Time

I've been reading Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Beginning with time as a circle, repeating over and over through infinity on to time as river flowing over sticks and stones to the ocean, God, infinity. Then there is linear, one dimensional, flat time, parallel and 2D time, or 3D perpendicular time offering possibility and choice. Time without choice, pendular, a metronome of predetermined monotony. Or time amorphous, moving in fits and starts, reactive only to basic need fulfillment. I read on, sparked to note in my journal all the manifestations of time, one paragraph ahead of the author, every time.

I have my own theory of time as a double helix, which I'll write about later, but I was compelled to blog after reading this section, "It [time] is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."

Do not fear it

Do not mark
nor mar that evanescent moment
Suspended
between all the hours of living,
the hours of purpose.


That moment
had nothing to do with anything ~
not your life nor mine.
Do not carry that kiss with you,
Nor calm
the fervent phantom touch.


Rather,
let the lambent flush linger
like rainforest air ~
Wet, sultry wet.
Let it be,
in the ancient, waiting air.


Let it be that single moment
when you breathe a coral-pink rose
or hear the lonely locomotive cry
on the other side of the river.
Let it be that moment
when the northern lights catch
your breath and toss it to the night.
Let it be the chicory Cabernet
that sharpens your tongue ~
or the cool glass contrast.


That moment between,
the one that whispered down our spines,
Was no more than the brief pleasure
of silk skirts dancing round your thighs.
______________________

I have a friend who seems brilliantly able to live in the moment. She is an artist, and like most artists ~ like me, I believe, is comfortable enough in the chaos that is the irrational universe. She does not appear to need to console herself with creating order or contemplating rational, scientific reasons, explanations for why. Strikingly satisfied with what is... is, she teaches me.

I am an artist, delighting in the unknown, the chaos, the thin mountain air space of time, but I am also a scientist, curious, and a theologian, anguished by, "Why? How? What does it all MEAN?" My friend reaches into the immediacy and tosses moments at me, which I then take and muddle and muse over until I have found its place in the grand jigsaw of my life, or its place in a poem. If I offer my order back to her too orderly, she says I have made too much of the thing. If I give the thing its gossamer due, then neither of us have to fear losing ourselves to the other and there is ease.
_____________________
It is the quiet moments that matter:
the cat stalking my pen as I write this page,
the rattle then hum of my old refrigerator,
signifying home,
laundry folded,
freshly cut grass,
one single candle lit for a simple prayer,
God, keep her safe, please.

I cannot

in that moment, last night at the party,
that moment between our fingers,
yours and mine, as we pass the stemmed glass,
wine and water shared,
as we pass the glass back and forth,
crystal rim moistened
by both our lips, our lips
(only we know have touched),
but last night, under the stars,
in front of friends,
when our fingertips touch,
the details of living explode like snapdragons
between us.
_____________________
These two poems were written five years apart, mused by different lovers, but both reflecting an anachronistic love, one, that would not, could not fit into the 3D order of either of our lives. Held in time, attached to place and space and person, these poems became secrets and the love forbidden. But today, I wish to release them, like a meteor shower above all the tides of our August 22, 2009, Portland, Oregon living. Time is not their gatekeeper, their ruler. They are of kairos, not chronos. No one can touch them now, tarnish them, claim them; they are available for all as all Inspiration should be. These poems are now released to time as breathlessness and a heartbeat, sincere, true, no past/future attachments, lost and found in a crescendo of infinite One.

Power of Place

My One Particular Place:

is it the exact center
of a boulder in the exact
center of a glacial runoff
in the inexact center
of a field of purple lupine
and red paint brush
below an exacting August sun
suspended over Elk Meadows?

or, is it this seem-less longing
for nothing between us
but lavender, cotton sheets
and Abba lyrics:
“…the sun is still in the sky
…let me hear you sing once more
like you did before.
Sing a new song, chiquitita.”

My place is wherever gardens grow
or need to grow, impatiens
and luxurious gladiolas, crimson
with passion and summer ending.
My place is the space between:
preparing for my first dive and the kiss
of lake water on nubile fingertips.

My place is not where I grew up
except for the horse stables,
sassafras roots, and wooded
wandering deer trails
that led me to contemplation
under apple trees
in fields of Black Angus cows.
“You were always sure of yourself.”

then, but now, place
is pain, “a blown out candle”
between love and declaration
“Will you try again?”
Between “patch it up”
and let it go,
between the first glass of wine
in the bottle and the last.

Then and now, place
is in the darkened stairwell
of the Hopewell Methodist Church
where an icon painting of Jesus
and an aged copy of Desiderata
expand my skin and detonate
my soul into the place between,
the white space, the thin place.

My place is where “heartaches
come and they go and the scars
they’re leaving. You’ll be dancing
once again and the pain will end.
You will have no time for grieving.
Try once more, like you did before
Sing a new song, chiquitita…
There is no way you can deny it.”

Tired, just plain tired

"This that is tormented and very tired,
tortured with restraints like a madman,
this heart.
Still you keep breaking the shell
to get the taste of its kernel!" ~ Rumi

This that is love.
This that is desire for companionship
under the moon.
Still I keep breaking open
with hope that it might be you.

A Single Person Dwelling

I am many roomed
and every year there are fewer corners,
less closets, softer lighting, and ceilings that vault and vault.
Songs whisper through my walls:
cotton lullabies that rock me to sleep,
velvet green ballads, safe in their loneliness, and sometimes
the floors quake with a Barbra Streisand sing-along.

Laughter surrounds my walls
like tree frogs in the garden. Someday, soon, I will open
the back door and those leggy frogs will spring into the kitchen,
fill the sink and we will all croak and chuckle contagiously.
But for now I am content in knowing they are just outside the window.

A formal entrance, the front door, opens to an orderly white.
Exacting angle of an ottoman and precise tilt
of the picture frames may cause you to pause and ask,
“Unapproachable? Cool? Elegant, but stiff?”
Do not hesitate.
Do not pause. Please, come in.
Turn my rooms upside down.
Leave your garden footprints on the China Silk carpet.

