The Poetry Marathon

I remember when all those little birds looked like snow.
it could be the way in to a poem, but this Goddess,
She Who Is Never Not Stuck, is here
saying it’s no use.
If nothing else, She knows stuck.
She suggests dinner, a Real Housewives bingewatch,
washing and conditioning our hair -anything but writing.
She’s pretty and her hair is fabulous.
We’re done here.

Solitary.
Holy.
Rocks and sea,
some grazing
for sheep.
A thin place,
where the veil
between worlds
dissolves.
I’m sure
there’s a low hum
in the air.
I’ve only visited
in dreams,
some ancestral
pull, the green
stone of Columba,
serpentine & limestone,
calling.

Midnight.
Grief dancing.
Loss makes me live
with impossible longing
for your return.
Once I saw light
in the doorway
of your old room
and for two seconds
you were home
again.

—–after listening to Moonshadow by Cat Stevens

No one tells me to wash dishes
or eat my porridge.
I make masks in the basement all day,
sewing myself into a lethargy
that borders on trance
that falls into bliss when I stop.
I sit awhile on the cottage steps
swigging from a bottle of real ginger beer,
the spicy heat a strange comfort.
The dog zooms in the yard, the last firefly flares
and at bedtime I’ll read the pomegranate seeds.
The story will be familiar and never about the future.

Tai Chi must come back into my life.
I crave the peace of that unhurried dance,
the poems of the names of its moves.
My teacher always reminds it’s a martial art,
a perfection of movement, and energy.
There is a precise expansion of chi, enough to hold me
as I turn and bend within it
and come to a moment of something falling
into place – a key turning a lock.
The door opening is the practice prize.

Clocks and calendars are useless,
the sun and moon are in charge
of all keeping
and I move through
the slow silk of each day
strangely present and alert
but without urgency –
just a languid tracing of old runes
that once marked time.
They are quaint,
I barely remember them.

When the morning is conjured by a good witch
it’s full of green things seeking light
and me seeing photosynthesis as a miracle
and seeing miracles everywhere.
There’s endless cacao tea and the old dog
basking in my presence as though I’m her light.
Small things will be created on this kind of day:
with words, with colored thread,
with soap and water,
with vagabond thoughts that roam, refusing
to settle down, leaving gifts in their passing.
Breath is easy and at the end, sleep comes sweetly
and says ‘well done you.’

I am determined not to cry but to listen.
Even the forest floor has things to tell me.
Debris can be read like tea leaves.
Today the only message is the word “enough”
and a sound like a heartbeat.
I put the word and the beat in my blood,
enough enough enough
and discover that it is.

“The entire world is shining with things we cannot see.”
                                                       Akiko Busch How To Disappear, p.3

Light left from the mysterious trajectories of my children.
Threads coaxed from the moon’s edge.
Sun breaths.
The glittering confetti of birdsong and insect chatter.
Chlorophyll smoke from the leaves.
Dogs’ bark balloons rising over rooftops
Tiny stars in the grass.
All the ashes in all the moving waters.
Hands reaching out of new prayers,
the limp ribbons drooping from the unanswered.

alarmed robins scold
each time I venture outside
fledglings on the ground