Poems – Poetry Is Salt

Poppies

Poppies
in the rocks
have volunteered,
yellow yawns
exhausted
by the talk
of hedges,
walls common
as seed
stuck to fur
or floated
on a breeze.
Underground
stems sneak
past the whips
of wire.
Last year’s
exhaled sigh
is this year’s
cause,
four feet
farther
from the barricade.

Epithalamion

Sit in the sun surrounded by love,
head heavy as a peony,
a blessing of petals swaying it toward prayer.
Listen, eyes closed, to the hum of guests,
of bees, dusting dance of pollen
visited on others in a fertile chain.

Mistress, this joy is from you,
brushing, as we do, your palms, your face,
entering the faith you’re making real.
Citadels you’ve taken with your hope
harbor tired refugees,
enemies of war divorced and tender in our flight.

Inspire us. Share your rings.
Lead your husband toward the band,
every step declaring peace.
Clasp him in your arms,
holding his gaze, accord
level as a field where nothing is submerged.

Eat cake as the communion that it is,
votive offering, potential to love mindfully
and well. We are bruised.
Help us bite gently from each other’s hands,
brother speaking kindnesses to brother,
every glass lifted to a common, needful praise.

After the toasts, throw us your bouquet,
reminder we are chosen,
marked for high regard that calls us by our names.
Even your garter is a quiet glimpse, a knowing
nod to armistice, the intimate, the delicate
occasion of our joining, our guard at last let down.

Value yourself, the risk you undertake,
the symbol you become.
As hardened as we are, we need your blush,
your fire, our pillar in the night.
If we make too much of your small day, forgive us.
Children trust the sun, haunted by its cooling,
honored by its light.

Selena Moore is getting married. (She’ll be in a botanical garden – hence the Alaskan peonies.) She and I spent time last week talking about ceremonies, vows, and ways of making meaning on the day. She pointed me to a poem by Stephen Dunn, his “Epithalamion,” which means poem celebrating a marriage, and that inspired me to try my own. I’ve written many wedding poems as blessings and gifts, but this one is more general, a celebration of the radical act of hope that every marriage is. In keeping with my project of writing through the Psalms, I chose to examine Psalm 122 through the lens of marriage, particularly verse 7: “May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels,” following the Hebrew transliteration shalovm becheilech levah bearmenovtayich as an acrostic guide. Psalm 122 is a love song to Jerusalem and a call to pray for its peace. I’m smitten with the notion of casting our sacred commitments as holy cities, fortresses, citadels that protect and inspire our people. In this draft, I’m looking to the bride especially as a conquering hero, a symbol of courage and the saving force of love. At weddings, I believe we live vicariously for a brief time, participating in renewal and fresh faith. It’s no accident that the New Testament features a metaphor of wedding in the union of Jesus and Church. I also like the reverse effect of figuring Jerusalem as a blushing bride, one you might pray for with the same ardent affection you have for the brides you’ve held most dear.

With Your Right Hand You Save Me

The boot we find in the river, empty
as a homestead – dishes on the table, owners gone –
recalls a pharaoh emptied from his skin, still watertight.

Hieroglyphic smoke rises, honoring the dead.
I have mine. You have yours. We hold
vigil, burning, small offerings by firelight.

Early next morning, you in the tent asleep,
narcissism and I spell my name with a stick
in the stillness of the ash.

Once daylight comes, who can believe in death?
Zealot that I am, I walk into the water to feel real –
venial, I know, but I matter so sharply to myself.

Even your silence is, animal and warm,
not enough to draw me from this temple,
alert, awake to runoff, cold as living will.

For breakfast, you packed berries,
sweet and fat. You’ll share with me, pretending you don’t
hear confession in my voice: regret –

I will take them all.

