and the sky was mottled grey

clouds crossed the morning sky
running to hurry past the horizon before your mother
realized you were gone.

the squirrels did not wander out to gather
they stayed away tucked inside their tree
chittered nervously and paced.

i thought i heard you whoosh past
footsteps that grew at once very loud and
then faded into nowhere else.

who ever knew you were leaving who
would have thought that you would one day be
never coming home again.

semantics

something like a murmur of voices
that is what it should be called
i think
when you hear a certain something
a murder of crows a
pod of whales a gaggle
of geese
why not a murmur of voices when you
hear the sound of a cocktail party in full
swing or capture the noise of a church's
congregation after the service is over and
before everyone leaves for lunch
why not fold your hands, turn your fingers in
here is the church and here is the steeple
open the doors and hear a murmur of
voices
circling around outside the murmur is the ever
watchful eye of form and the "let me put
a damper on things" hawkeye of function
but for now
just bellow, for now just throw your head
back and laugh, a guffaw, a cloudburst of
sound, a salient feature in the murmuring
crowd of others, oblivious that we listen
for the sound of a beloved and we never
stop to wonder how one voice
rises up out of the midst and says
hello

how things change

sand in the snow
do you remember the first time?
was it so long ago after all
say it was that same street
where chestnuts fell and
streetlights swung perilously
summer night late and you
in your creaking bed
peeled back curtains to see
night calling, hush of noise
summer quaking autumn near
and one day in winter
miles away and years later
sand from the atlantic coast
mixing in with snow

the dream

inside out of myself
panic stricken and
worse
where was my littlest one?
what mother leaves her child
alone in a hospital for some procedure
and never checks back
until two days go by and
no word
no answer from the switchboard
no way to find out
guilt
fear
terror
betrayal and abandonment by
me this time
by me
zipping fast atop waves
trying to get to an airport
the airport was months away
the woman said
and she called me laura
what mother leaves her
littlest one to strangers
and goes away for fun
nagging loss will not
let me go

Old Black Magic

This big ol' bed of mine ain't half bad.  I got it
ready for your coming.  Sheets is fresh and
pillows fluffed.  Come a little closer,
won't you, darling.  Anchors up and
moon is high, foreign lands are waiting.
Push us off, let shore fade fast, we is
goin' sailing. 

Sunday Evening Looking at Houses

Sunday sermon on

    a crooked sidewalk

A homily of grace

    for each other.

The night a misty friend

    enclosing us in,

Its quiet street lights

    and lush green lawns,

Your footsteps chasing

    and echoing mine,

My footsteps Morse-coding

    back to yours.

I do not know

    what they said.

Some veil of beginning where

    expectations had once

Insisted on change but

wisdom acquiesced in peace.

A blessing to see

    you and feel

Your gentle hand

    touch my back

While we walked

    and talked and

Pretended to have answers for

    the mystery of

It all.

Sunday Morning

In the midst of running
through leaves on a dry path
sunlight and shadow dapple
roots and rocks
ground dips and water rises
mud swells and beckons
well worn tracks from
others come and gone before.
You can hear the swish and whirl
of fallen leaves underfoot and
you are talking about ideas,
their elusive nature, there is
nothing new under the sun
except as it pertains to you.
Discovery is a door opening
that you never knew
was closed, an epiphany
you never waited for
nor understood was coming.
La silence sera profond la,
something I had written years ago,
and Shakuntala moves. 

Moving Out of Summer

Shush of wonder
blurred colors in the
periphery.  Autumn is on
its way.  Cold undertones
in cloudless blue, I
smelled winter lurking
nearby.  Hidden cups
in cupboards, tea leaves
shuffling in a tin, murmuring
to be steeped and sipped. 
I turned right on the curve
sped past falling yellow,
green danced on branches
overhead.  Something
changes every minute but
something stays the same.

Venus and Mars

I thought they were planets, instead I
found out they were my accusers. Each
page, every paragraph, another proof
of what I did--and do--wrong.  I always
knew that I was not of this place, always
believed that some other soul was
journeying to find me in this realm, though.

I have been
ever narrowing my direction to be
certain that he would enter my arc, my
tractorbeam of connection; now this.
Accuser, scanning the crowd of
readers, alighting on me, with a
satisfactory pronouncement, "HER."  (Do
not be like her.)

Should I give up? I give up. I do
not know this dance. Otherworldly I
only know how to trip and catch
myself, fall and land laughing, only
in the dark and alone do the tears come
and the blame and recrimination, "When
you gonna learn the Martian way?"

