I just love my office! I thought I'd give a little tour along with this poem.

Dance of the Bower Bird

Much much much--
So much foraged and scrounged and mined,
          flotsam and tokens
                    of strangers' delight.

The button, the tin horn, the donkey on wheels.
Why grasp and sort and order and cling
          to so many insignificant things?

Perhaps it's a buttress--
          some scaffold or truss--
To brace such a gossamer sense of the self.
An essence intangible, faceted, fey,
          mirrored in piles and stacks on the shelf.
Some bone deep desire to be utterly known.

Or perhaps it's the singing--
The songs that things sing--
Those ballads and blessings that soften the silence.
          the whispery torch songs,
                    the tittering chanteys--
The airs of the orphaned, the broken and lost.
Those calls from the lonely and castaway stuff.

Or perhaps it's the mystery,
Those lives and those loves,
          enveloped, absorbed
                    when flesh delights in a thing.
Making something a poem,
          a cocoon morphing wings.
The bridge to another life--
          a story,
                   a touch.

                

Another thing facing extinction--cursive writing. Sigh.

                       Handwriting

They say the way you do anything
                    is the way you do everything
                                                  and so--

The hard lean of your letters,
                    their heads so ahead of their feet,
          is the same way zeal
                              yanks the weight of your good sense.
The diligent stretch of your ascenders,
                    anxious and watchful as guardian geese
                              over their huddled gaggle--
          is the careful way you keep your council.
And the way your descenders stop abruptly as ice picks--
          is the way you swallow your comebacks,
                    is the way you leave a room.
And the half-hearted distinctions
                              between your m's and n's
                                        or your u's and w's--
          is exactly the way your mind wanders and blanks
                    at any instructions.
I can see the pout in your put-out p's
And the flourish in your flightly f's
And see how you carelessly leave the back door ajar
                                       of every single s--
          for the verve of your dreams to slip out
                    like a sneaky house cat.
And the way your stories circumvent their point
                                        then loop back again--
                    is so like your o's bad comb-over.
And of course there is the roving eye of your i,
And see the meandering detachment
                    of your t's open arms.
And your elaborate capitals--
          such flamboyant drum majors
                    all pomped with epaulets and braid
          or divas in bustles and veils and trains
                              leading an entourage.

I see your thoughts drawn out across the page
          a little loose about their line--
The letters sometimes as languid and sprawling
                    as the thoughts themselves,
          but other times grumpy strangers
                              bunched inside a crosstown bus--
The spaces sitting between the words
                                       like so many awkward silences.

Brain to synapse,
                    synapse to muscle,
                                        muscle to pen,
                                                            pen to page.

Oh the loss when thumbs skitter across toy keyboards--
          the mirror of what's written
                              into what's written.

                              

This is a piece I did for Sandy awhile back. Happy Mother's Day.

                              To the Good Mother

There is, after all, nothing very glamorous about a sea wall.
It's just a line of tangled, clunky things
          arced out into the barbarous deep.
There is nothing dazzling to its stance
          as it bows its back against the tide
                    and gentles the wild chop,
          as it absorbs all the tedious and eroding monotony
                              of the world's pulse.

There is nothing to write home about,
          nothing for snapshots or post cards--
In the way it marks the boundary between wild and tame
                              between here and gone--
In the way its staunch shoulders make home.

It knows the dark side of the sea.
Wedged in its cracks and crannies
                    are gold ringed fingerbones
          and the impotent talismans of lost wanderers.
Its leeward side is littered
                    with soggy flotsam and ruin.
And because it knows--
It would barricade its little slice of shore
          to save it from the craze and crush and mean chaos,
                    the gale's ravenous, wild-eyed hysteria.
Because it knows--
It would be an impregnable fortress to its little shore
                    but for the strange music in each crashing wave,
                    but for the seductions of the wild blue yonder,
                    but for the wild magic of wind and sun and spray.
It knows the dark side of the sea--
But it knows its myriad and mysterious beauties.
And so its great embrace is never quite complete.
There is always a passage,
                              marked by a tiny lamp,
          that worries after the brash little boats
                    slipping around its great curved arm
          that squints blinking into the dark for them
                    and strains to find their fragile sails
                              against the great blue-black wilderness.

A passage marked by a tiny bell
          that pierces the thrash of storm for them,
          that calls out to them
                    through the sickening dense silence of fog.

There is nothing very flashy about a sea wall.
It waits half buried--
                    constant--
          patiently braced against the surge and swell
                              marking sanctuary,
                                        making safe harbor.

Eve's Crown

Eve's Crown

She walked out of Eden--

bared feet to sharp stones, bared shins to thorn.

She walked straight and resolute,

jaw set, steely, clear-eyed.

Mother of will.

And with the reek of its skin on her back

she remembers the lamb's bony knees folded in her lap

and how she teased it with mustard flowers.

Mother of blood.  Mother of the knife.

And rubbing a balm of tallow

into the splits and calluses of Adam's palm,

touching her finger to the creases in his brow--

Mother of penitence, tenderness and debt.

Mother of all weariness.

And hearing the tiger growl in the night,

she remembers his velvet muzzle,

the way she would rest her head on his fire-colored flanks

to feel the rumbling purr in the marrow of her bones.

She throws more tinder on the fire

and draws the baby tighter to her breast.

Mother of hungers.

Mother of fear.