Yes, the toothpaste is neatly rolled from the bottom up.
Yes, spices and books are alphabetized, magazines fanned
on the coffee table, and socks color-coded in their drawer.
But, poems fly across rooms in random chaotic scribbles,
furniture shoved aside when the need to dance arrives.
Passions stack up for the weekend
when a mere word like “mellifluous” can extend the day
into a ‘never get out of my bathrobe’ flurry,
a Tigerlily tangle, an elegant mess.

Orchids bloom in steamy bathrooms, but die on precious shelves.
Can you smell the wet carnations, vanilla, violets, and bread?
Do you notice the ladybug on the light switch -- in my many rooms?

In my many rooms there is moonlight that slides in
through partially opened blinds; moonlight like memory
that lays in blue-white streams over elbows, wrists, and fingertips—
moonlight like memory that cannot be held.

Oldy, but appropriate for today

As I walk this trail again

grant me the draft
of a thousand butterflies under my skin.
Let my mouth water
at succulent clusters of purple lupine,
clover and blackberry blossoms.
Let each bite of picnic bread
tingle my lips,
kisses from the divine.
Let me hear the mourning dove
above bulldozers
rumbling in a straight line.

construction deconstruction reconstruction
grant me release

Let me float on this trail
above the iron cold weight of uncertainty.
Raze my life
and grant me peace.
Raze me down
so that I might rise.
Raze me down and recover my soul
then let me fly
through a towering cedar mystery.

Finding Form

Put your hands in the clay
Put my hands in the clay
Let the heat of our hands
the heat of our histories
sculpt the cool amorphous mass
Let the heat of our hands
our fingers
curl, stretch, dig,
unfurl our lives
sculpt our love
Let the heat rise above the coolness
of fear and unknowing
Rise and shape the new
now

Saturday Morning

It's noisy here today:

1)The slap, slap, slap of a basketball in the neighbor boy's driveway...an occasional thwang on the rim;

2)the morning crow, there's just one, the same one, every morning at 6:00 a.m., caw, caw, caw...thrice warning,,,I have a poem somewhere on this blog about the ominous crow and a pall over my life...I think I was reading Shakespeare at the time;

3)lawn mowers, chain saws, edgers...the busy sound of sweat and Saturday chores;

4)the yellow lab next door barks at the morning jogger, the mailperson, the bumblebee, and the crow.

I can't sleep in and have a lawn to mow before kayaking. I'm looking forward to the droll flap, flap, flap of the Heron's wings over the Tualatin.

Dog Sees God

I'm going to the play tonight, "Dog Sees God." I find the title a bit ironic because I've been playing with palindromes all week with my writing students and just this morning I was reflecting on how and where I "see" God. I know the play has, on the surface, nothing to do with God. It is about the Peanuts/Charlie Brown comic strip characters growing up. By the time I finish this post, I will have seen the play and may have more insight into how it is about God.

Why was I teaching palindromes in writing? Well, we were working on character sketch, vernacular, speech patterns, and I told students that Barbara Kingsolver's book, The Poisonwood Bible has a character who only speaks in palindromes. So I brought in some examples and challenged the students to come up with their own literary palindromes. One student brought in, "Madam, I'm Adam." I remembered Weird Al Yankovic's song Bob, dedicated to Bob Dylan, that is entirely made up of palindromes, "I, man, am regal a German am I.......Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog." You can see the entire poem at (http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Bob-lyrics-Weird-Al-Yankovic/64A208DBB08E381D48256D2E000AABEA). So we challenged ourselves all week to create those literary palindromes.

We also challenge ourselves in writing to 'show don't tell', which is a classic literary technique involving the use of concrete images to show what abstract sentences tell. Ex: Telling sentences: Al Yankovic is weird. Showing sentences: "Al's hair sticks out like he stuck his finger in a socket. He speaks in a crazed, caffeinated voice, and wears stripped bell bottom hip huggers even in 2009."

My friend and the president of our church wrote about the challenge of showing her 5 year old where God is. Where God isn't is a heaven where the boy can visit his sisters and get home in time for dinner. I began to think...how do we show don't tell a five year old where we find God?

This is what I came up with:
God is in the friendly wave from a neighbor who would help me jump start my car even though he doesn't know my name.

God is in the crow who wakes me every morning: caw, caw, caw. We need you.
out in the world
awake, awake, awake.
There is life
for you to live.
There is work
for you to do.
There is joy
for you to feel.
There is love.

God is in your hugs and in my good night kiss.

God is in your friend's hand, offered you when you fall down.

God is in the tears of the mother who misses her lost babies.

God is in the moon, the same single moon that can be gazed at by every single person in the entire world.

God is in the minuscule spider scampering up a thin strand of web...why?...for the same reason she repels back down five minutes later.

God is in the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the fire at the Dougy Center and in the troubled heart of the arsonist who set that fire.

God...where is God? How do we find God?

God is in the courage it takes each of us, every day, to rebuild our lives.


So the play was interesting. CB deals with the death of his dog and the death of his lover "Beethoven." He asks his friends about life after death. There is a bit of Buddha, a bit of what the Bible says, a bit of outrage, and a bit of love. Where do we find God in life and in death? In the pain and the sorrow, in the love and loss, in the life sometimes not worth living, in the death that came too soon. Life can really suck canal water, but good grief, wasn't that part of God's plan?

I LOVE to teach

Okay, so this isn't really poetic, but the last post came from a daydream about the life we'd be living if we weren't living the life we're living. I put that question on my blog and one friend said, "Same song, second side." I have to say that that is where I am today.

It is only Tuesday and my week is full. I'm teaching two writing classes this week and I ended up texting my friend to say, "Teaching makes me feel centered and whole." I've had almost two years with limited teaching. My friends keep asking why I'm not teaching because I sound happiest when I am. I am not only happy, but also motivated, centered, challenged, engaged, and most of all, feeling like I am fulfilling a purpose in life, which is not what I feel when I am typing data entry all day in a computer under florescent lights, in an ergonomically unsophisticated chair.