Thwarted by my Venutian heritage, intergalactic
citizenship notwithstanding, I
twist and turn on the wind of time, caught
in space on planet earth, howling for
my lost love.

The Grief of Love Tossed Aside

In the dark, I tell myself
that you
do not matter
and that you
did not have
room
for me in

your
life

but sometimes

I
miss
you

so much that I think
Death
would be a
relief.

Summer Vacation

Go away, then. Fly in
fact, away.  Herd yourselves
through check-in, security,
take off your
shoes and
coats. Do not 
joke about bombs or
knives or any-
thing at all except
maybe your bare
feet and what a 
pain
it is to have lost
to the bad guys.  Get to
your gate and wait for
the boarding call.  You
will feel important and better
than so many 
others who only ever
fly coach.  Flirt with
women, use your eyes, 
be hurried with your
children.  Remember you
are so very
indispensable to 
Planet Earth.  Never call
to say hello.  Never think
of what you are.  Never 
remember 
anything unless it
has to 
do with
you.

My, we were yar

We have now become
the grown ups.  Old unidentified
man lingers still in a frame
of teenage boys, sixteen or
seventeen years old, their lives
stretching out before them like
pristine canvases of luck.  Here
we all are fate and time jumbled
into what we now call our life.
Someone had a camera and the
shutter opened and closed,
catching us and holding fast to
candid moments in our lives,
caught forever as we never thought
we’d be.  Wrinkled, wearied, worn,
wavering somewhere between youth
and capitulation to time.

So Late This Peace

When hope dies light the candle of despair and let the weeping spill
rise up out of your heart explode the vessels that pump blood crash out of your chest
billow out and rise like balloons on the wind tears falling at your feet howls filling the air
this one lost not to be this one gone a memory only not a future unfolding as you thought.
When hope dies find out if something else was always there find out if you were only fooling
yourself and hope was nothing more than make believe remote control of reality which
anyway is so far outside your realm of influence as to be laughable so laugh.
Nothing wrong with laughing even at yourself at the tender little wishes you held like
flowers in your hand small and sweaty and young before you knew before you ever
had a broken heart before you ever had to learn to let go and finally learn to heal.

Leaving Home

When I see the photographs now of the
very empty house when
the movers had come and taken
everything away
(remember they left the blue runner)
I think about change,
how blithely we walk into
uncertainty, how on the
before side of after, we do
not yet feel the loss, the distance
has not lengthened into the past.
That night when the house was
finally empty, before I left and closed
the door of my house
one last time, I
filled my deep bathtub with cool water
and eased my tired body down
and tried to memorize the
moment and the place.  I summoned
memories and went about tucking
them into my mind and heart.  Later,
tub empty, lights off, dressed again
and ready to leave for good,
I knelt on the hardwood floor of the
kitchen and thanked my house
and kissed my house
goodbye.

One Summer's Day

My version has you going 
outside on a summer’s day. You
put playing cards in the spokes
of your bike and you rode it
fast
around the block
clickety clack click.
You liked the sound.  You 
got off that bike and
stood, beaming and
proud, hands on hips and
breathing hard from pedaling so
fast.
(so long ago)
I was inside my own housebaking my first pie, an error of
mulberries in a hot oven
nothing more
and I was waiting 
in the back hall holding
fast
to a kitten who was sick
maybe dying and yet I would not
let go
until it got sick all over my shirt and I can still
remember
feeling such disappointment
in the kitten and my pie.
There we were all those years later
just innocent victims of Fate.

Waking Up to Fate

The blessed are the broken,
the wearied who are wise,
the word of truth unspoken
perceived by tender eyes.

They suffer in their waking
less pain to stay asleep,
but valiant through the quaking
such souls are fathoms deep.

tender compassion

tender compassion.

that’s what I am sending you today.

it does not fit in a box;

I cannot address it to you and mail it.

it does not have weight that can be measured

by any scale or judge.

even if I put it in a clear plastic bag

I cannot see it and

I cannot prove it’s there.

no package will arrive that you

can open, take out the contents to wear.

you cannot clothe yourself with my gift.

it will not keep

until tomorrow.

I cannot hide it in a book.

I cannot fax it, cannot transfer it,

cannot transfuse it

like blood.

I can only send it,

and pray that you

receive it

and that your soul is adorned with it

the way light adorns the earth

when morning rounds the bend.

