
the bearable dark.
10 months and 2 years… Happy Birthday, my Crocus Boy!
(from For the Willing, Finishing Line Press, 2008.)
Mama Takes a Bubble Bath
November 15, 2008
Mama Takes a Bubble Bath
Here, wedge of water
slim parcel of time
her body traced by clouds
clotting and pulling apart,
a world adrift.
The porcelain suggests
that she lean back,
but how long her legs reach
this body of birth filling
every space water wants.
Mold in the cracks.
Smudges on eyeglasses.
A three-poem soak. Never enough,
or perfect. Here she rubs,
softens herself – pumice to heal,
cloth to nape – as if tuning
an instrument for what song
is expected next.
The children come,
stand at the edge,
thousands of tiny bubble explosions
the moment’s metronome,
and try to comprehend
how she is not
on their side.
Published in VoiceCatcher 3. So true today.
When Air Traffic Ceased
September 11, 2008
When Air Traffic Ceased
Sept. 11, 2001
We come to the field at twilight,
our horizon a black, leafy frame.
The sky expands effortlessly.
Stars begin, one by one, to testify,
like our held breath,
like never before.
Vanishing Point
February 10, 2008
Vanishing Point
The wind is a steady hand at my chest.
An hour to ride my bike head-first
into spring, that flimsy catkin teasing
from a maple, the thing I follow
at a lumbering, hypnotic cadence.
I push through early-morning shadows
and winter’s left-over gloom
as the sun winnows down the path.
Nothing distracts but the juncos
criss-crossing like lace unraveling.
Behind me, three miles by now,
my child busies the dust
in the hulking house, the place
where all of this began.
I long to be no longer visible, an arrow
quivering into a grove but missing
every tree, an exquisite passing.
Below a frost-slicked trestle,
the creek swells its green skin
with yesterday’s pollen and rain.
A fresh grave is being dug on the hill.
Skunk cabbage jaws open above
the curved rot of a lone Chinook
in the shallows. Cottonwood resin
coats the air, sweet and welcome.
From the mottled water, a mallard
pads her way up the mud bank
to a nest enfolded
by ten hues of green. So clearly
she slips into the tangle
while her mate devotedly treads
in the direction of her return.
Like the expected rioting
of bud to flower to fruit,
I am unable to resist the path.
The wind, now at my back,
chills my bare legs revolving out
a rhythm that will carry me homeward.
Iron-hot blood floods
its capillarious routes. Propelled,
I become that point
on the horizon slowly
coming back into view.
First published in Pilgrimage, 2007.
Counting Cross-Stitch
January 4, 2008
Counting Cross-Stitch
She shares the morning with winter birds
feeding beyond the window.
Red, white and tufted they dart
from sap-cured trees to a birdhouse
overflowing black oilers onto the snow,
a skirt of hunger. Threading night to day,
they tack dawn to a blue hour
that pales by the minute.
Lip lines ring her full mouth.
She cannot stave off time
which raises veins along her tapered hands,
fingers capped with polish lifting
an embroidery hoop to a lamp.
The flat dish of fabric brightens.
Somewhere within its blank weave
a code is trapped, a pattern
that once knotted will overcome
the space between the strands,
sheen itself into existence.
This moment is as slick as floss.
She tries to teeth it just so.
Lead it to needle, bind it to cloth.
This morning, though, she will need to also palm
the pure truth of seed and suet,
continue the doling,
enough to fatten up the birds’ reserves
for the arduous trip out of winter
into a blushing, ruddy sky.
(First appeared on The Pedestal Magazine — www.thepedestalmagazine.com)
Weather
December 6, 2007
Weather
Hood up, he drags his feet
through the morning’s puddles, away
from the dull fury of mother against father
and the duplex containing the dogs
and his small sister. The gray rain insulates.
He watches for the slick yellow bus,
its chain-call rounding the feral streets,
gathering up children
on the first day of school.
Nothing keeps him here except
the stop-sign at an averted angle,
continuously rinsed and red,
also taunting the sky.
He would rather be out
in the sloppy world, soaked by rain
unable to find a creek-bed.
With his sneaker-heel he carves channels
from one pothole to another,
and water gratefully follows.
… in awe of the will of water… December 2007, Oregon.
(First published by Hot Metal Press at www.hotmetalpress.net )
Missing Migration
November 25, 2007
Missing Migration
Two headlands jut craggy and gray
into the brine, cupping the beach
before the tide swells. Gray whales sink
beneath a slate horizon, slitting nothing
with their breath but imagination,
my eyes trained to catch
on the smallest of clues –
Orange bill of a bobbing surf scoter.
The arrowed purpose of a tern’s flight.
Smooth-humped seals
perch-fishing below the breakerline.
At my feet, finger-sized pieces of driftwood
point neatly in the direction of retreating waves.
They form miniature mountain ranges,
ravines and estuaries, resemble
blast-trees after an eruption, gleam
like red, yellow and black animals that glide
through our view, mass tidal movements
that pass the periphery of our lives,
along and between all coasts –
Alewife and salmon.
Slug and salamander.
Warbler and swallow.
Swan and caribou.
The strong wings of geese
sloughing off night
up a black river.
Out of our cars and hobbling
on rolled-smooth basalt,
I am not the only one waiting
for a whale-print to surface,
that hologram of hope rising
before the beast, for what
we have nearly missed.