So I thanked my boss for giving me more teaching assignments out of the office. I emailed some friends the following:

Amy, your imagery is palpable, your longing even more so. Claim your life, girl. Interestingly enough, I've been teaching again this week, using your poem you contributed to Caryn's blog, and I am beginning to re-claim my life as a teacher. Happiness is a heavy oak desk, with a stack of dreams written on torn notebook paper, and 13 students eager to please. Happiness, for me, is the 7th grade boy, who barely makes eye contact through his extra-long bangs and is embarrassed by his father's presence on the first day, slumps in his chair, but finally speaks out. He cracks a literary joke that all the other awkwards get, smiles a sideways smile, still no eye contact, but now, he knows he is a writer. Happiness is the ESL (English Second Language) student who returns the second day even though he had no idea what I was talking about the first day. Oh, and happiness is the other ESL child who produces an introduction to his story about his future that is so provocative I get goose bumps, and he grins when I tell the class that his first three sentences could be read in a published novel. "Three out of five children in Taiwan don't know what a blue sky looks like. I gaze at the half-dead sky through my little window and wonder."

Those amazing two sentences happened simply because I asked the students to start their story in three different ways: dialogue, fact, or description.

So I know I'm a teacher when I can get students to produce words like that. Yet, i am humble in this knowledge. It's a channeling sort of activity, it's, dare I say, God's work through me.

When we engage in our calling, we are whole. We are satisfied. We are content to put aside the excessive television watching, the addictive habits of the evening, and we continue on in our giving of gifts.

I asked to live the life I dreamed; same song, second side. I received.

The Life I Still Dream of Living

The Home I Long to Return to

was re-discovered
today in the pages torn
from Architectural Digest – glossy
photographs of room, after room, after room

and a Mediterranean
light through blue-white
curtains that swayed in the morning
breeze like Edelweiss or chiffon kites

blown onto the veranda
(also white and aged with salt water).
Bedroom, livingroom, kitchen, garden, bath,
photographs, patched together into a home, torn

from a magazine
during stolen moments
when we dreamed of the life we
wanted to live if we were not living

this life, with
only a trail of sweetpeas
and philodendron to remind us
of sea-green fantasies in the south

of France,
where lemons roll
in cobblestone streets
below lavender scented Alps,

while you
stack Caprese, fresh
basil always lazily in reach
from our rustic kitchen window.

Two glasses
of Bordeaux on granite
countertop, your bright camellia
lips, outside the photographer’s frame,

in the white space
for me to imagine: this house,
this life, this scrapbook of our future,
now sepia-toned with age and neglect,

these pages
of the house that never
lived, except for in our dreams,
these pages fold in on themselves today.

Rhythm & rhyme of healing

Recently I attended a song writing workshop (http://www.bravevoice.com/), not really sure that my poetry would translate into song because I rarely use rhymes. I did manage to get a spoken word piece put together with an amazing R&B artist, Kelley Hunt (http://www.kelleyhunt.com/). She was graciously open and generously found a hook line and a gospel rhythm for me to sing my poetry to. Kelley and Kansas poet laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (http://www.carynmirriamgoldberg.com/) have co-created some brilliant work on the CD Mercy. And some of the lyrics don't rhyme.

This weekend, as I dug away at the neglected dirt in my garden and reflected on the Law of Attraction, I listened to Jewel. Many of her songs stand alone, without the music, as poignant poems. There's a place for me, I thought. My poems do have a musicality to them that I'm certain reflects my former career as a modern dancer. One of the reasons I took this workshop was to be able to move and sing with my poems. Rhythm and rhyme help to make words stick with us (as in mnemonic devices, nursery rhymes, and hymns).

In my morning meditation, I challenged myself to write at least three rhyming poems that I could remember and repeat throughout the day like an affirmation. I've been working hard to shift my thought patterns from depressed and negative to positive, hopeful, affirming, with a desire to attract more positive into my life. Most of my spiritual lessons I learn from nature, so I decided to write short "songs" about the seeds I had planted the previous weekend. I'll refrain from over editing and intellectualizing. Below are three simple poems:

Portulaca Portulaca
What a funny, sunny name.
Portulaca Portulaca
will you join me in a game?

I planted you three days ago ~
how about we make a bet?
By the time I see your tender stems,
a gentle lover I will get.


Once upon a time
I planted Columbine ~
tiny seeds hidden in my hand.
Life line creases
palmed possibility,
sifted through fingertips to the land.



I asked the impatiens seeds, "What will it take
to release me fully from this sorrow-filled wake?"

Sunshine and soil, sweat of the brow
Tend to your needs, water us now.

Time is all, let the wait be your bliss.
Be patient my friend and you'll be kissed

by joy as verdant as my sprouting leaf.
It took so little, less than a week

for me to reveal what's been seeding underground ~
new life, new life, this morning you found.

To Mina Loy~

just for fun, across time and space, through my acclivity

...for a declivity
into depravity
there is no first or last,
only equality,
which is, perhaps,
why it appeals to me ~
we are all the same
at the bottom
of the slippery slope,
no One better
only worse
for space and time.
We can merely hope
that our propensity
for Liquor, Love and Lust
is just a side Bar
with little immensity
in the thrust toward Absolute.

Tell Me

How is it that the first sighting of delicate, new blades of grass can bring me such pleasure. I actually gasped with excitement when I saw that the seeds planted 10 days ago actually sprouted in nubile wonder...and on May Day. Happy verdant Beltane to all.

Leisure

by William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Cape Disappointment

You broke my horizon,
claiming a noble neglect,
"I don't want to hurt you
like others have hurt you."





Yet, we became a tragedy anyway,
one of recognizable proportion.

Now, knowing the sorrow
of waves on ragged rock,
wounded shorelines,
and a seagull's scream,
the ocean is no longer a lullaby
unless this song was our last.

I have loved, oh God, the beauty...Psalm 26

Why is that not enough ~
loving the beauty, oh
when everything else is gone
does the etching of love remain ~
yellow lips deep within
open petals of violet iris,
echos of a poet's heartbeat,
cello vibrations, strummed,
rippling out, faint but still
audible, attainable
when all else is said and done?

The sword fern awaits
my planting.

My Nephew Grows Up

From dressed to charm at 4 months to dressed to...protect.

I yam what I yam

THAT SORT OF WOMAN
by Jan L. Richardson

She is that sort of woman
so annoying
not content
to let the truth stay hidden.
Discovering
is her forte,
revealing the masks
that others choose,
reminding those
who dwell near the holy
fire will find them
shadows will take form.