Photo by Brooke Gottmeier

I’m selfish, and much of the time it doesn’t even occur to me feel bad about it. Why would it? After all, I can and will only ever be me, for my whole life. Why wouldn’t my own be the most sacred to me? Yet what seems natural in myself often appalls me in others. It’s not a pretty tension. In this draft, I’m confronting the urgency we all feel about ourselves as I reckon with Brooke Gottmeier’s photo in concert with Psalm 138. David is unapologetic about his desire for his own life to be preserved, even enhanced. His praise is based on the bald statement that God will vindicate him. He writes, “When I called, You answered me; You greatly emboldened me.” That line provides the acrostic guiding this draft: tarhiveni oz venafshi. Emboldened, in the Hebrew, has connotations of stormy or boisterous arrogance, and I’m interested in our instinctive move to assure our own well-being. It’s normal to want more for ourselves – the bigger slice, the better seat, the brighter love. We’ve all read stories of heroic sacrifice of self, but I’ve put someone else between myself and the angry beast or unpredictable stranger too many times to believe sacrifice can ever be an untutored response. Brooke’s photo presents a situation we all recognize: the haunting absence of the wearer reminds us he has not survived. It’s an image steeped in mortality, no matter how we try to clothe or protect our bodies. And so the speaker standing hip-deep in the river is an age-old portrait of prayer that serves mainly self. I am committed to continual training in selflessness, and grateful for models of it, but I’m still eyeing that bowl of berries in an admittedly wolfish way.

I Hear There is a River Underground

Murmuring voices whisper my fears
at the lip of the cave.
You swear they are just
_____a susurrus of streams,
indifference mounting an echo,
making mouths
_____at nothing,

_____but the growling
hollows me the way a tree dies
at the core:
_____diseased heartwood
moribund while cambium persists.

Another swimmer, local girl,
hovers for a moment at the edge, small
caution, then she leaps.

_____I can almost
hear the wind slide through her
agile body like a flute,
meting out a trill
as she, brave embouchure, finds
rest around the province of the tune.

Photo by Brooke Gottmeier

The acrostic guiding this draft is mayim hamah chamar: “though its waters roar and foam,” from Psalm 46. Verses 2-5 describe the terrors of earthquake and storm as “mountains quake with their surging.” Yet the psalmist resolves not to be afraid: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.” I’m using a photograph by Brooke Gottmeier to consider, through this poem, what happens when the refuge itself is scary? Brooke visited an underground lagoon known mostly to locals in Kauai, yet couldn’t bring herself to swim in the darkness once she’d climbed down into the cave’s entrance to the pool. Her photograph is her failure, in a sense, taken as she emerged from the cave without enjoying its refuge. Trusting what we can’t see is terrifying. Refuge isn’t peaceful every time, and often introduces its own set of challenges. The image of the hollowed tree, dying from the inside, led me to reflect that letting go that core of self, diseased by fear and ego, can lead to courage – pictured in the confident girl who has trusted the cave before. The local girl, in her practiced faith, occupies her own stanza without indented lines. There is no hesitation or afterthought for her, which the narrator admires yet cannot quite approach. In the trusting leap, the girl becomes another form of hollowed wood, and the wind or spirit surging through her makes a beautiful music that provides its own wisdom and comfort. This reminds me that I do better in my practice of compassion, mindfulness, joy, peace, when I am not the origin or end, but a channel through which other forces do their necessary work.

Her Tattoo

Elegantly seeded in the furrow of her spine,
even rows of letters
repeat: my dream
is to be powerful and free.

Cherish the audacity.

Hands that hold the whip must
underline that strength.

Lechers face the speechless roar:
existing is resisting.

Maybe her voice is soft
as alchemy, the silence of base metals
admitting they are gold.

Nonetheless. She is

indelible, marked now,
translated by the dream.
Adamant as philosopher’s stone,
matter beyond measure rests beneath her skin.

“Plowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long.” The third line of Psalm 129 is chilling. The image of a human back scored like the earth in an act of brutality and domination is horrific, all the more terrifying because it is also familiar. The image is very old, too often repeated in the human story. Whether with whip or word, we take the cowardly approach, attacking the exposed and vulnerable. In this poem, I’m using the Hebrew transliteration of “they made their furrows long” – heerichu lemaanitam – as an acrostic guide to help me consider the response of resistance. I know a beautiful woman who has felt greatly oppressed from youth, and spent years as a hostile stranger to her own body. Part of her reclamation project arrived as a tattoo across her back. I’m taken with her placement of her message in a space where she can’t see it. The message is of her, but for others, for any enemy, in fact, who steals up from behind to violate her victory. The message is her loudest voice. With it, she is “cut free from the cords of the wicked,” and transformed into what is precious. In the psalm, the final lines revoke a blessing from the evildoer. Their deepest punishment is to withhold: “May those who pass by not say to them, ‘The blessing of the Lord be on you.'” I can imagine nothing more just than stripping protection from those who exploit others without mercy or remorse, and I delight in the divine alchemy that restores dignity and strength, marking us permanently as blessed.

