Tuesday, May 29, 2007

A Stitch in Time

"Your absence has gone through me like a thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color." WSM

Monday, May 28, 2007

Call and response

The simple warm bed with me
is where it always has been, still with me.
But there is no "with."
You are not here, with me.
There is a bed, and there is me.

What is is not all there is.
What is new is open before us,
if we dare to endeavor
each day
in the fearful enterprise
of opening ourselves to it.

Quell the rumors
and carry their sleeping bodies
slowly,
carefully,
far away,
and tuck them into another bed,
to sleep forever
and dream their poison dreams alone.

When your hands are emptied
and you have fluffed the last pillow and turned out the light,
go outside and breathe the air deeply,
down into your navel,
down into your toes.
Reach into the gray western sky,
and there you will find my warmth,
on the wings of a bird,
aloft,
singing,
no longer hiding,
simply waiting for you.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

the city, as i remember it.

there is no building there; there are no buildings anywhere. though we ride down familiar roads, each with names and street signs we swear to recall, block after block of the city is gone. then we see our friends, the former occupants of the city, the one we've lost somehow. they are waiting for mail sent to addresses that designate an empty lot of land, an acre of tall grasses. they wave to us as we drive by and they say, "oh we're just waiting for the mail today!" and they laugh somewhat uncomfortably. i think it is because they are waiting for something a little more exciting than that. i see my family next, waiting with little babies in their arms, sitting on the curb side drinking tall bottles of water. they are so happy to see me again, and the make room so i can sit with them beside the dusty road that winds up the side of a green hill. we try and remember the city, our city, rebuild it with hand gestures in the air, stories of rides into town, directions to parties. I remember the city as a coastal city, and my brother agrees. we remember the tides of the city, it's AM swell, it's evening decline. we remember walking along sidewalks with shells embedded in the concrete, the smell of salt and pine and the occasional sweetening of taffy. our parents say how wonderful that is, and each of us remember our own city, our own construction with vague edges. people gather, our neighbors come, we talk about casino cities, circus cities, farm towns, sky cities, shanty towns, the dense metropolis. and between our voices, the moving of the air to make sound, the dust moves, realigns because of our breath. and then it happens.

we stop. feel our foundations. we wait restlessly (anxiously, quietly, lovingly, desperately) as the city begins.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

For OMT (On May's new moon)

Wide awake
sleepyhead

(Can you feel the earth spinning?)

I am many specks of dust.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Desire may guide our returns, but I still don’t understand distance.

The truth of the matter is this: good-byes have always been hard for me.

(And when I write here “good-byes,” I don’t mean endings, but partings.)

When I was a little girl, I’d cry for hours after leaving my grandparents’ house. I adored my grandparents, and of course, I knew I’d see them again, but the time between always seemed so long…and more than that, it was the space between: it seemed so strange that there should be—even that there could be—so much distance between us, so suddenly.

I’ve carried something of that childhood feeling of strangeness with me into my adult relationships. And the fact is, even now, when life puts distance between me and someone I love, I still don’t quite understand it; my heart won’t quite accept it. It’s not just that I resist it (although, sometimes, I do)—it’s simply that I don’t know how to make sense of it. Some part of me still can’t make that leap. Our bodies move in ways that our hearts do not.

And it’s not just that I miss you (although I do.) That is something different: the time after good-bye, the time of missing, the time of being either here or there, where you are not. What I'm writing of here is the time leading up to good-bye, and the moment of…the knowledge of a coming absence, our coming absence from one another, from the space that we share. The terrifying conundrum of fort and da…

Where are we? Where do we go? Why aren’t we where we were?

There’s an absurdity to these questions, to be sure—we are dynamic bodies, after all—but it seems to me, there’s an absurdity also to such radical shifts in relative proximity: one moment, you’re lying so close to me, your face is a blur, my eyes can’t focus, I feel your hand pressed flat against my back, and all I can smell is you; another moment, and there are a million miles and an ocean between us. How does that happen? I mean, really, it seems so strange. And what does it mean to say good-bye at the moment that shift occurs, between near and far, here and there? We use language to mark that moment, that moment we don’t understand. And although we might trust in our returns, our departures bewilder.

Good-byes are still hard…and the strangeness of space perplexes me still, always one of us moving away from another. I’ve reconciled myself to strangeness, though. I embrace my experience of it, in fact, and this is what I want, moving through space, accepting that life moves us, and we move with life. When it comes now, I rest, comfortably, into the strange, familiar discomfort of good-bye.

But I am still confounded by the space between.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

A day for a song of hope

She sang to us today:

We are here because our grandmothers prayed.
We are here because our aunties prayed.
We are here because our mothers prayed.

What the old women knew was that the dawn was coming.

Remember the old stories that come from our mothers.
Remember the prayers that come from our mothers.

We are here, carried on their faith.

Monday, May 7, 2007

A feeling in her bones

She returns to the scene again and again.

The yellow tape is gone but the white outline of the relationship is etched in her mind.

She asks the same questions. She hears the same answers.

The way forward is not found in the words, though. She can feel it in her bones.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

encountering buddha, i will:

sing my voice, clear and true...allow my voice to sing me.

when encountering buddha.

my mentor says to me that when encountering buddha _________________.

i'm asking you: space poets.

(Me? i would dance like mad).

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Quiet comes when it will

1

The self-perpetuating prophecy
rings low like the sound of
still-life music. And I ask:
how do I produce quiet?

2

The heat rises from my skin
pink
small hairs damp against my neck

And sleep slips beneath my eyelids
as I dream of starry prophets.

(w/ ksd)