Restless Spring

The first hummingbird buzzed by
yesterday late ~
fluttered in place
against an airy wake
and sucked the sweetness
I’d put out for her.
Essence

yesterday late
afternoon ~ a brief visit
from an old friend ~
And the ebony crow, too
cawed his thrice warning
about the ache of love,
as he bent a lofty bough
with a scold, then flew away
as shadows fell.
How straight the crow flies.


This morning, a riotous flock
of starlings commune
in the camellia bush.
It’s warm enough
to sit on the porch
in shirt sleeves with a second
cup of coffee and Mary Oliver ~
Our Story, her 40-year conversation
with a lover, her partner, her mate.

My craving for companionship ~
to be with one who understands
me without explanation ~
that craving is at odds
with a seasonal, burgeoning
desire to experience life,
once again, autonomously.

This is my half-story,
always a partial contentment.
I really am trying
to let loneliness and fear
rest from their vigil
over my life.

Today, I accept the silence
from a friend, trust
what is stirring and growing
healing and becoming
in the spring soil.
She has imposed
a silence on me as well,
“Do not write me anymore.”
Heard too much from me
I imagine, my muffled
half of the story.
Why is it we only wish
to hear and tell our stories
from the safe side
our side?

Just now, a pit bull
and its owner walk by.
I hear the innocent
click click of the bull’s nails
on pavement and see only
an easy saunter
in the black man’s gait.

For our Journey

This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.
-Rumi

Lenten Renewal

I haven't written for a very long time (as some of you faithful ones have noted). There is a reason...I haven't been myself. This January I crashed into that realization and started looking for solutions to find myself again. One solution was to rent my own space again. It has been wonderful sharing a space with my friend...she has been generous and we have been relatively compatible, but I really am a soloist when it comes to living space. I missed my art work on the walls, my own garden space, talking to myself without getting caught. :-).

So I came upon a little yellow house to rent, only a mile away from the "fun house" with the poetry pole. With great intention, I found a place for every knick-knack and wall hanging. If the piece didn't fit, I stored it, threw it away, or gave it away. Slowly, I am finding a rhythm to my day in this house. I am reading, writing and meditating again in the mornings...renewing my spiritual self...reading at night again. Most importantly, I am addressing old habits (addictions if you will) that have kept me from me. This is the hardest part, being still and silent, grieving if that's what comes up, until I can feel me in my body again. I wake in the mornings in my lavender and white room feeling my spirit hesitating to re-enter this body. "How are you going to treat me today?" it seems to ask.

My little yellow house has some small neglected gardens in front and back. There is a hunk-o-bamboo that appears randomly placed in the middle of the lawn. I was going to try to remove it, but it is too big and too deep. As I looked closer, I realized someone had a plan with this bamboo. Someone left before the plan was complete. It is my job to wait until I can see where that garden wants to go next.

To the right of the front door is a garden bed with lavender and tulips popping up. I planted some baby rust hens and chicks barely visible in the red rock right now, but I know they will spread and acclimate quickly. Purple heather and euphorbia will also fill out nicely in a zero-scape kind of way. Calluna vulgaris, with its downy gray leaves and pink tips, is so rooted in her pot that it takes quite a bit of coaxing to get her out and planted in the new space. I decide to transplant the tulips and other spring bulbs into the center bed where I have planted the proverbial purple lupine, already catching tear drops of rain in its open palm of green.

One tulip, a single leaf, that I think will be shallow and young, easy to move, refuses to reveal its bulb. I dig my trowel past the red rock, inching into clay soil, blindly easing around what I assume is the bulb. Then I press down on the handle, lifting a hunk of soil, no bulb; only the broken stem.

This week I broke a friend's trust. I hurt someone I love. I dug too deep (or not deep enough), pushed too soon and now I believe she will no longer bloom in my presence. Who am I to be someone a friend can't trust? Who am I to be so cruel? I can't just say, "Oh well, maybe next year. At least I didn't slice the bulb. I only broke off a stem. That's life. I'm not perfect." I can't say any of that right now. I have to say to myself that I didn't take care enough, I didn't let well enough alone. Why? Because I have not been myself? Why, because I have numbed myself with all sorts of distractions and addictions and it is time to fully admit that I am lost and must do all I can to find myself again.

I am paying the price of losing myself (in some ways literally- as in a car payment and higher insurance). My Epiphany word this year (we get one every year at church) is ALERT. I get it now. I thank the garden, I thank my friend, I thank my little yellow house, and I thank God that I didn't do more damage than I did, that I am awake now and ready to take that first humble step of renewal.

Advent reading

I've been reading Jan Richardson's Night Visions, which, by the way, is out of print and you can only get copies for $75-$100. Anyway, week two is about desire with a reflection on landscape and place. I wrote about the landscape most spiritual to me:

I long for high desert
dryness, heat-hot sweating
raw heat, draining me
of all my impurities:
1) This virus that clings
to my lungs ~
sweat it out;
2)This addiction to whisky:
watch me, three days in the desert
I could sweat it out;
3) This longing
for earthly love ~
I have only to look up
at vast blue beyond blue
to know my desires
are small in contrast
to possibilities.

Sweat them all out.
In the desert
I have no need
for anything ~
not even food
as my stomach shrinks
into lightness.
Not even water
as I push myself
through hallucinations
of dehydration
and am pleased
with what I see ~

Simplicity.
Light, warmth,
melt down
to the skeleton of me.
Bones whitened
in a blazing sun ~
the color of purity,
the absence of all color
is me in this high
desert light.

for Leslie

Hey Leslie, thanks for your faithful reading, finally something new for you:

Hibernate -
sleep is for the unconscious.
Germinate
deep in dark, moist soil.
Activate
only the necessary.
Rumi-nate
on the compost within.
Then, when the spring shovel
taps the cold ground,
Emerge
lime green and ready
for a new dance.


by Wendy Thompson
published in Museletter, Volume XXVIX, Number 3, November 2008

Almost two years in this home now

Light

Breadth of autumnal sunshine
and the five-year-old
neighbor boy's call
to come out
and play ball.

Towering oak
above impatience ~
I miss you, where are you?
There is no ceiling
to love.

That moon, orange
as a thunderous symphony,
announced a triumphant end
to loneliness
and summer.

Even in the darkest depths
a porch light shines
somewhere,
here or there,
guiding me home.