In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother

“Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.”
~ Charles D’Ambrosio

Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and
rooting, everything waits. It’s not like you’d
expect, not having children. It’s not

elegy or effigy, but some days even this resolve must
hold its breath, tested
by lily bulbs and history of rose.

Again, the promises of thorn and orange tongue
near their glory, needle through the loam
in interrupting green.

My love with its own labors,
liquid, runs it channels,
energizing what it didn’t fix in place.

By now, I know no ghosts will share my bearing,
and there is peace in what one waters.
No trace or debt, one just

evaporates. My children’s children, offer this
kindness: bless the rain that patters
as a pilgrim loves the road.

The last verse of Psalm 128 reads, “May you live to see your children’s children.” I’ve used the transliteration as my acrostic guide in this draft: ureeh banim lebaneka. It’s one of the most precious blessings in the Hebrew text, and it stands for me as an invitation to reckon with how the blessing comes for those of us without children. I’ve been told I’ve opted out of blessing, but I’m slow to believe that God has no gifts for me because there are no olive shoots around my table. Outside my window sits a garden still under snow. The waiting lilies and roses will return; I trust that as surely as I trust that I will hold scores of infants in the years to come. But they are not mine. I’ll tend them, though I didn’t make them. My offering is water. As a Psalm of Ascent, this blessing is the recitation of pilgrims. In my role as teacher, even as mentor, I am not the origin nor destination, but I’m present along the path. The final stanza addresses my children’s children, whom I believe in because I trust that love, like energy, is neither created not destroyed. If they will give a moment, now and then, of gratitude for rain that refreshes between one home and the next, I’ll have my blessing. (As for my parents, they are regularly bombarded with my students’ affection for me as they meet families I’ve taught in town. There is for them, I hope, a sense of legacy, even without blood.)

Photograph by Walt McLaughlin

Yesterday Your House Was Vandalized

I know you keep antiques, beauty,
venerable objects you love
not for looks, but what they’ve seen,

every imperfection a history,
human record, necessary as
vows. And now

a wanderer,
your vandal, of the tribe that once sacked Rome,
imprints here her own report.

That scratch on the chiffonier,
almost unnoticeable, rings with violation,
mouths at you both rising and at rest:

Empty your home.
Let me unsettle, help you
understand the lies of lock and key.

Set up sawhorses,
hew the doorframe
as you will, inscribe a prayer for

vagaries, vicissitudes, invasions
enough to keep your shutters banging, open as a palm.

Drafting from Psalm 127, I’m following the Psalms of Ascent for a spell. The acrostic follows the transliteration of verse 1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” The vanity of what we accumulate and the way we revere it resonate with me, especially in the wake of hearing last week about a break-in and burglary in a colleague’s home. I’m a big fan of locks and keys. I bought a lockset for my bedroom door when I was a thirteen to keep my younger brother out of my things. The Psalm and the invasion both un-settle me, making me more temporary in my securities and safeguards. In the poem, I’m questioning whether I might grow to see the invader as part of a tribe, too – like the Germanic Vandals who plundered Rome, and whether I could ever come to reinterpret damage to possessions as more of the story of an object, and not as an attack to my belonging. The poem is a confession that I can value stuff more than people if I’m not mindful. While I might not be ready to thank the intruder, it’s valuable for me to reassess the certainties I ask for and the costs they may incur.

For the Harvest in the Barrel and the Day that Calls us Home

for Tessa

Kiln-fired hopes still shatter
easily enough. She lives in the city,
cultivating orchards in her mind,
harrowing the rows, tending to her
once-dreamed apple farm.
Long homestead evenings,
emptying cider from the press,
melt of winters lavish
in the ground, restoring health,
mending what the cold had slowed.

