petals and bees

Ordain, ordinary –

See the one within the other?

Just as a day commands for a

Minor rearrangement

As in the letters of a word,

As in the words of an exchange

That move customary into ministry;

It’s just that we are all priests – rather –

Beasts who wake up every morning

Conferring holy orders upon a day by

Placing our character of self somewhere else in this

Ordinary, fleshly, middle of the road

But by now sacred arrangement –

It is that category of awake, as in

Something hasn’t settled, and

The worry of some flattened, stowaway grief,

Like the cardboard between wall and waste bin,

That won’t be gone until you move it, but first to

Address the clutter of food-scrap defectors,

Mold, the exodus of ants outlining floor and garbage

And that cardboard, again, from the foreclosure sale,

A subsequent casualty after the marriage went sour, and now,

Now, your ransacked heart has sent you to the pantry,

Reaching for the cereal, the milk, the bowl —

What else on earth will enact the divine for you:

Hold, wait and serve you, lip to lip, from out of itself?

http://www.postcardfromholland.com/still_life_chinese_bowl_white.html

Rolling hills? I blame our

Somersaulting eyes.

Sight, he said, is the closest we get to

Contact without touching, which is why

It leaves us full of want.

I had asked him what it’s like

Driving an eighteen wheeler up

The Northwest, into the upper crust

And across chunks of the middle states:

When you can see the fog in the cracks of the mountain

And it looks like how it feels to be held by sleep,

Or by a beautiful woman,

The mountain becomes that much more eminent.

As he left I requested a souvenir of how he lives:

Something dirty and sweet, something summer

I wrote Yield to Sunrises in the film of the dust on the side of the sleeper,

I also left careful instruction to mind all clearances and steep grades,

Use low gear when necessary and to pass with care,

And I added mention of soft shoulders and blind curves

For him to remember me by –

It was the most honest poem I had ever written, he said,

Knowing so much more about truth than I.

He’s carried across state lines months of

Solitary hours and somersaulting eyes –

More potent than any metaphor, even this one about

Poems being road signs to direct a lived life –

Too cautionary, he warned, when you put

Your want into words, you are left with

One Ways, Do Not Enters and Dead Ends.

One year later he brings me a bouquet of Fennel

Between his burned thumb and busted forefinger –

Exactly what I asked for – more stories and

A present that smells like interstate exhaust, yet aromatic as chew tobacco,

Only a bit sweeter and in full summer bloom,

A companion to every highway: because you asked me how I live.

Sometimes what you need is a day of sobriety

With a view of wild oats, yellow as popcorn,

Whose kernels opened and dropped seed

In the first heat wave way back when 

You were instructed to help, somehow –

It was more of a tug than a command.

Remember when imagination became responsibility?

When your life became linear: forward or back,

Never a behind, between or a beyond, as in

Beyond the grain, the grapes; beyond the olive trees,

The live oaks eaten by deep green up

To the top five feet, a crown of sinking sun and

Beyond to the hill of oaks still inside day, but not far behind

The shadow trail. Beyond the hill, the sky,

Beyond the sky- 

for Renee & Larry

She had been walking behind him,

Falling in love with his cadence during their three-hour group hike.

Now mid-fifties, after buying her first house at sixteen, exiting two marriages

And a life of slinging fixer uppers, she marries this man

With third degree burns disfiguring his entire face and body:

Who was working at a dump

In the center of Illinois with his dad –

When he made a little fire to stay warm, but since he was only

Eight years old, he neglected a high-octane paint can that was too close –

What followed next was a chain of cosmetic surgeries and a

You had it coming. It was all that his father ever said about the accident.

She calls him her Million Dollar Husband. Between his reconstruction,

The pacemaker, the organs and joints and bones removed and replaced

Over the years, it is probably close to what he’s worth.

This kind of story telling is bilingual,

It needs to be sung, heard, then translated

Into the language of the spirit –

I hear her say he is undefeatable but she never spoke the word.

We look out the window at Larry, braced and bent over irrigation, as he

Constructs a lifeline for her dahlias and hydrangeas.

Building is an integral extension of his heart.

Each project an intimate artery to the world.

He never graduated high school, but it wasn’t necessary because he knows things

He doesn’t even know how he knows.

He’s been around for centuries, she says,

Lived life is beyond what we think and say –

Some people have courage and they need to be talked about,

Let it be a kind of legacy for those who make out of abuse and horror a place for nurture,

Decorating it with flagstones, lined with big flowers –

Everything has the capacity to teach us,

Translate it from all the singing.

And you’ve rolled the windows down, the car

coughing over every pothole, and the world

is green to your left and to your right.

The first weekend of summer,

and everything unfastens.

When the orchards are mulched

it’s hard to believe how six months have passed

since you made applesauce with your shoes,

nosing around for the last of the death-sweetened fruits.

The branches espaliered as if they’re dancing,

as the baby grapes, within arm’s reach, foreshadow or reminisce

exactly where you were last year, this time.

