North winds blew the paper news
Out from under crookneck squash.
Words weighed down by yellow straw
Flopped upon the sprouts of beans
Who bowed and almost snapped.
We’d laid it down for water’s sake,
To suffocate the weeds, but compost
And blue thunderstorms didn’t bother
To read about the captured soldier
Who’d faced the desert as if he were free.
2014
This morning
Space was a golden mother
Without body
Whose body was also mine,
Whose breath was the sky
Playing ocean.
I didn’t know
Where I was
But home.
I was the child
A mother cannot help
But love.
I was the mother
Of the naughty,
Knotted
Golden child
Making room
On my vast lap.
Go ahead, we said,
Personify what you can’t
Understand
If that is what it takes
To break you
Open like bread.
2014
Morning light is low
And yellow. Dirt roads
Of the small town glow.
Cattle on the outskirts
Shine like gold.
It’s early June.
Buddha drops off
Her son, now eleven,
At Bible School
With his best friend
To learn the stories
From which she grew
Like dandelions.
Everyone needs
Something
In which to root.
From behind the windshield,
She sees young mothers
In long, sleek skirts.
Their hair is clean and filamental.
Their shoulders are not bare.
They carry babes on soft hips,
Hold small, washed hands.
Plump greeters in cartoon t-shirts
Smile at the welcome table.
A breeze moves their white hair
In waves like rows of wheat.
Cowboys for Christ,
A bumper sticker reads.
A puff of cottonwood floats
Through the passenger window,
Past Buddha, out the driver’s side.
The air is so many flowers sweet.
She sees only a peony
The color of lipstick.
Unexpected grief rises in her body
While she drives home.
The joy of congregation.
The shame of we’ve missed you.
The Spirit throbbing her throat.
The day it lost its name.
Perhaps she could return
To church.
One metaphor as good a door
As any,
If one remembers metaphor
Is only a door.
The morning passes.
Later, planting seeds with her
In prairie dirt, the boy confesses:
If the Holy Spirit, that part of God,
Is in each one of us, why do we sing
In soft, high voices “Only God is Holy”?
I don’t like to sing that song.
Later still, sunburnt, the boy
Sips water at the kitchen table,
Speaks of baptism in the name
Of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Buddha asks him, Where’s the mom?
His eyes search the space of the room
As he relates the shortest scripture:
Jesus wept. For Lazarus, his friend.
He then quotes God who spoke in flames,
I am who I am. The bush roared bright with anger.
And further, I am the Lord God,
And there is no other besides me.
Confusing books of the Old and New Testament,
He proudly pronounces numbers after many names,
Uses new words: Isaiah, Exodus and verse.
Buddha remembers when she first learned
I am that I am,
Considers who and that and Popeye’s what.
Her son declares this week
The best of his life
Though neither he nor his friend
Found it fair, at first,
When they didn’t win
A prize by school’s end.
That’s bull, his friend had said.
When their teacher realized
Her mistake, she gave them
Each their just reward:
Matching water bottles
For good behavior
And a flashlight to share
For memorizing God’s word.
There is no belittling light
Of any kind in its becoming sound.
Buddha wakes up
In the way words become flesh
And dwell among us.
2014
Watched pots boil.
Watched seeds sprout.
Only space
And patience
Give out.
2014
All morning the Cassin’s Kingbird
Mistook our bathroom window for sky.
Yellow belly black beak
Black beak yellow belly
Could not crack the why
Of that blue shell.
Upon each failure he’d perch
A foot away, consider the shining wall
With blinking black eyes,
The softest crown of grey.
He couldn’t see the concern
Of black and white
Lovers on the other side, nor hear
Our not unkind laughter
At his error—we who had
Already been bruised and crowned,
Having found what he sought
Behind the glass.
2014
The wind is blowing
In the direction
The heifers face.
Indoors and kitchen-warm, I assume.
Here, my man’s high levels
Of natural attention turn me
On: carrot rounds,
Slivered green and yellow rinds
Of half-mooned squash,
Smirks of red and yellow
Sweet peppers, onion piled
Purple on bamboo board.
Each one equally machine-thin
By his blade and angles, his
Down-neck, his black-brown wrist.
This isn’t perfection
Or anxious precision
Or fear of variability—
His sustained vision
Of what is simple
In hand, moving.
Before us, our window.
Without camera,
This is what I have:
White-tipped, green t-posts
Holding up paneled squares
Of last week’s goat fence,
Standing as receding elevens
Framing unplanted earth.
Behind this: weathered electric pole
Parallel to seven wind-torn elms,
Evenly spaced like a plan
For solitude and shade.
The fourth tree’s top: broken off,
Hung up in the arms of the next,
Twenty feet up, parallel to the ground,
The wind’s tori gate.
Behind this: evenly dispersed herd
Of red heifers, everyone mouth-to-earth,
Bowing to green, everyone facing south.
The retina competes with itself
To have it all. We can’t help but stare,
Unaware of this registration
Of beauty born of visual distress,
The vibration of complements.
Don’t look for symbolism here.
This is about irresistible looking,
The way space plays,
Moving hues between
Your eyes and the horizon.
Soon, while stir-fry waits
For acini di pepe to swell,
The cattle turn, everyone facing north.
Direction is not always about wind.
My lover says they are eating
Their way to bed.
2014
Rosehips shriveled black,
unpruned by the year’s white shears,
will not flavor tea.
2011, 2014
It is
Good
To be
Nowhere
When
There is
Someone
To love
In the
Middle
Of it.
2014
It starts as soft breath—
stillness stirred beyond itself to move—
combs grasses back
like the gentlest mother’s brush.
It then begins to hurry, fret,
rocking cars like restless babes,
leans against trees
like the deepest mother fatigue.
Nothing firmly rooted moves.
Boughs break and fall
clinging to new nests.
Birds mourn.
A roar
groans like birth.
Mother funnel delivers dark dust,
rotted cottonwoods,
rusty cadillacs, family photos,
white cribs, pink bathtubs,
precious darlings
into the trembling hands
of a yellow green sky
that cannot hold them
long enough to cry.
2014
You, the even pages,
I, the odds.
All our words
And margins touch
In sleep.
Come dawn,
We shuffle air,
Spread wide
The spine,
Gutter to the sky.
2014
