Morning poem # 1

The sun falls in broken rectangles on the floorshards of yellow plates we gather in our pockets, for the winter ahead. Our skin bare to the wind, the grass tattoos our arms with zig zags and clover while the moments grow steady and the verdant humming of summer dwindles into the big-moon nights and stillness.

September mornings

Sometimes there are other things. Mornings of sleeping in an extra half hour instead of getting up and dragging myself to the keyboard in the pre-dawn chill, because my days already feel like the fragile worn fabric of a quilt. The first flu of the season has me bleary eyed and achy. I’d whimper, but the afternoons with skies all blue and full of tatters, make me too happy.

The weather has been perfect. The leaves falling, every day more, until the ground has become a kaleidoscope of red and yellow. Days are filled with small things that make me be right here. Pomegranates are in season. The wood is stacked, cords deep, and our new wood stove arrived; fire-engine red, tucked into a corner in the dining room. Apples are tangy and sweet now, and on the tree beyond the kitchen window they look like the burnished red beads on some old woman’s necklace. The air’s still sweet and noisy with the end of summer: crickets at night, and the last cut of hay, but there is a bite to the mornings.

Sometimes I want fragments. Short phrases. Words in the loop of a poem; the dangling thought of an elipsis; the wanton lust of the run-on. Sometimes I can't say things all the way, the way they are. Instead, the feeling is simply there, welling up. Like woodsmoke in the air, or the red streak of the tanager. This week I want to return to something I did last September. A poem a day. A morning poem. Whatever words come to mind to paint the colored arc of soul and dreams across the page. Tomorrow, first thing, with a steaming mug and the fog rising, I'll scatter careless armfuls of words like autumn leaves. Will you join me?

Two kinds of prayers

Praying

It doesnt have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch

a few words together and dont try to make them elaborate, this isnt a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

__Mary Oliver

Another Morning Poem

Letting Go

I open my hand and the hundred small birds of my heart flutter out, wings rumpled from the tight fist I’ve carried them in.

They fall to the ground before flying up, knowing something of soil and grief.

I can’t shake this feeling now. Nights up, hearing the house move, the small birds flit restlessly about the room, dreaming.

With dawn the birds fly up to the rafters where I cannot reach them.

A morning poem

Like a cold draft from the crack in the lintelthe day of the killing keeps creeping back in; making my heart beat faster, unbidden. All the things I tried to avoid by covering my eyes at the movie theater again and again rush up now, in the quiet moments when I’m there in the dark rocking my son to sleep. Or in those other moments of ordinary things wiping a dish dry, or standing dripping wet after a shower. There is nothing left for me to do but dance off kilter to this new song until I turn the floor boards to tinder and the room becomes suddenly warm with compassion.

Morning Poem Snippets

Until I catch up with my life again, a handful of snippets will have to do. Here are a few unedited lines that surfaced in the midst of my morning poem chaff over the past few days. I am so inspired by your lists of life-altering artists, writers, etc. I want to compile them into a sidebar feature--with links to all your amazing blogs. Thank you for filling me up with new places to look for wonder, for solace, for joy, for sustainance. I spent the evening in a bookstore, with a stack of books about two feet high. So good.

*

We twirl gradually towards better days, our knees scraped, our hearts drenched in the honey of love.

*

The moon bright and white, caught in the corner of the window like a lone daisy petal or a wedge of chalk.

* Night comes too soon after sunrise now. The days, turning towards winter, have me stumbling again towards the center in me.

*

Like a pale china bowl, upturned overhead the sky is glazed pink and shades of lavender.

*

Tree silhouettes are becoming sharp, crowns of twigs amidst a hillside of fire.

*

Its hunting season again. Bucks rake their antlers across the sky in anguish. Stars scatter earthwards, becoming dew. Fawns, full grown but knowing nothing of mistrust, lurch to their knees red blood spilling onto the brittle end-of-summer grass.