Written the first summer during Iraq war

Hope Over the Willamette

On the riverbank, a sienna night,
the symphony explodes in black and white.
It's an 1812 Overture. And we hesitate
in the patriotic.

A raging red Mars enters our sky
while the war still simmers, shock of the world,
in a cauldron of gray. And yet
a single goose sails by.

A bold gift, innocence begun? And the moon
rises on the largo like a New World arrival,
still wet from birth
and teary-eyed wonder.

Some thoughts on intuition

Sophia Speaks to Me

Wisdom comes
with the second spoonful
of breakfast cereal,
morning sunlight on my back,
and the journal,
marking concerted concentration,
unattended, left flipping its pages
of purple words into the summer breeze.

Wisdom comes when I brush
my teeth, and realize
Spirit speaks with ‘aha’
and ‘of courses’
easily coursing me to freedom
from known pathways and destinations.
Like the river flows
and slows around boulders
or even pebbles, unevenly
in the way, yet very much
a part of my day, this journey.

Like the blood flows
each month
cleansing me
from cranium to sacrum
toward that arid truth.
Wisdom comes
when I stop waiting,
pause in the writing,
that sweetly surfaced
those soulful stones.
I see the barriers,
rocks, bricks, by ways;
I thank them
for their lessons,
the rhythm they bring,
the bob and bump,
surge and spray,
the crash or avoid,
creating theme and variation
to every one of my days.

Wisdom comes
when I am least expectant
most listening,
most accepting.
She comes
when I reframe the mistakes
and when I surrender
to the wake,
when I wake,
and grin at the sun,
before coursing on.

Do you know me?

What is my identity, you ask:
I am a poet
a teacher
a seeker
a healer
a guide.
I am unique to this world
and wish to lounge
in the light of that knowing
like Sheba, the cat,
who fritters away her morning,
sprawled effortlessly, carelessly
across my unmade bed.

By what name am I known, you ask:
You may know me by
Wendy, Wandering One
Wendy Jean
Friend Wend
Wend-i-kins
Ulindy
Prima
Bella
Sulia
Sulia Grace,
but mostly, you know me
by the way I hold my hands,
which shall remain nameless.
You know me through gesture,
through the timbre of my voice,
through the scent of Boucheron, so named.
You know me by the liveliness
in my face when I am delighted
by words,
by music,
by dance, or other such passions.
You know me by the dark depth
of my hazel gaze,
which shall remain nameless,
the generosity of my heart,
which shall remain nameless,
and by others who know me.
But most of all
I want you
to know me
by the unconditional love
I offer you,
which shall be called
the One
G-D
Yahweh
Creator
Grace,
a gift to you
through me.

Transformations

Paradigm Shift

Night breeze
cooled, bare arms
and mind.
Glass wind chimes
clank, a tuneless
companion
under the inquisition
of a patio light
mid-July
mid-life.

A garden mobile,
Egyptian princess
made of weak wood
with charcoal eyes,
spins like she always has,
round and round in the breeze.
Her Mardi Gras beads
dangle heavily
from her thin neck.
She gets nowhere
in love tonight,
suspended
from a triangle of strings,
spinning
clockwise, counter
clockwise,
she retraces her flight,
the same pattern
over and over again.
Her arms reach
toward Orion,
a longing for a new
constellation of being,
yet, all she can do is spin
in the same circle,
round and round
over and over again
unless, maybe,
what would happen
if I cut her strings?

begin again on this journey of faith

It is time to start over again.

When morning begins
with a crow caw
and the garbage truck
brakes like a distant urban rooster,
it is time to start over again.
With meek courage,
I plant bare feet
on cold hardwood and groan,
“Must I, really, must I?”

When Kona coffee brews
a mild chicory, and the daily
news thuds onto the front porch,
it is time to start over this one life
I’ve been given, this one journey
I’ve failed, foibled and tripped through
like a crippled gray squirrel
Which way do I go? Which way do I go?
What next? What next?

Today, I will
eat oatmeal instead of donuts
to lower my cholesterol.
I will
pour the half bottle of cheap wine
down the drain.
I will
ride my bike to work.
I will,
with dubious courage, try
to start over again.

Today, I will begin
with poetry, a collection of Whitman
Earth, My Likeness.
The cover, a watercolor
of egrets in a shimmering
reflective pool.
Last night I dreamt
of egrets in a marshland,
a place of decomposition
where old dies
to make space for new.

Today, when an emerald-breasted
hummingbird thrums through
blooming honeysuckle and the rotting
apple tree, I remember:
sometimes we must fly backwards
in order to start over.
So backwards I fly
to a righter time of living,
a time of poetry
and meaning-making
among the towering ponderosa pine.

I start over again
in the forest with Whitman
on my narrow path, soft under foot,
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow…”
Today, when pine branches
linger over me
I am called to rest
in my own likeness
I am called to be still,
to watch and listen.
I am called to start over again.

Trees

Finding Center among Tree Trunks

Once there was a woman who spent a morning with a tree. They were well known to each other, having spent many mornings together, afternoons and evenings too. She called this tree the Leaning Tree, its sturdy cedar base growing from the lenient earth on a diagonal slant as if people had been leaning against it since it was an innocent sapling. The Leaning Tree supported her pondering, her sobbing, her anger, barrenness and even her lover’s back as she once dared some forest passion. This morning she leans back, heedless of sap, then slides down the trunk to sit on the meandering roots. Her weary spine presses in until she feels the sap flow slow, so slowly. The Leaning Tree teaches her that slow is good, so good. “Why can’t you remember that?” the Leaning Tree chides. Why can’t I remember? Because remembering hurts.
Her shoulder blades fit into the cedar bark like missing puzzle pieces, like tessellations, a mystery of no beginnings or endings and no need to know the answers to her questions. Tears flow, blood flows, sap flows so slowly. Her heart, the knothole of a broken branch that once reached out, greening into love, now snaps back to her core, her sturdy trunk. She presses her sacrum into forgiving soil ~ quieted by fallen needles and death. She slows, so slow in release of grief, comforted by the natural cycle of things ~ a cycle she knows, but sometimes forgets. Remembering hurts.

