I believe in the soft, distracted smile
turning my way and the girl who
draws vines on her white Keds
in permanent marker.
I believe in stately trees and turning
pages beneath their boughs
with searching hands.
The adept hand signing, “hello”
when there are no words to be heard
or knitting colorful yarns on
telephone poles. I believe
in gardenias that bloom between
the alley and the sun, the sounds
of Cohen from someone’s kitchen.
I believe god
is held in the mouths
of philosophers and children:
that beliefs are dangerous without
love and art is an act of goodwill.
I believe in ethics and the
responsibility of leadership but even more
in the resiliency of the human spirit
like a ghostly pounding heart
as we sleep.
I believe in the spaces between:
in pauses and think-backs and could be’s,
especially in “perhaps” and
I believe in the dog’s paw
that smells like sugar cookies
now that we are family.
I believe we should be careful
of words like, “inconvenience.”
I believe in the storytellers and song-
makers and especially in grandmothers
watching mothers turn the page.
I believe in simplicity of
needs: the hand that must be
held and the mouth that
must be fed. And, the
needs that go untended,
the boy clutching his teddy
as he dreams.
I believe in the untenable
breadth of the universe
and the starlit dust
inbetween it all. I believe
‘god’ is in the trees
and the wave tumbling
towards the shore and
the eyes of strangers.
Tag: hope
us, mirror
The way of a mind like a seed
on the wind floats up
instead of with the wind
somehow, or people born
wedged in sidewalk cracks
deep away from the sun
know where happiness
resides tumbling
upon its arrival:
in this I feel almost
a lucky misfit.
Even a self divided is
scattered like pages
lost within the house
with no binding.
I see windows in every room
that inform nothing except
where I have arrived from,
and, I, in every room
stitch a binding, day-
in and out, am
surrounded by a puzzle
of words on paper.
But aren’t us the
song? Aren’t us the
dream and
attuned to truth:
the paradox of remaining
genuine when a melody
unfolding.
When the War Ended
It’s a sad story,
the drowning man
in a cloud of fists
the first thing in morning
woken thinking of yesterday
and swinging wide like a boxer
finds the finish when he
splays on the mat, hair
absurd and wet for
just a fight in his memories
of fire and rush
of the way the sun
shocked when he woke seeking
like missiles seek below waters
a mid-night butterfly to take,
hunts
way of shore: soft
sand and dawn,
the cellar
where Geppetto carves a heart/
and how still is absence
of war. stillness
pulsing like a star grown
old or the shock of gardenias
in a scorching heat,
not a violin struck with flint
or the way a man can wail,
through city streets across
smelly kitchens and
mothballs clung to old coats
dark roads and alleys
in living of dying-
the flower unfolds
its self.
I think the man
questions if he can
swim in dark waters
and how will he meet
the sun, swinging
with those
wildcat fists? how
he could, like a shock
of gardenias, breathe
life of so-called dying;
make a home with
an artist in the cellar
where he is waiting
on the shore.
~how to grace
I have lived surrendered in hope
tied loose like the truth
in my mouth is loose
or a startled face is composed
loosely as a cloud sifts
the light of the day/
it was Mary’s sorrow upon
the backs of ladybugs; that
is a story people told
to explain the mar
of black. to become
echoes
painting poppies on dark
space of nowhere and
nobody, just
the brightest poppy with black
stamen sunk as beautiful
things are sunk in feeling
composed of all colors. How
delight is only found in
in the middle of a
crashing wave-
to live between the surety
and the unknown unfolding
i.
Become a mouth-breaking
exclamation, a sigh sorting
memories into the box
of photographs
the turn
of a projector or
maybe a suspicion
of beauty
in others, like a freckle
tucked away beneath
makeup:
how suffering so often
is a lone subject/ a
whale song caught
in caves of ice
or upon the lips of sleepy bears
filling with weary resolve
threatening avalanches:
do not disturb.
To draw lines and swallow
lyrics like whiskey is hot,
the finger bones
grasping in resolve
with burning.
Who We Are
There are too many
versions of self lost from
many iterations/ I seeping
in tender aggression
over it/ I, containing
all echoes
resounds
and thinks in-between
such things where associations
flow without influence: I wonder
if the truth is there same
like a stem makes a leaf
makes a tree
in infinitum
‘the way of the way:’ waves
rising out of words we say
and up into another I
like dust from an old coat
rises the still air in
the light
like galaxies,
Because I need not define:
to wake and see a familiar
stranger constructed
from this seed (seed of
a stem or seed
of a leaf)
still rooting
maybe tangled
like The Beatles
Revolution 9 where love
was not enough, Lennon
planted everywhere
in pursuit of order
(like a theory of chaos)
because my words like fractals,
and my people like words
become recursive- appearing
infinitely complex, but
if you follow each statement
back there was only a person
‘simply,’ in the beginning-
and my love will find me in
the rainforest again where
mountains meet the sea/
sometimes I fear a great wave
will come like I dreamed when
young and frightened or
he will find me driving completely
unrooted and free with only my heart
like a beacon- I am in Astoria or
Sedona, back to the hot trails of
youth chasing spiderwebs
in the sunshine
to hold tight/ even the insubstantial
and every thing an animal
can perceive waves
bouncing from one onto another:
is wanting definition. Sometimes I will
antidote the need to define
with inattention/
until the echo goes on-
because people rooted
in sand: their roots don’t
tap the same way so
they grow them flying buttresses
scaffolding tender things
or like ivy choking
the heart(‘)s
like those grown in shade
of tall trees with small and
hanging pink flowers balloons
concerned with whether they are more
pink than red or more red
than is tender in
perception
and how silly,
(when I was a little girl
laying on the cool concrete
watching the night for lightning
that arced like a spider’s web
thinking it evidence
of god)
a state of wonder
a wave forming outside of
else, only echoes its self
is outside of definition
like a balloon
maybe lost/ maybe
let go
looks like a dot
from so far away-
maybe I watch with
required wonder
maybe it can still reach
into the sun.
Fear of Abandonment
I tried to remember back then
when she left for a new world
calling me a woman-child
we like two tongues
tied in our two-headedness
when she saw violence in little girls
having no universe except
a naked root in the sun
and too many endings
like her father’s plinth of madness;
my mother sat upon his thorned heart
and any crack, she shone me
in the dark like starlight, and I,
like a hound kept at it
not knowing
any hunger but hers-
the scant memory of shore lines
the margin of estrangement
forever hanging in the air,
how I give and give
what she could not take.
~Inspired from Aracelis Girmay, The Black Maria, First Estrangement