Morning Poem # 6

All night the cat slept curledon the chair opposite the bed, content to hear the heartbeats of her humans lost in slumber. Now she wakes and stretches a beautiful apostrophe of feline ease, becoming a comma, then an M before she struts away.

What it's like

This morning, all I could muster after a too-busy weekend with houseguests and rainstorms were these few lines written in dark ink, the words running together as water dripped from my hair.

I throw myself into the face of the day waiting like an expectant martyr to be handed alms or be run over.

I’m at that point right now, before things feel easy, but after things have been at the hardest part. It’s that point between exhaustion and sweetness. That point at the end of being sick for a full week, and not having had two nights of solid sleep in a row---but after spending an evening in the curve of DH’s arm, watching firelight and making love so many times. We celebrated our anniversary today—-waking up to a leak in a pipe in the wall above the kitchen sink and a sick baby.

But we also woke up to another day together. Another day where what I wrote to him when we were first together, still rings true. Now more than ever: your hand fits the curve of my hand and your mind fits the curve of my mind.

Morning Poem # 3

I wrap my towel like a turban around wet locksand suddenly I am ten again, tossing rocks with the new girl who wore a turban and was not allowed to ever cut her hair.

We were fast friends, for those short months just shy of summer at the end of our fifth grade year when the sun filled the afternoon with dry heat and even under the sycamores the shade was warm.

She joined the class late, and left before the autumn brought us back, our shoes brand new and pencils sharpened. But in the time between, we played hard and did not stop to ponder how our worlds were really separate stanzas.

Instead, our friendship took place between the parentheses of joy; where sparkly black eyes met blue and spelled out mischief.

It didn’t matter that she wore long cotton pants under her dresses, or wrapped her hair in yards of cloth. What mattered was our wildness, running together faster than any of the other kids, or hiding in the barn where, (I offered her a silver pair of scissors and she cut some of her hair.)

Morning Poem # 2

In the gradual lightening of day,I wait for words to come. Outside my window, the bright flames of leaves speak the language of planetary tilt and early sunset.

Like the widespread skirts of a peasant woman the sky trails tattered bits of clouds; a lone jet streaks overhead. Behind me trail remnants a dream,

smeared with sweetness: the addict gets better, the killer pauses before the bullet breaks glass, and turns away.

The dawn clouds turn to golden and the cup of memory spills. The day begins.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

** I loved reading your morning poems. Post more & link to here!

Morning Poem # 1

I open the corral gate to a new day andthe white pony of hope gallops out long legged.

Both of us are throwing back our heads, pressing our knees to the mud, praising the sun.

But shadows grow long, and the sickle of sorrow makes the grass lie down. Things are never what we expect.

Already you can see the buzzards circling. The colt’s rib bones, like twelve new moons, make white silhouettes against the greening grass.

** Add the link to your morning poem from today below.

"Think In Ways You've Never Thought Before"

I went to hear Robert Bly speak tonight, and felt, after listening to him read in his Minnesota accent, from his newest collection of poems, utterly vibrant. It was a little like touching the glass on an observation beehive, where the warmth from the thousand beating wings transfers instantly into the palm of your hand. Like that: warmth saturating my being, making me huger for more than I already have---more words, more knowledge, more courage, more poems.

He said: “I asked William Stafford ‘how can you write a poem every morning?’ and Bill said, ‘Just lower your standards.’”

Then he said: “Start with anything—whatever happens, and write one every day.”

My favorite poem he read tonight was this one, from his book titled Morning Poems.

Things to Think Think in ways you've never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you've ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven, Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

** I’m making this my challenge for the rest of September. A morning poem every day. Some morsel that reaches out and touches wonder. Some collection of scraps that, when gathered together, contains the beautiful remnants of a day.

“You can say anything in language.” He said, daring us to try.

Care to join me?

Field notes

The waist high grass bows to the mowing blades

Slack heaps trail the field like discarded snakeskins drying in the slanting summer sun.