Yarmouth

There lingers still

but outside this dimension

my song

their laughter

their sighs

Somewhere in 

time

Somewhere in 

space

and here, tonight,

in my head

where

safe and unseen I 

conjure what was

and sift through the 

numberless days

pushing close together then

now strung out so far away

gone from here

gone forever

except here, 

tonight,

in my head.

Climbing Up

Today I climbed

up past the monument of

self discovery and cracked

open the door to the temple

where I already sat cross
legged, draped in sheer silk
and ribbons, listening to the wind.

I hid from my father, whose

adamant tyranny, whose rules

for how to become, whose

depression disguised as

genius, whose proclamations

of doom had finally been

enough, whose definition of
who I am was finally given
back to him.  I left

him extrapolating to no one
and cloaked myself from 
his sight. Of blame

and correction, I had had

enough.  From where I stood,

watching me, I saw what

had been expanding all

around. Children, their lives

in vignettes, now three, now

grown.  Friendships, once

when we were young,changed

as we have aged.  Marriage,

intimacy, stages, failures,

hope, hatred, love, vows,

divorce.  Lovers who did
not last, lovers who wanted
less.  A tray in my hands, hot
tea for me and God.  Bells. 
A humming energy suffuses 
this peaceful sanctuary, buzzing 
aura of my eternal spirit 
aware in present form,

a little one pressing past 
the mortality of time.  In the doorway

with the past behind me and

unwritten life before me, I walk

toward my resonant self and settle

into me. 

petit poeme

Quand mes yeux verts
s'ouvraient au matin,
j'ai vu, après mes rêves
et par les fenêtres, un ciel
plein de petites fleurs
blanches, dansant,
tombant, un tourbillon
fragile de neige, chuchotait
au monde.  Très lointain,
au-delà des nues
silencieuses, de l'autre
côte du monde, tu
restes, ton visage levé
a l'univers, vers Dieu,
qui se cache dans
les étoiles.

Christmas Eve

In the hush time, the eve of the
arrival of our liberator and redeemer,
all is calm, all is bright.  Holy
Night still beckons, angels still
sing.  Voices clamor over the
starlight, raucous noise of
failing earth.  Inside of me, a fire,
a welcome hearth, the door
unlatched, listening for your
coming.  Always spinning, the world
keeps rushing, a furious stream
toward an end, but in the soul,
a quiet night of waiting.  Let love
push its way up through ice, melt
frigid hurt, heal broken hearts,
bring laughter where tears laid
tracks of pain.  A patient silence,
borne of surrender, a choice to trust
that the arrival is sure, the fruit lies
dormant waiting for the warm
sun of spring to call it forth.  Christmas
again, you there, me here, wonder
all around.

Supernova

Q: What is the difference between
me and a supernova?
A: I can think.


And sometimes it is
too deeply and too
often for some who
know me.  Yet I can
no more hold myself
in than the star can keep
from expanding, from
exploding, really.
The star has lived longer than all of us put
together but it does not
comment on its existence, nor mine,
nor yours.  It merely keeps
shining, brilliant, a nuclear
fire far far away hurting
no one, destroying nobody's
life on earth, but making
men's minds busy with
wonder and mystery and
my mind busy with
words.

Morning First of Year

I did not plan to awaken early
you know it's not my habit
any longer
though every night I say tomorrow
I will rise while the morning
is yawning and stretching herself
across the sky.  But up I got and
dressed and out the door for wood.
The old wheelbarrow was bottom
up in the yard and big enough
for what I needed.  The dogs ran
too and down the hill we went to
where new wood lay chopped and
sour and old wood had evaporated
into kindling.  I worked then
hauling and piling until the well
was full and the door was pushed
shut for another day.  No easy task
trundling back up the hill out of
breath but full of fuel.  Two logs
I carried in and placed them
in the fireplace.  Flames licked
dry wood and I shut another
door.  This time, golden morning
in a stone-framed box.

whoosh

run step now go
fly churn lift off cry
push me wild eyed
fall down in deeper snow
spread heart to wings
up over beyond
the branch reaches down
jump high hold fast
swing by me grasp tightly
here we go
running into speed

Whisper

I said, I don't know what
I mean. I thought
you would understand the way
I understood while writing every
word, painstakingly, full of
who I am, pen pressed hard to
paper, heart pressed into you.
Perhaps I have imagined you
into existence, formed you
in my mind, fashioned you
out of ethereal pulp, wrote
professions of love that you are
now surprised were supposed
to be said by you.  Maybe the
memory is where we really
dwell; maybe what happens
outside us is the pale reflection
of truth.  I put the gown on
in my dream and danced.