Why is it that I always need to go beyond, beyond the swallowtails mating in the air, beyond site of base camp, beyond the Wooly-Mullen and the last participant in this workshop? I keep walking to a periphery, a road, a divide, a threshold. It is there I spy you, a ponderosa snag ~ dead from the inside out. Your needle less limbs draped like a swooning maiden, drip-line dry, stripped of all but a patched, red-bark skirt. And yet, your gnarled branches still offer a resting place for the chick a dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.

Finally, I am alone, and with that thought the urge to turn on my cell phone is almost overwhelming ~ connect, connect, connect, the need to connect is stronger than the need for solitude. Where is my place in the circle of mariposa? Mariposa de sueno, te pareces a mi alma. You are like my soul, a butterfly of my dream. Where is my place beyond Neruda, my place amidst fading larkspur? On which sedimentary rock do I rest?

Ponderosa, you stand alone as I do, somewhat aloof. You do not beckon me like the cedar Leaning Tree. I keep a respectful distance, my elder. Perhaps you are tired of serving, tired of reaching out, always the giving tree. Perhaps you only need to stand rooted, pocked with woodpecker holes, sapless as I am soon to be, and just be. Let that be enough. If some little critter chooses to nest in you, fine, she is welcome. It is you, Ponderosa, to which I need to connect, not the tenuous and wireless, 1,000 miles away. It is you, in this chattery silence, which holds the questions for my answers, the calm for my chaos, the acceptance of empty.
I ask you, may I come closer? May I step in to you? May I touch you, cracked and dry ~ you offer no shade. Brittle bark scratches my back as I lean in. But you still smell like grandmother's closets. Grandmother pine, I call on you now as the blood leaves my body, perhaps for the last time. Sapless, childless, what will I leave behind? What seeds have I planted, like your tender saplings greening around you now? What poetry will come as I stand on the threshold of just be, rejoicing in my rooted ness?

Mesa Memories

Once, she would contract
into the clamor
of yesterday and tomorrow.

But today, under a relentless Sedona sunshine,
she seeks the silent abundance of now.

Like a saguaro cactus
she holds water in her ribs ~
red rock reserves

A foundation of readiness for spring's
release of prickly pear blooms.

This sundance of in and out
give and take, contraction and release,
is her brittle-brush journey

Between desert expansion
and blue-green sage retreat.

But tonight,
like a single taper, long and unflickering
in an Arizona night wind

She holds steady only
to what Is. Only this. Only now.

Chrysanthemum Refrain

This poem was inspired by a music composition by Branic Howard entitled "Chrysanthemum Hours" and the work of Fernando Pessoa.

"I am going to Exist. To ex-ist...To ex-ist. Give me something to drink, for I am not thirsty!"
~ Fernando Pessoa

Chrysanthemum Refrain

I hesitate to write

the chrysanthemum song,

one of timbrel possibilities

amidst an oblique rain.

"Should you ask me if

I'm happy, I would

answer..."

a cascading gold,

a bronze bow

toward sunlight,

a lithesome lean

into a tremulous summer.

Yet, these are disquieting hours
beneath a tacit moon.
Have I failed?

I require short days

and long nights to tempt

flowering, to bloom

like the Emperor's seal,

the Queen of the Fall.

Do I really exist
in this occidental mystery?

Will days neatly line up

like cheery chrysanthemums

in the Festival of Happiness?

Or will I ex-ist

like a funeral bouquet,

lamentations and incurves,

burnt-orange requiems
of yesterday?

Should you ask me,
I have no answer, as yet,
but I have not failed ~

only, I am thirsty.

Will you water me?

Photon Psalm

Oh my Beloved, what is this ache?
this longing, this missing
link to wholeness through you?
What is this black iron will
without a flint to spark a flame?
What is this cobalt voice
without a song, these hands
motionless, this metallic day without
a poem of possibility?

You, my Beloved, completed my inner being.
You colored me on a canvas of love,
intended me to be bold of hue,
a full spectrum of stain.
You fashioned me whole
from all the elements,
salts of the earth,
electrons designed by you,
to make that quantum leap
toward your pure light.

And yet, today I am merely crimson
bent low in primal red,
a lithium lost and alone.
Without even an apricot orange
to stir my cold coals, I say
Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,
incomplete.

But you tell me
the edges are most difficult to see.
And you promise the night
will burnish in a patina like the day,
shadow will wed sunlight and you will know me.
So I face the darkness within,
breathe deep into my sacrum
and grasp the root of my being,
the lowest note of my song.
With only a will to be and trust in you,
I aim for the verdant green of my heart.
I come to you in love,
with gratitude unfolding,
I sing a quiet horizon song
between dark earth and azure.
Slowly, slowly, I unfurl toward your violet light.
Maybe today I will see indigo,
and my yellow will greet your blue
at the emerald center of the rainbow.

Marching On

A poem in gun-metal gray,
may there be peace
in the sky today.

Seagulls cry, high
then land
on moss covered rooftops

anticipating patches of blue.

sh'asani eisha, sh'hechianu

Hebrew for: Thank you, God, for having made me a woman.

I've never wanted to be a boy and certainly not a man. I have female friends who wanted to be boys so they could play the sports that they were prohibited to play before Title 9 (that tells you a bit about my age). I was athletic as a child, but enjoyed field hockey, gymnastics, kickball, hiking, tennis, and was always the first picked in PE for square dancing. Later, when I became enamored with modern dance, that "sport," and the cross-training around it, consumed me. If I had been a boy, I would have had an even greater challenge convincing my parents that I wanted to major in dance in college and make a career out of dance. Sh'asani eisha, sh'hechianu.

I've had other female friends who have been fascinated by male genitalia. Not me! Such a sensitive piece of paraphernalia to be carrying on the outside of our bodies, I can imagine the pain of getting hit or the humiliation when sexual urges are so blatantly revealed for all to see. Even the ability to urinate standing up never interested me. I’m not sure why, because in many situations it is more convenient and hygienic to pee standing. Maybe my lack of interest is because I used to be so disgusted by my brothers’ distance contests, or the perpetual poor aim of many men, or maybe it was just because I was made a woman and I am biologically content with God’s design. Now, the Urinelle, a urination funnel for women, gives us the option to avoid unsanitary sitting conditions as well as save our shoes and bad knees from the squatting option. Therefore, I have options if I should change my mind.