With clear skies, the farmer spends each day on his blue tractor, turning bales.

Along the borders between fields, their round weight casts dark circles on the grass, a home beneath them now for worms and voles.

Above, the moon like a scythe hangs against the pale barn wall of heaven.

Blueprints

After a few days off I’m back to writing, fingering the blueprints that make me who I am. I’m going back to my childhood in the Colorado mountains, and to the stories of my parent’s love and faith. I’m looking for meaning in their loneliness and isolation; I'm looking for maps that can help me to describe the context of my own life. Sometimes it feels impossible to make words describe the things my heart needs to say. Sometimes, barely, the right ones arrive on the page in the nick of time to save me from the heartache of knowing but not being able to explain.

Following the path of the dead

Opening and folding, flush petals move towards sun, where warm life stretches to the boundaries of stem pulling nectar upwards against gravity.

In the moonlight moths flock to the ghostly silhouettes of backlit petals. Their wings beat aimlessly, falling for the sham of appearances.

Hovering at the edges at twilight times, at dawn, worlds open and close like the finning gills of fish, pummeling the air like the call of a coyote.

Here perceptions shift ; the shape of the sea star gathered up becomes an interior space.

Some nights I wait with an empty cup

Some nights I wait with an empty cup for the water to boil in the blue metal pot.

Some nights there is too much to define: the places where I begin and end, where my heart leaves off loving and begins needing unsayable things that make me flutter like winnowed chaff in the wind.

I want more than water and tea leaves, more than steam. Some nights the world stops in my soul and I must wait like a heart attack victim for the pulse of words and meaning to return.

I pour the liquid into my cup and burn my fingers on the steam; then bring them to my lips, hold them there, caressing their blistered heat.

Some nights, I wait for words to rush up like the steam, to catch me unaware.

Becoming

To grow is to go beyond what you are today.

Stand up as yourself.

Do not imitate.

Do not pretend to have achieve your goal, and do not try to cut corners.

Just grow.

--Svami Prajnanpad

***

I am surrounded by notebooks, and I am taking notes. Like an archeologist, I am looking for clues about the piece (a book?) I am trying to write. I want to find the veins that traverse it, that bring meaning to it’s peripheries. I am re-reading all the scribbled pages and documents I’ve written since the winter of 2004 when I was hugely pregnant, exhausted, and severely dislocated from my sense of self. It is startling and sometimes funny to go back and read all the thoughts I’ve dutifully recorded.

Over and over againI write the same things, tugging at the girdle of phrasing, couching my words this way and then that---trying to get closer to truth. And then over and over I forget.

I find I’ve written things down that make me laugh out loud. Like this:

“I look around the apartment today and think: god, I’ve all but killed the houseplants.”

Other things make me go quiet inside, the way a bird must feel after it has landed. Like this:

“The map of your identity changes when you love someone. “

**

“On the train home, we slice through the dark—an isolated rectangle of light and breath and shifting weight.” **

“The days of recovery from labor and bonding with Bean have blurred together into a continuous present. I find I am unable to think very far forward or backward and instead end up lingering in the moment doing nothing except watching and listening to my son breathe.”

** “His little fingers curl around my thumb, and I am learning humility now. The moments of each days fabric have become a string of little wonderments. Little things matter now. Like coffee, and the incredible smell of his hair.”

** “Everyone lives through periods of intense change, yet few give pause to these moments of turbulence. Few are present and reflective right in the moment of becoming.”

**

I’ve started to feel present in the story I am trying to write for the first time, and have begun to realize that it is more than a story about birth (my son’s) or death (my father’s) or love (my parents, my own). It is a story about becoming.

I want to know your stories of becoming.

Love is...

In the atmosphere above the sun the sky is dark and stars whirl. From there love scatters earthward arcing the distance between the divine and us, --and I am drenched with it.

In the way my small boy, newly walking, curls his fingers tightly around my hand and together we cross the room; or the way my man cups my face in his hands, still fiercely with want and tenderness after seven years.

