I went to the ocean on a particularly lustrous morning,
It was washed in all the softened, secondhand light
That the new sun, so far away, could yield.
I felt it pull at my ankles on the sand,
To the edge of that great, wide water and
Before my eyes, a hundred gulls lifted in unison:
Church is out, it seems; the day begins;
I had been asking for happiness as we all do,
Daily, carelessly, and without knowing –
So it’s the prayer that put me into my boots,
Then into my car, and out there to the line in the sand
Where it was answered, by the blush of heady light and the rush of the gulls,
To touch me like someone new who brushes your
Shoulder in those first brave and leaning steps into each other–
What I’m saying, is,
So strong is its pull,
We will always walk into our joy.
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.
petals and bees 