The Machinery of Desire

1
Everything is calling, clicking
an intricate clockwork of longing.
Crickets rub their toothy wings,
cars race hungrily along black ribbons,
airy arms tingle for breakfast,
pigeons ever gurgle on the wire,
dogs whine to be let in—pity them,
and me, I chase my stories round
my head looking for the end.

2
My words are never content with silence,
that great engine turning poems.
And why not? Silence has everything to say,
everywhere to go. Words are its wings
rubbing together, singing come here, love me,
leave me alone, no—stay, yes—go, listen, don’t
look too hard for me. I’m under the pile
of dirty jeans, I’m tucked in the crotch
of the mulberry tree, I’m up here
in the mouth of the great horned owl, waiting.

2011

If you want silence

don’t seek a quiet place.
Let trains rattle and call
dogs          howl
the freeway hum          the rain
fall
in ticks
and taps
the movie mumble
through your
bedroom floor.
It is not necessary
to close
your doors.
Just listen to the lacy din
or each sound
in turn
the way you’d notice
a cloud          or           bird
drifting,
then shift
to the blue        behind.
Fall in.
Silence lives in the shape
around sound.

2011

Practice Dissolution

You might be afraid.
Feel your body sink and still
Into bed and yellow light.
Your arms too heavy.
Toilet too far away.
The earth of your body
Dissolves into water. You kick
The bedside toilet, swing arms at those who
Can still walk, but you are really kicking
At death. Your mother unfolds

A large absorbent pad beneath you. No one
Says diaper because they love you and your pride.
Water begins its hiss into fire, trickling from you,
Evaporating from open lips and halflit eyes.
Mother begs you, please sip. You do
Because you love her, though you have given up
The comfort of water now, your eyes dull ice.
No one sees the blue light of your water shine but you.
Sister touches your feet, sees liquid
Pool in red constellations beneath skin,
Sinking toward your body’s lowest sky.

Heat seeps past limbs, cool slides in
Like night. Mother’s painbright eyes, sisters’
Whispers begin: it is happening just as the blue book says.
You listen to all this. Your liver a bonfire
For months is finally a coal bed, glowing,
Dimming, sending out sparks, fireflies
Only you can see as breath no longer feeds its flame.

Thin wind rakes your lungs’ groping fingers, plays
The strings of your throat, your last voice.
Silence fills where breath breaks, relaxed lungs
Collapse into green light brightening as the last
Gust huffs from your mouth, eyes shoot

Open to take in the blast of light, clear white.
While your mother, sisters, husband wail
Wordlessly clutching dead hands, pressing heads
Upon your body, stroking your still warm velvet crown,
Turn from them. Countless people, life’s rich personifications
Gather in the widening now and ask your true name.
Awareness opens spherically upon itself. You answer
Without words—what you are—and begin.

2011

While It Happens

Don’t think about it while it happens,
that slippery moment
buckthorn dreams your spines and deep berry eyes
while a neighbor dog barks from your chest.

Notice, don’t think, the ever twirl.

Thyme breathes your nose,
your eight palms: cupped basil leaves
out reaching each other for sun.
Comfrey knits the bells of your tongue
to sweet kneed bees.

Church bells ring your eager skin a church,
calling all in. Heavy, your peony head arches
to earth, petals wilt on your flagstone feet,
your thin neck clutches a fist of fat leftover seeds

Don’t think metaphor, personification or make believe.

Don’t think.
This isn’t the work of similes
or even cosmic permeability.
Rest. Stop swinging
the lamps of your body.

2011

To every one I tried to eat, I’m sorry

I have chased mountains
and quiet men, wolf women
and booky teachers:
Help me!

I’ve been every mother,
frowned
and stomped for silence
hoping it would
point.

Even so,
my throat’s
been
so thin nothing
could pass, my abdomen
immense
globe of hunger stretched
around boundless
ache.

Wandering ghost belly

No woodsy cabin or bear man
fed. No singing or dying
woman,
witch or nun could satisfy
with wands or words
or all the grief
I could eat.
I had it wrong.

Only when in uncalled dream
I found one hovering just above
no within
no as
(me) unadorned,
clear as ringing
goblet
casting
prism mandorlas
did lost paths merge.

My belly turned inside
outward,
swallowed me
along with the spinning
world
and everything
was perfect, of one
taste.

It fades, this flexibility.

Sometimes I walk
around allowing all
passage,
my human throat and belly
a ruse for the fact
that the path to this
much space was
never any
where or who
but here.

2011

This body is not ALL THAT, though

It houses all it tends to think
I am. Hungry belly, heavy lids,
Tired breasts, a behind
That could be bigger but isn’t,
Comfortably forty. Forty years!
This body’s four decades of
Little deaths, this body a blue-
Print for cells who very kindly
Continue to replicate to replace
What is lost as I die every day,
Though today have forgotten
To fill a few finer lines. It’s ok.
They don’t ask for reward
Or accolades. They just live
For me, give me a chance
To think about the texture
Of wood, the sound of my son
Breathing. When the day comes
My cells stop thinking, they
Won’t be making meaning
Anymore, they won’t mean
Anything when I walk out.
They won’t even be a door.
Truth is, I am the door.
My body just happened
To pass through.

29 April 2011

becoming colorado plainsong

I never meant to stay so long, friends,

but while I’m here
I’ll let this sky
carve of me
a wide

bowl

holding nothing
with room enough
for every little thing.

Listen

The world requires doing and noise.
And when doing slows,
and sound,
sound moves around inside. We want
to follow
where it goes and get
lost in a decade old desire—
blue eyes
just before the mourning dove
kiss, or
in the mist of the next decade when no
young boys
will thump through
the silence
holding them like a mother who listens
and knows why
there is war in the world.
We cannot
stop it, and neither can she,
these ornaments of silence, ringing.
We can only notice spaces
between, silence
underneath,
hold them,
release.

Tapihritsa/Liberation

When the thing you wanted becomes the thing
you don’t want, and the thing you didn’t want

becomes the thing you want, you begin to see
problems do not live in things, but in wanting

and not wanting.  If you could throw away
your jewelry, let down your long hair, burn

your clothes (you’ve seen blue jeans burn red)
and sit unadorned in your own invisible colors,

all things could dance through you without a snag.
You would almost smile, but not quite, and the mouths

of the earth would pray to you for insight. You
would grant nothing and everything. The two

are the same in the way wanting and not
wanting are the same.  It is best to simply offer

your utter nakedness to those who
wear the clothes you left behind.

waking into sleep, take your waking slow

You wake up a sphere
of clear crystal and the bed
is in you. The blinds shoot

curved through your belly
and light glints where
there are no eyes.

You roll out of bed
and surprising legs lift
you, hands touch

your belly, shoulders
open, tangled hair
catches still

air, and the invisible
eyeball itches,
now two.

You scratch their edges,
rub with clumsy fists. Blink.
Shuffle to the toilet, the mirror.

And the flesh’s uncertain
and certain longings begin
knotting the endless net

of thoughts by which you
organize your day into
that which you

want and don’t want
to fall through you. This
is the morning’s way.

with thanks to Roethke, Emerson and Tenzin Wangyal

2010