Category: Poems

Tell me again how I will be
okay without a shell, outside myself,
with you. Let me feel your hands

behind me, offer of new carapace –
wind in my face, my own legs pumping,
even with the monkey bars, the slide,

swinging up and back, pendulous
affection: suspended, held, released.
Loose is not my way, but you

lift me up like all we have to do is
anchor a ladder against your
heart and climb, and beauty

will be waiting, rich and full,
enough to forgive a world its
roughness. Forgive me,

attached as I am to shelter.
Believe me when I say I want to try.

 

1.

Pilgrim in fields bright
with snow, crane returns – my heart
who leaps to greet you.

2.

Your face – more daylight
rising from winter’s shadow
over love-starved trees.

3.

Seed on the railing,
chickadee tracks dot the snow
with braille: I love you.

 

You make it look effortless,
opening, closing your eyes,
vowing to rise from sheets where you did not
sleep, buried to the chest,
heaped with grief and waiting for the stones
in twos and threes, small handfuls
all night long. When mourning comes,

daylight flips the hourglass
and off you go again: the bathroom,
kitchen, daily barre where you rehearse –
kamikaze, breath knocked out –
expressions, smile-shaped
echoes in the glass, enough
invention to appease the waiting crowd.

Rustling overhead, a strange bird keens and caws
until you recognize the strangled cry
and look. He lifts, cupped between two hands of wind,
climbs a thermal and gains height, your own weight
hoisted on his wings, your own limbs, for the moment, light.

 

Sun on your face closes your eyes
and you are absent for awhile – white
beams brush your cheeks and chin,
blind and gentle blessing on your
empty brow. Is it

enough to pray this way,
naming nothing
under the ether of sky,
bringing open palms empty,
a delta of lifelines,
burden of years, new grass bent
by another morning’s due?

Once, amends were made;
questions torn at the sleeve, sewn up,
erased in seamless thread.
Rest. It’s early yet – just dawning.

 

Maybe she climbs inside your car with force
enough to leave you lost among familiar streets,
orders you to take her home,
deliver her (or save yourself),
never asking where you meant to be.
In the passenger seat, her will
means more to you than safety
so you offer her gloves,
a scarf – stillness, all the mercy you can find.

 

Her first flowerpots convince her
not to change her name, she so taken
with the blooms in dirt.

She grows by bringing
water, seeking light for something
not herself. Humility

is transplanting one
into another bed
and asking it to thrive,

all the more difficult, precious
for being separate.
Calling their names like pulling petals

in a playground game, she plucks
begonia, snapdragon,
geranium, poppy, calibrachoa

bursting in syllables
on her tongue that also shapes “I do”
with every morning, every night

turning toward his back,
laying palm to warming side
like daisies seeking sun.

The name is not the process
that turns the heat from stem to leaf to bloom.
The name is the secret; the name is the reward.

Helper is the Hebrew word
for wife, who was also in a garden
so very much at home.

 

The four-year-old wearing her dancing dress
is pulling dolls apart in search of the smallest self.
She knows the baby when she finds it
and the nucleus knows her, how she is cradled
at the center of the world.
In return, she gives it shape.

The dolls are Russian.
Shaper carves the smallest first,
using her to measure out the rest.
She is plainsong, unison, pure voice,
a small arrival right in time.

The one who holds her
finds her note within the chord,
the chant where words agree and prayer is born –
belonging fits, a symmetry

of mind in mind, the snugness of a cap,
a canticle of fellow feeling:
how deep in we go.

We correspond; joy complete
is heart inside her heart inside my heart

dancing in December beside the blazing stove.

 

Count it so I
can discern –
heart a beating scale
heavy with all

the questions of worth.
No judgment this thorough
could fail.
I will know, my wait

lifted, what matters,
a matter of time,
a matter of course,
no matter,

it comes to this:
days are completed,
measures are made.
The earth is a chart

and all it contains
yearns for the tally, the notch,
the nock of the arrow,
smooth clarity

in the target’s face,
contraction in the rings
that planes the mystery,
sifting

shavings of faith
like snow vanished in the palm,
warm before I
can reckon.

 

The station is full of men
in hats, pinstripe-serious,
pretending not to see
the angel with the camera.
Clock faces, solemn hands,
postures of business:
they are composed
as priests before the host.
Smoke hangs like incense, pregnant

pause: she startles
with a flash both urgent and divine,
a word that takes their voice away.
She leaves the image
of a man, the kernel
of a doubt, the wait,
the certainty of waiting.
Later, they will try to tell their wives
what silence means,

how to face the crowd without a tongue,
without a job to do, a God to represent.
But their wives already know –
speechless darkroom queens –
how gestation happens without light,
how words of man
don’t bring the world about,
the picture coming sharper, clear,
even as you are still.

 

The dancer swoons, marionette
nodding in an ecstasy of praise.

You feel it
in your body’s most real space:

below the rib and rabbit of the heart,
above the acrid acid of demand,

closer to the spine.
Some need in you slides home

as if Eve found a way back in
to Adam, the two now simply bone

again. I see you give,
rope in the bridge of you relax

without the strain of passing,
not taut nor studied, just afloat

in blessing,
granted flight

toward trust that none of us can name.
The dancer spins,

knowing she is safe
this close to the edge.