Kintsukuroi, she says, golden repair.
Every fracture part of history, rich
composite of lacquer and gold
healing in the cracks.
Our dreams are open veins,
land ready for the seed,
emerging finally in
many-colored leaves,
in fruit as sweet as laughter, as
men’s songs who now live free.

Welcome to April! This is National Poetry Month, thus the fitting return of a handful of salt. After taking a break during March to consider where to go next with this project, I’ve decided to shift my focus away from more finished work, to work decidedly in progress. I need a reason to keep writing and a deadline to nudge me along, as we all do, so I invite you back into the weekly prompts and the honest transparency of someone trying. I hope it encourages you in your own creative work, and I hope to be able to share eventual news of publications as these pieces mature in revision.

My welcome-back draft is another in the acrostic Psalms series that excites me right now. A friend asked me to try on Psalm 126 because she loves the first two verses: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.” I also happen to be in a study on the Psalms of Ascent, and this is one, so the challenge was perfect. In thinking about dreams, I draw from my friend’s own dream deferred. She wants desperately to be an apple farmer, but she’s years away from moving toward that reality. In the Hebrew, our dreams, or chalam, are synonymous with health. The fulfillment of a dream restores wellness. It also binds us together. In class last week, a student introduced the Japanese art form of kintsugi or kintsukuroi, where broken ceramics are repaired with a mixture of gold dust and resin, following the philosophy of embracing the flawed and imperfect. I’m in love with “golden repair,” and so the poem positions the dream as the precious compound restoring health to our breakage. In the season anticipating Easter, the dream of restoration is especially prevalent for me.

A Man of Unclean Lips Considers Prayer

for Nicole

The angel was kind, a school nurse
applying the live coal like a bandage. Antiseptic

white, wings rolled to his elbows,
his hands were like my own, which should have seemed

more strange. His voice was feather-soft,
familiar. I guess I expected to go under –

wasn’t surgery required?
The infection went so deep

I was certain it would take a blade.
Nothing.

Just a touch of heat.
No scalded stub of cigarette on flesh

or punishment of metal on the skin.
Just a touch of heat,

as if he’d rubbed his palms together fast and light,
then laid them on my wound.

Prayer is simply this:
I have nothing to explain.

Rock & Sling, A Journal of Witness just published this poem in its most recent issue (11.2), and I am happy to share it with you as the final love poem of February. I wrote it for a friend, a nurse who loves this story. It’s a picture of love that comes out of Isaiah 6, where the prophet receives his calling from God. Isaiah’s unworthiness seems to come crashing down on him in one mighty wave, when an angel appears at the ready to touch his lips with burning coal as a symbol of forgiveness. The image can look cruel, a scalding punishment required to make amends, but I don’t see it that way. I see healing. I see the kindness of a wound cauterized to prevent infection. And I see grace. As Isaiah prays, I watch him labor under the burden of some elaborate confession or explanation of his failings. I don’t read his silencing as a stifling, but as mercy. It’s not that there is nothing to forgive, but he doesn’t need to offer an eloquent defense. He simply needs to receive what he need not, can not, earn. This is the best love I can imagine, a love that doesn’t rely on my ability to talk my way into it. I hope to offer it to others, and I long for it myself. For all of us, may we feel, from time to time, freedom from the need to measure up. May we truly fall in love, certain of the arms that catch us.

Let that be my parting note for a little while. I’m going to take the month of March off from weekly postings. I’ve been at this for about ten months, and it’s time to rest and to finish the final step in the project that started this whole affair. I’ll be ordering and mailing out the hardcover copies of The Other Stars Hover & Wait during March, and I want to do that well. I’ll see you in April, and we’ll figure out what’s next.

First Thing I Tell You

It needn’t be much.
After all, the genius of
“You Are My Sunshine”
is warm and simple,
always sung by a child.

It’s enough to say
you are a watermelon seed,
small and smooth,
pleasant to sort out
from other pleasantness.

Linger over this.
Later, I will give you more.