I used to think the allure of the male lure was due to the power that society attributed to those who tucked away such an organ. Women didn’t really want the appendage, but wanted the benefits that came with. I believed that until I heard about “packing.” Last night, I went to a karaoke bar and watched two female-to-male transvestites, accessorized right down to the crotch. One was dressed in a Sean Penn kind-of-way, the other in a Broke Back Mountain look, both with facial hair and well defined forearms. One is quite renowned in the bar scene, but was no more convincing to me than the images of Steves and Maryannes in Tipping the Velvet (great book by the way). The other had me convinced until she was “outted” by the DJ. So there are women who really do want to cup their crotch with purpose and Michael Jackson bravado, women who may really want a (and here I resist my usual jargon for male genitalia)… between their legs. Thank you God, for having made me a woman!

Today, I attended my first Argentinean Tango lesson. This class is taught at a dance studio that advertises “Out Dancing,” ballroom dance lessons and parties for the GLBT community. Although most of the men in the class were gay, the traditional male/female coupling was arranged; the men were leaders, the women followers. I rotated into the arms of an attractive, silver-haired, self-professed gay man who told me he usually follows. We were taught a tricky weight change step that the “man” initiates. The idea is to guide your partner into a rhythm of parallel steps and then, when you are ready, subtly shift your leading weight to the opposite foot while your partner stays with “her” weight on the foot you led her to. Then, surreptitiously, the leader steps diagonally on the opposing foot and the couple is now dancing with opposites. When first learning something like this, the mind is quite busy, rocking back and forth in a methodical rhythm until the leader feels ready to try this little dancin’ game. Ginger Rogers use to say that female ballroom dancers have to be better than males because they dance backwards and in heals, but today, I had the easy job, I just had to listen to cues from my partner and we all know that listening to subtle cues is a female skill that comes quite natural. Thank God, I was made a woman. Sh'asani eisha, sh'hechianu.

I'm Not There

Witness the Day

Grapefruit fresh, the day
begins. Thirty killed somewhere
in Nairobi, but

that was yesterday
and I only hear the rain,
like a distant flame

diluting daily
news. I catch whiffs of charcoal,
last night’s burnt chicken

But how can I witness
when I’m not there?

I Am From

A friend was seeking writing prompts for the month of January. I gave her the following: Into what community were you born and how were you received, and by whom? I am looking into some family history, particularly my great grandmother Mamie Pearce King who was a Baptist missionary on an Arapaho Indian reservation. This poem came as a result of reading a poem in her scrapbook titled "Women of God" by E. Rinehart *. The poem was written at the turn of the century. The photo is Mamie Pearce King about 1912 after typhoid fever.

I was born into a circle of writers:
Virginia, Sappho, Emily…
through a dream, they welcomed me,
called me to pick up the pen.

I was born of Nancy, variant of Ann,
Hebrew for Grace, a wife, a daughter, a duty
Nancy, marked by devotion to man.
I was born of a woman, intent.

I was born to a circle of grandmothers,
Grace, Mary, Mamie, and Carol Joy.
Born of a virtue, a virgin, a missionary, and a song,
how sweet the sound traversing years, calling me, calling me.

I was born from Women of God, in mission fields,
circuit riders, sisters, lighthouse
keepers of the Word, stars of the sea,
Mary May, ever enduring, Mamie, she.

Mother may I, too, be called,
be merry, brisk and blithe, defined
as mirthful in the sun of righteousness, 

shining away from secrecy and shame.


Women of God, of uncertain origin,
mothers of mine, calling me.
Be swift to go, the doors are open wide.
The times are full of promise, so

follow the flow of the tide
sail out on the deep, broad seas
let your heart be brave, mothers sing to me
A mighty work is waiting.*

I was born of divine women, adored
virtuous, star women, original women
women derived, I am a woman wishing
light, song, joie de vivre, a woman wishing

fearless response to her call, I am
a woman intent on wishing you,
a woman, a new definition,
wishing you, a woman, a new name.

How shall I call you?

Seasonal Surprises

Advent

An on your tiptoes anticipation,
does it come from within
like a giggle brewing
until suddenly you realize
your endorphins hit a high
and you smile, spontaneously,
at nothing?

Or is the thrill, the unexpected happiness
something you put on with intent
like a polar fleece wrap?
You heave yourself off the couch,
away from the television
and your second glass of wine
(It's a Wonderful Life)
to say, "I'm cold. I want to be warm.
It's nearly Christmas and I want
wonder and awe and newborn
light amid the gray and early night."
So it didn't snow like Storm Watch 2007
predicted, so I'm still single, and we're still
at war. But, peace is still
a possibility. So is this when
you put on your cheery red vest
with purpose and resolve, saying,
"I am ready. What's next?"

Advent

There is a voice in the wilderness
calling
her name
she-who-lives-in-darkness
calling
as the full moon wanes
over crashing waves
falling into wilderness
at the cape of disappointment
calling
at the horizon
where the lost stay lost
until they find themselves
within each other
calling in the silence
amidst a cacophony
of uncharted waters
receive the silence
first language of God
listen
to your wilderness
and begin

Veteran’s Day Immunity

Another Portland rain taps
my morning window pane.
I wake before the alarm
to a stormy wind that overthrows
patio furniture and launches
it across the street like a battlefield
in opposition to my denial.
I’m not ready for winter.
But rain happens, leaves fall, ready or not.T
his story is getting old
with its old beginnings ~
entrances into endings.
I drag myself out of bed,
and shuffle to the cold kitchen
for a habit of coffee, Portland pleasure.
In the Oregonian,
bad news from distant places
is demoted to back pages,
following the cheery red, white and blue
mattress sale ads.
I light a candle, put on Vivaldi,
read a poem and a prayer
then get ready for work,
grateful for free parking.

How is it I have survived
this deathly rain so long?

sermonette

I mini sermon I was asked to write for a service on Sabbath:

I was asked to say a few words about what Sabbath means for me. Sabbath, the seventh day, a day for rest and renewal. I used to think a Sabbath was like a vacation, a break from work, until I took a sabbatical, a type of Sabbath, and realized that entering into the space of Sabbath, sabbatical is anything but a vacation. The writer and intuitive, Caroline Myss said, “[During Sabbath,] more than relaxation and de-stressing, we are seeking a genuine encounter with the power of Grace.” (Mystics Without Monasteries, Unity Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007, page 16).

