Raspberries, blue skies

Clover crowns and necklaces,
sun-streaked heads of hair,
framing
sun-dappled faces,
smiling.

The way things are hidden

An awful dream. My father drove away in his old red pick-up truck, the one I always hated, down a gravel road. You went with him, leaving me alone in this strange place. And I stood by the side of the road, in a slowly dissipating cloud of dust, watching you go, taillights glowing hazy red in the night.

Poem: About Poem about Get Off The Internet about Get Off The Internet

I once, tonight,
thought of an idea for a poem entitled:
GET OFF THE INTERNET

when i realized that Phil Elverum
had written a song by the same name
with pretty much the same subject matter
that I would have included in my poem.

Needless to say:::
It was aaa Bummer.

Over and Out.

Moving Toward Back

I watched the clouds roll undulating onto one another. I watched the blades of grass flick their wrists at each other. I felt the wind swath its salty spit onto my cheeks. I felt my legs going, going strong, like oak hips and stone bones, my heart and stomach soupy and my head empty but searching…for something. I was leaving this land but I didn’t feel ready to yet.

The faraway sun skirted low on the horizon. I knew at 4 o clock that I was a goner, that I was pretty fucked if I didn’t figure something out. All this walking without thinking had displaced me further and further into nowhere. I looked at my map and tried to decipher the it in Deutsche. Yes, I should cross the island so I can catch the shortcut to the road that leads back to the train. Yes, here is the path right here. Perfect.

Across the sagey foothills I tread. The wind continue s to pet my cheeks, my boots continue to thud one after the next. My legs are strong. I stop often and look entirely around myself, drinking in the landscape to fill the void I felt in my chest. Now I see the sea no more. I see around me nothing but grey-green hills. I feel some sort of beat in my blood, as though I am dancing. I step livelier. The sun is late. Accustomed to the city lights, I note to myself how out of tune I am with the day in this season.

My legs climb a hill. I imagine it’s the hill, the one that leads to the other side with the sea waiting for me. I rise with the ground. The view tells another story: there are dunes, sand dunes, and lots of them. I pick a point directly across the way at the horizon in the exact opposite direction from which I came. I continue to look at the point as I descend into the valley of sand, suddenly so soft under my feet, the granules arguing against my push. They wish to keep me here, under the earth in this beautiful and foreign landscape. Part of me agrees with them.

I reach the picked -point , expecting to see the sea on the other side. To my increasing disdain, I find another valley even larger than the one I just crossed. More sand and another point picked, I continue, the lowering sun increasing my dancing heart beat.

The next point tells the story of the evening. It tells me that I will not be leaving this island, as there will not be enough light to navigate my way past this point. I am destined to rest under the granules of sand, defending myself against the increasing cold. I make like a carcass waiting to be devoured by island scavengers and nestle myself into the ground, lying against the wind-break of the dune. I curl up dead-like into the finest ball and completely shut off my mind, as this is no time to think.

I awake before dawn. The stars out-number my grave granules. They provide enough light for navigating. I raise my head and suddenly I am wide-wide awake. I gather my body together and continue walking into the horizon, the next point into the next point. It all begins to look so familiar, as it is all the same thing again and again, until I see the sea from the crest of one of the dunes. Finally.

After descending another valley I rise with the hill by the sea. It brings me to sage again. The sky is now orangey pink and the sun wishes to peek out from its nest underground. I welcome it but mourn the sleepy stars that brought me luck.

The sand is wet and I walk even quicker to keep from the coldness. The seaside is slow to reveal another secret: I have returned to the same place I came from. It is all too familiar, with the same bending curves and sage pathways winding around the frozen waves. I am completely unsure of all sense of personal navigation at this point. I was so sure….so sure I was on the right path.

The way things are revealed

A beautiful dream, standing beside me, one arm wrapped around my shoulder, your other hand moves through the air, showing me the space of a hallway, at the end of which I see an open door, a large bedroom window, an opening in the side of a house not yet built, framing a pink hibiscus plant in the garden just beyond.

Net (ten)

No part in a high-wire act,
after all,
this net.

Close to the ground,
the balance it maintains is of a different sort.
Rooted in a discovery, an awareness
of its own particular structure,
it is not in the business of catching
falling bodies.
Rather, it holds and lets pass through
all that it should,
in the proper proportions,
according to its wishes,

and in its being what it is,
gently works to correct
any assumption
that its proportions
might resemble those of some other net,
either real or imagined.

But it can never be sure how successful its efforts are
and is reminded,
again and again,
of all the ways that its language falls short.

It doesn't need anybody to understand it, though,
in order for it to be,
for it to do what it does.*

And it doesn't hold onto words.*

*These are lies.
*These are its desires.

I am in a land of strange aesthetics.

My bed, freshly covered in your scent, criss-crossed by our well-worn trails, one to the other...now, in my craving for you, in my stillness with myself, a wide, clean horizon, an expansive geography. Instantly, Siberia.

A game that we played, the honeymoon's over.
That was our joke yesterday.

Laughing to myself at my lovelorn heart and the language it conjures in the night.

Glad to remember your breathing here, next to mine.
Glad for the quiet space to stretch my bones into, alone once again.

Let’s go away together.

X: There are places I want to go with you.

Y: Where do you want to go?

X: New places, old places, places we share, places we make.

Y: I would like that, too. Let’s begin. Let’s go.

X: We can’t. Not yet.

Y: Why?

X: Because before we go anywhere, we need to establish our footing here and understand where here is.

Y: But I don’t understand.

X: Exactly.

Y: No, I don’t understand why you think that is important. Or even possible.

X: We can't move forward until we know where we stand.

Y: Nonsense! We can’t do that, we can never know that. So, let’s just go and trust the ground beneath our feet not to give way and the sun and the stars to guide us on our way.

i wrote many poems and picked this one: poem: I LOVE THAT LINE

i love that line i love that line
i made it with my hand

the line was red
and i winked at myself
and i patted myself on the back

i said, "i swear to God
thats my favorite part."
God heard me
and we both knew it, too.

first kiss

we got out of my west facing room, which always gets too much sun and holds on to heat long after the start of evening. we sat together on my porch, and he told me about fire-flies, bioluminescence, and other phenomenon alien to the cold climates i come from. minutes pass, and we fall quiet. i listen to the breath pass in and out of his nose, and i can almost feel the changes in air pressure on the hair of my arms. and then he leans over, and our mouths press against each other, those cavities of speech, silent still, but now quiet with intention.

this version is way from creation...

sometimes i think my family places magazines in specific places so that they might test me. They want to see if i'll read their magazines. They must know by now all about my reading habits. I have been reading other people's magazines for (probably) seventeen years. ohhhhhh...snapp app appa appa.

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

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.

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.

For OMT (On May's new moon)

Wide awake
sleepyhead

(Can you feel the earth spinning?)

I am many specks of dust.

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.

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.

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.

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).