I was warned about this

Things feel fierce when you try to talk in three dimensionand cannot wrap your words around something that is not yet there the square foot depth of real things: soapstone traveling the surface of the counter walls, this thick cupboards here.

Somehow because you can’t explain that which you can barely see in your minds eye everything feels like a soda bottle after it’s been shaken up.

You talk and talk and then walk away the plans spread out the table the lines and measurements in graphite, easily erasable, unlike the tone you use to say the things you’re not quite sure of.

Every hardware store clerk will nod and say he’s seen it all before. The disconnect between two minds trying to see the same thing from different angles. If geometry were a language, it would be easier.

Pickup truck prose

Rain is falling today. The cat feels the change in temperature, and meows restlessly at the door. The snow is melting. The gutters are rife with slush and garbage. The clouds press close to the pavement, hugging the curves of the road and nestling into the valleys.

We spent the morning in the car, driving to the capitol check out a used pickup truck DH has been eyeing. Right now we’re a one-car family, but with the house closing coming up in a couple of days we’re going to start needing a truck to haul drywall and refuse. It makes sense up here, where the snow falls often in the winter and our driveway is long, to be able to plow it ourselves or haul wood.

Growing up my, my dad always had a truck. It was a 1969 Ford Ranger Camper Series Pickup with a long bed and a stick shift that was connected to the steering wheel. The seats were maroon, and the steering wheel wrapped with leather. I learned to drive in that truck—and steering it felt like maneuvering a boat. Whichever way you turned the wheel, ever-so-slightly, the whole truck went. In the winter we’d put concrete blocks in the back to improve traction.

My father was already sick when he sold it, though at the time he was still in denial about having cancer.

“I sold the pickup today,” he told me. “There were a number of calls, and the first man to come out made a deposit on it, and is bringing the rest of the money tomorrow morning.”

“Really?” I said with a smile, remembering countless adventures in the truck my mother had nick-named Bessie.

“Yes,” he said with a little laugh. “It will almost be like having one of our daughters leaving home. I’ve had that old girl longer than any of you girls!”

“It’s true,” I said. Then waited, as his pain interrupted us, and his voice grew taught and shallow.

“That’s all I can do now,” he said.

The truck we looked at today is also a Ford. Dark red, with all the plushness of modernity: power lock windows, airbags, antilock breaks. We make a plan to come back to haggle over the price after we've research its blue book costs, and then drive back along the rain-slick highway.

I notice a lone crow on the high branches of a bare tree. The road is often obscured with fog. I grow pensive. Right now my life is abundant with firsts. Each day Bean makes another discovery: yesterday he took his first wild wobbling steps towards me away from the couch he’d been holding on to. Now there is a lump in my throat and I catch myself wondering what it is like to be at the end of one’s life, to have each day filled with lasts.

I wonder if my father thought about the last time he drove. About the last time he walked. And then there were those days where each time he awoke, he must have contemplated the awe of waking, and wondered when he would not.

It always catches me off guard when I find memories of my father occupying my mind in the vivid way that they are today. I’ve grown used to not having him around, and recently my life has been so abundant with other things I don’t stop to contemplate the emptiness I sometimes feel.

***

Even in great sorrow your eyes are like a pair of darting bluebirds, across a stormy summer sky. Two bright flecks of all that has come before and will return, to the eternal clockwork of the earth.

Right now you seem like the edges of a lake in early spring, ice turning black and hollow waiting for the shuddering crush of a turtle’s first foot print; the rising of water levels; the tug of vernal currents; life that surely follows winter’s shallow death.

Nourishment

I make a promise: two poems every day. One for eating, the words from the pages of a book like the pomegranate fruit: fire inside a leathery skin. And one for pouring out from the parched place in me: (that waits for perfect sentence, the witty one, the just-so observation, the clean narration, but needs the messiness of each stained seed, just as it is)

words cupped in the bowl of the poem; a mouthful of red juice.