This is the greatest blessing staying in one place offers —

Grace of custom, seeing the small finches go out

and come back to the eaves of your life until it becomes

a nest, until you learn to not be good

at everything right away, like a rhythm,

allowing it to be messy, gloriously, over again.

At first you don’t want to know how alone you are,

Much like grief, there is denial and this goes on

For quite awhile. You spend your time with

People you will end up not liking but pretending you do –

If you’re already denying, why not continue.

Meanwhile your loneliness will surface,

And you’ll be sad about something:

Not having someone to kiss, or hold or take sides with

Or argue over the potato chips on top of the fridge,

Having kids, not having them. Eventually you will be so sad,

Because your heart won’t take the phony denial for long and

Those friends who aren’t your friends will exit your life

And you’ll be alone. You’ll hate it. You’ll go for the phone until

You listen to yourself think and find it interesting, inane,

Maybe even intelligent and witty –

Instead of waiting around, you start doing what you love,

Wishing someone was alongside you but proceeding regardless

To the mountains, or the ocean or the movie theater.

About this time, you start telling your loved ones that you’ve

Gotten used to being alone. Which isn’t true and it’s not the same as liking it

So you stay alone until you realize there is something to learn here.

When you can sink into yourself without a tantrum and

Have rounded out your own rotten mind, you will

Witness the shimmering genie of Solitude (who vaguely resembles Socrates) –

When you’ve made shelter, found food, collected medicine, crafted weapons

And made home on that lush, bountiful island of yourself, you will be granted

Three nonreturnable gifts: you will know thyself, you will discern, and you will have compassion.

I’ve sung what I was given/

Some was bad and some was good/

I never did know from where it came/

And if I had it all to do again, I am not sure I would/

Play the poet game. – Greg Brown

Go outside and find a tree,

In a gully, on a bluff, somewhere unmanaged.

Look where the branches are broken and how

It’s been hewn by the westward wind; see it

Stripped down at the waist,

Roots tangled, a result of shifted plates –

So you aren’t planted against a mountain but

Your litany of requests will be the same until you die:

Love me, help me love deeper, help me, help me, help!

Which is a kind of holding still, inside the bedlam

Of having a body that moves, a roving mind

And a heart hammering away at the project of you

As if there is a deadline.

Not everyone is dealt this useless hand

(The need to feel plainly and speak poems),

But your prayer is designing you now, in whatever your

Roots have twisted around, there seeking livelihood,

Whatever you are greedy for, wherever your want is latent –

Wherever the immanent tremor of desire resonates,

Sculpting the ecology of the spirit.

Love the world,

However it pleases you –

It will be prayer, regardless.

I want to thank the older woman who

Shared with me her rhubarb compote,

Who steeped the herbs and brought me tea,

Who stoked the fire and sat close. We read in silence, together;

Who reached out and touched my arm when I thanked her,

To the woman who served me with a spirit of giving,

Who served me, who served me until

My head lit up at the purity of the moment and my heart –

(My travel companion, my charity case, that friend who needs explaining)

Saw this, and was pleased.

I think about failure,

The kind of agony that keeps you up at night like

A votive flickering until the prayer is answered:

For your teenager to stop slicing at herself and

Threatening to jump out of the car

As you drive her to school.

It’s always at night, with the self-flagellation,

When your thoughts begin to form themselves

Around the irreversible passage of time,

How could I have been so misinformed all these years?

There are no classes that prepare us for it, this thing we call living –

Sometimes it feels like Chinese water torture, you tell me –

Decisions that seemed right will go sour,

You will be lonely over and over, relentlessly,

You will be an addict; you will spiral out of control,

You will be poor, while others have

A mahogany table that seats six and house cleaners

Who come in a van every week to polish it down

With orange cream wax, meanwhile

You smile and make it work because nowadays

Feeling sad or anxious is just a disease you can reverse

By eating raw, doing yoga or taking pills

None of which you can make payments on because you have

Finally taken her away from him and he took the money.

It was one of those afternoons, calmer than others when

The neighborhood activity is tranquilizing as meadow sounds

And you go outside to see her working with him, some

Construction project, really, she’s just lingering with her poppa.

You tell her to come inside and he does the thing that changes it all:

He puts the staple gun to her face, like a hilarious joke

To your clueless, trusting baby but to you, a choke hold:

she stays with daddy

It falls, like a feather, that final slender, golden straw –

You do what it takes to preserve the continuity of the day,

The rest of your life, why don’t I go inside and get juice for everybody?

Reader, you have one assignment for this class:

Wake up and stop pretending like you aren’t going to die;

Stop pretending like there isn’t misery in and around you –

Find catharsis in the clamor –

Stop hoarding, stop not loving; stop denying yourself discomfort, regret,

Disappointment, anger, rage just because someone hinted the notion

If you ever feel hopeless, it means you’ve failed. Re-define failure:

Take a blowtorch to that little votive,

It’s time for some fucking answers.