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.

On the way home

My mountains are these clouds.
Treeless fields of sage
my high desert sea.
Each pry the same opening.
The gap that spreads quietly
as late August yellow,
refusing to entertain
but claiming me.

another way of looking at a black bird

-for the raven over Pearl Street and especially Karen Chamberlain

After thirteen years,
I finally understand
the raven’s word.

Awe! Awe! Awe!

Look! Isn’t that the sun
it carries in its beak?
Isn’t that the dawn
in my own dark belly?

In the beginning was a school bus

From one of its olive green Naugahyde seats
an 11 year old girl’s belly—
while trying to imagine her own
insignificance despite her Christianity—
disappeared into endless space,
into the place that holds all things
but is not held by anything else.

Her eyes fluttered.  Bouncing in the seat
over pot holes brought her belly back,
a nausea. When the bus stopped,
she walked out of its metal walls,
across the street, into the dry-walled walls
of her own home with the hidden key
under the railing. She turned on the tv.

2009

If I put the camera down, I see

My boys try on attitudes
of bodies in water.

The newly eleven on the diving board,
a slight hesitation, a running to the edge,

a throwing of flesh into whatever
molten star shape five limbs can make

before smacking water, before mouth
flashing light, before Awgh!

Next, the monk waddle. Hands
in prayer at breast,

then the innocent fall.
And the almost eight sits quietly

astraddle the alligator’s eyes
while bigger boys climb and pull.

He is proud not to fall off, jaw set
to stay astride while they battle,

cheeks pinching nylon, peeking
out from trunks. He hugs low,

alligator jockey, ear plugs
still in place, protecting tubes,

his last two. The others float
see-through somewhere in the pool.

The faith of hounds

Church bells ring at 9 o’clock
People called to pews
From aerial view,
crawling ants
disappear into squares
Old hound howls out
low-oh-only
low-oh-only
low-oh-only me
and stops when the bells do
a prayer in her tail

2007

with thanks to E.B.

I love this body

the way it things and flattens.
The way its desk is a mess
today, but not always.
The way it cries when
an old woman can dream
of making love to a limping
young man and rewind in slow
motion and fast forward in slow
motion a man making love
to a woman he realizes is not
a woman, not sure what she is,
and falling compelled toward
her in a taxi anyway. This body
could touch itself, but won’t,
awaiting its lover, love. This body
whose breasts have fed
and sag and wait for kiss,
tongue, lips, fingertips. Its hair
keeps growing without it knowing
it grows. The body shaves and trims it,
plucks. This play of skin and hair and limb
and organsong. In tune and out,
sometimes eating hotdogs and gods.
Whatever I is wants
to wake up here, hear
the mumbling hundred eight pigeons
on the cornice of the abandoned blonde
brick school, see pixels through wings
of the mayfly in July, remember Joseph Brodsky,
feel its liver creak with wine made by
its ex-husband given with hopeful sad eyes,
watch people watching through lenses, stop
wanting change and loving this all at once.
Or doing both with bliss. So new, it reaches
for a light switch that has never been
in the same old house in which it lives.

Reverie in Green

We are so much water, it is no wonder
even when we have been held all night,
all morning, by a light filled, spacious cabin,
we go outside and follow the wet roar
we heard the night before when we arrived,
somewhere north.

We study downed limbs and crushed, rusted cans
under a young sun to remember the way back, trusting sound
will take us somewhere safely shaded by midday.

And there it is. The lowest place on this limb
of hill, flowing.  We must be like this, willing
to sink into the lowest places, quench them,
make green with our own falling dance through
space, over rocks and mossy beds, past powerless
immersed twigs, useless rudders steering
back and forth in currents, snagging red leaves,
pulling on staunch, still trees.

Oh this green at the edge of wet! It blesses
our bare feet, sends roots around rock, into spongy
soil, clinging, unmoved by gallons of gravity.
Green holds on. Witness of shift and shadow’s icy shine.

Six pointed stars of green. Long waving blades
of green. Bundled sponges of submerged green.
My heart—what is this thing?—a star and blade and sponge.

The roar opens inside, tugs my body downhill,
a thread pulling me through the eye
of a needle of sound, this fabric of falling clearly
down, seeking whatever is barren and crisp, whatever
has roots that have forgotten their throats.

Let me find these roots in you, my love, let me sink
into your loamy triumph, cradle stones of shame, fill
you plump with this that makes us live, this pouring
with which we brim bowls and mouths and parched hearts.
Watch them swell and shoot stars, watch the blades
we’ve pushed through bend like grass, not knives
but long reachings, green swayings toward the roar.

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

and this poem is finally a leaf

My poems have been a gas
powered lawn mower
with a duct taped wheel,
an electric weed eater flinging

pebbles into spiral galaxies
and blistered palms around brooms
on sidewalks littered by trees
pruned by hail.

My poems have been wordless
rich stench of gasoline and ripped
green, the ping of stones
against chain link, the weeds

whose roots I’m too tired
to pull, too careful
to poison, so the roots
stay, the green flies.

Buddhist sages say thought
is the root of speech, speech
the stem of actions, actions
the leaves. And I wonder

if my garden means me.