Tag Archives: acceptance
Black Friday
Choose Before Me from the drop- down menu, then Parents, then Mother. Place in your cart her tomboy youth, how she outplayed the boys through long summer days, cupped in small palms fireflies gathered by dusk, their light mirroring her eyes. Choose Memories, then Family, then Father. Add to your cart how he carried you […]
Digging the hen’s grave
on a day when I can, though barely, my own mortality implicated, excavated, spading through hardpan, carving space for the body she still inhabits, tail down, but head up. Eyes bright; a shimmer of hackle feathers she will not molt. Secretly, I invoke fox, bobcat, hawk: You may come now; she can no longer run. […]
This is now
In Egyptian mummies, smallpox. This was before. Before Christ, maybe before God, maybe before salvation. Who can say when God was born? And whether God’s countenance was immaculate or scarred by pustules swollen with fluid, turbid and sunken, though not from great pox — which was syphilis, and thus unworthy of God — but a […]
Having seen, unmistakably, the second line
I join the haves, keeping distance from the have nots. Oh, the fevered battle, the many dead soldiers blown gently from the nostrils into soft tissue, their duty honorably discharged. This sweep, the clearing of the fallen, a residual chill and tremble. Later, I will sit in the sun, make soup, add COVID to the […]
How tiresome to be solid
the stubborn insistence the ceaseless assertion the perpetual collisions sixty percent liquid some variable amount gas and still we do not move aside do not go around do not flow nor mingle we are rigid as rock On my favorite day which has not happened we become insubstantial unassuming as ghosts we are indistinct interstitial […]
Still I belong
Still I belong to the earth, the grass greening through spring snow, the white shoulders of mountains, the doe bounding and twitching vast soft ears that hear what I cannot. I belong to the early forsythia, bright with promise. To the late killing frost. I belong to the newborn finch, naked and blind, the jay […]
What if we never
turned and fired, but kept walking, our backs to each other, until we forgot the nature of our grievances, grew weary of the weight in our hands, the long heavy barrels, the ancient ammunition, and dropped our pistols in the pile of pointless things, disarmed, disoriented, dazed by the trees singing through the mouths […]
Practice
You learn quickly to not poke yourself in the eye but slowly to recognize sticks which after all are everywhere suggesting you might bow at the altar of branches practice the burn the sting the ocean on your cheek and consider their hidden kindness how they rub the velvet from your antlers that you might […]
Called
On account of darkness, called: The ball game on the unlit field; the interminable argument. The migration of hummingbirds; the crescent moon, incrementally. Dusk. The hope for something better; the search for survivors. The ovulation of hens. The play of long-ago children. The open throats of morning glories; the songs of wrens, of larks, of […]
My last objection, your absence
I lay beside the others, an accretion of such magnitude it shames me that I ever presumed to keep what I love as if it were mine and not some mysterious grace that comes and goes while I wish otherwise. My last objection, your absence, I lay to rest along the banks of this river, my […]
Meditatio Ephemera 