And breaking the neck of the grouse with her strong hands,

she plucks its jeweled feathers

and studies them glinting in the sun.

Mother of cruelty.  Mother of wonder.

And walking through a fall of leaves,

a lilting shower of reds and golds,

but rising from the rustle and crunch, the haunting smell of rot.

And then each sharp green shoot and blade and bud of spring

a hymn of ransom.

Mother of seasons, of decay.

Mother of redemption.

In the laughter of her children--music.

In their sickness--the dead weight of dread and worry.

In their tears--the raw, fierce need to meliorate, to mend.

Mother of healing.  Mother of devotion.

And kneeling on bare ground, clutching Abel's bloody robe

keening into a bitter wind,

she rocks back and forth and back and forth.

Mother of rage, of envy.  Mother of secrets.

Mother of story.

Eve of the veiled face.

Mother of dishonor and shame.  Mother of silences.

Mother of desperation and yearning.

And, having purchased the world on credit--

Mother of absolute faith.

Eve the courageous.

Eve the defiant.

Eve--maker of the great trade--

ease for possibility, innocence for wisdom, bliss for joy.

Eve knowing first

what each and every daughter since has known,

holding the slippery pink newborn to the breast,

that death is and has always been

a fair price for life. 

I just returned from a visit with my sweet new grandson and his wonderful parents and then a quick trip to Midway (new baby llama and in Skinner's pasture--miniature goats added to the donkeys). Then home to a garden gone mad with flowers--all in all, the last three weeks have been a giant medley of my favorite things. I guess both of these two pieces--the totem and the poem--are my version of "Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes...."

a Totem of my favorite foods

                   Weatherstripping


It's the sing song childhood rhyme
          bubbling up through layered years
                    while you wait at the stoplight.
It's the hymn learned at your grandma's elbow--
          the one she sang in her crinkled, tissue thin soprano--
That with first light
                    wafts through the tail end of your dream.

It's children's recess laughter,
The music of rain-birds on hot grass.

It's the electric thrill of a summer kiss
The smell of bacon rising in the green of morning,
          or the jasmin heavy blue
                    coming through the screen at twilight.
Or that first whiff of ocean when you crest the hill.

It's your shelf of books,
          their spines like kind faces,
Or the return to familiar rooms--
          walls soaked with your own dailiness--
                    the keys on the counter, 
                              the glass in the sink.

It's that startling first taste of a mandarin orange,
          or the brine of sea water.

It's when God spoke to only you
          in a particular arrangement of stars,
                    or in a dizzy spiral of squirrel romance,
Or in the love look in your dog's eye.

All these for dark days.
All these for menace gathering.
All these for bitter winds.

All these to swell and fill the cracks 
                              of your small courage--
          for chinks against bad weather.

I finally have a poem that sort of goes with this piece.

                            Lifeline

How does it play?

What red square, what black square,

          what blind card drawn

                    marks a turn--

A plot point bouncing you this way or that

          a shoot, a ladder--

 Or does it glance off into no man's land

          like a ray of light

                    glinting off glass?

Or is it a slow veering?

Does it move with the crowd like a school of fish

          changing course with a flick of collective mind--

Or does it push against tangled constraint

          like the angry press against jammed traffic?

Does it grow like a branch maneuvering around

                    and even embracing its obstructions--

          sculpted, made intricate, made sinuous

                              by its obstacles?

Or does it reach like a tulip stretching for its sun

          unfettered by anything but its own longing?

Does it hitch and snag on a stranger's word

          or some odd thing discovered in a pocket?

Is it drawn through thick fog 

                    by the trembling wire of a voice

Or does it grope and flail and echo in a vast silence?

Is it blown like litter by mistral winds?

Or does it follow a path girded in concrete and asphalt,

          proscribed with guardrails, striping

                    and helpful signage?

Is it's mark upon the world

          the crush and fizz and void of a wave,

Or is it etched soberly, painstakingly and for the ages

                   in a granite slab?

Welcome to the world little Andrew!!!!

Oh my little longed-for one--

If only I were a wizard--
          I would weave you a cape of red feathers
                    to protect you from any grief or harm.
If I were a medicine man--
          I would bead moccasins for your feet
                    to guide you to that place your dreams call from
                              but would always know the way back home.
If I were a magician--
          I would cup my clever hands around your tiny ones
                    to teach them to be quick to help
                              and the wonder-work of secret kindnesses.
If I were a shaman--
          I would draw the line of true sight beneath your eyes
                              with my charcoaled thumb,
                    that you would see the world clearly--
                              both the world seen,
                                        and the invisible one beneath it.
If I were a fairy godmother--
          I would sprinkle angel dust upon your head
                    so that you would always remember your true identity--
                              that you are a child of God.
If I were a genie--
          I would sing a secret spell into your ear
                    that you could sense the magic whirling all around you.
If I were a superhero--
          I would give you superpowers
                    that you could always be somebody's hero.
If I were a priestess--
          I would kiss your little chest
                    and whisper a blessing on your beating heart
                              that it would be forever happy and honorable
                                        and brave.

But alas,
I am just an ordinary old woman
And all I can do is promise you that
          anything that amazes you
                    will amaze me,
          anything that hurts you
                    will hurt me,
          anything that delights you
                    will delight me.
That everything that happens to you
                    will be important to me.
And that my love will be right there beside you
          wherever you go
                    forever and ever
                              whether you can see my eyes watching over you
                                                            or not.