True, Sabbath is a time of slowing down, being quiet, but it is an active rest. In order for an encounter with God to occur, we must clear our space and time of distractions, busyness, absolve our perceptual field of any imposition of rigid structure and knowing, because Sabbath is not about how much we know, it’s about whether or not we can endure listening in the silence. We have to let go of our need for control, our fear of nothingness, fear of pain. We have to let go of the security of the known, comfortable habits of our day, long enough to hear the still silent voice of God. For many of us, this is an effort; surrender control, that’s really hard work, risky business. It demands a level of faith that our finely constructed and controlled worlds will not fall apart in the process of seeking a genuine relationship with God, the Source.

As a performer, I know that place of surrender to the luminous ineffable, that place of transcendence into the Cloud of Unknowing. It’s the point in a song or dance when I’m not thinking about technique, the notes or steps; I’m not thinking about my next line, or the mistake I made in rehearsal; I am not thinking. I am purely in the moment, trusting that I am one with the movement, the gesture, the sound -- and the song sings me. This is the place of Grace; this is my Sabbath; this is my prayer. I’ve only reached this state of surrender a few times in the dance. How did I get there? Through daily devotion, discipline and practice. I trained my tool, the body, up to six hours a day, 6 days a week in order to get closer to the absolute, that collaborative conversation between grace, gravity and God.

As a poet, when the Spirit travels through me I know I have to lean back and let it; I have to trust that the writer’s craft will be there, as a part of me, without me manipulating the process. I must discipline myself to write every day in order to reach that occasional encounter with Spirit, with mystic mystery. I must empty myself of preconceived notions and perceptions, suspend all judgments, dissolve the boundaries of ego and fear, and be willing to tolerate uncertainty and a sense of insecurity. Hard work! I must have the patience to wait for the truth to reveal itself in an image, a word, an unexpected combination of thoughts.

I try to do this every day, but I don’t make a living writing poetry and if the poem hasn’t birthed itself in the hour before work that I’ve allotted for Sabbath, well what can I do? Sometimes I take the poem to work with me and I feel really guilty even if God does trump my place of employment. Sometimes I try to stay in that open state of listening, breathe the breath of Sabbath throughout the day and marry what I hear and see and feel in the office or on the bus with the light wisp of words from the morning. Sometimes I don’t return to the poem for days, weeks, even years, but every day I continue to devote myself to an opening of my heart and mind. I open wide, putting aside both the objective facts and subjective filters to listen to the Word of God. This is my purpose. This is my Sabbath. This is my prayer.

My place of Sabbath can look like inactive rest, even laziness, but actually, the devotion, discipline and practice of surrender into the silent mystery is a type of effortless work that, if I can reach an encounter with the vast power of Grace, is more renewing and life giving than any vacation I’ve ever had. I wish to leave you with a thought about Sabbath time from Rev. Eleanor Fleming. “Time in the silence is sacred. We must learn to place it ahead of everything else in our lives until it becomes such a part of our functioning that it has more authority over our thinking, our words, and our actions than the outer voices of the world.” (Rev. Eleanor Fleming, Unity Book Preview: Sacred Secrets, Unity Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007, pg 19.)

Fall

Lamentation

If you insist, God, that I stay alive
then what consolation? Don’t I too deserve more
than a couple hours of joy?

Entitlement is a nasty word.
I know too much about grief
and the ache in an old dancer’s hips.

Shivers of midnight light on downy quilts
no longer convince me that Beauty
makes these years of strain worthwhile.

I know the pain of surrender to gravity;
release to a hard, cold earth as the only way
to bliss. Beauty hurts,

so like an autumn leaf trembling
on the tip of an oak branch, I suspend
in quiet gold until it is my time to fall

and become nothing again.

From Vermont I feel Burma

Across Oceans of Compassion

Vermont maple syrup
flows bitter sweet through my pen
as silent monks fall.

Autumn orange stands
tall, still, with Myanmar roots.
Breathe my violence in

Breathe in maple’s gifts
of O2 and fluid veins.
The leaf touches me.

CO2 released ~
Winter comes early this year.
We know what to do.

Depression isn't about feeling sorry for myself

Depression

1.
My other mind
the one that I'm out of
sometimes
plays tricks on me
scribbling catastrophe
and conspiracy
in every fold of gray matter
until I can't fight It anymore
and I begin to believe
the unreasonable.

2.In this home,
not my home
resides the bear,
who is I, but not me
filled with stone-cold
polar resentment.
Fiercely caged in
an infrastructural landscape.
Is it the bars
or the space between
that lodges me,
a paws length away
from freedom?

There's No Place Like Home

I'm currently teaching poetry once a week to fifth graders who were affected by the immigration ICE Raids in our town. Tomorrow's topic is home. What is it? Where do we find it? How can we define it wherever we are? Many of these children and/or their families face deportation in the next few months. They are, for sure afraid and the message I want to leave with them is by Rumi: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house – I’d like to see you in better living conditions.”

I started thinking about metaphors for home, my own writing about home. Here are two examples:

Single Person Dwelling

I am many roomed
and every year there are fewer corners,
less closets, softer lighting, and ceilings that vault and vault.
Songs whisper through my walls:
cotton lullabies that rock me to sleep,
velvet green ballads, safe in their loneliness, and sometimes
the floors quake with a Barbra Streisand sing-along.

Laughter surrounds my walls
like tree frogs in the garden. Someday, soon, I will open
the back door and those leggy frogs will spring into the kitchen,
fill the sink and we will all croak and chuckle contagiously.
But for now I am content in knowing they are just outside the window.

A formal entrance, the front door, opens to an orderly white.
Exacting angle of an ottoman and precise tilt
of the picture frames may cause you to pause and ask,
“Unapproachable? Cool? Elegant, but stiff?”
Do not hesitate.
Do not pause. Please, come in.
Turn my rooms upside down.
Leave your garden footprints on the China Silk carpet.

Yes, the toothpaste is neatly rolled from the bottom up.
Yes, spices and books are alphabetized, magazines fanned
on the coffee table, and socks color-coded in their drawer.
But, poems fly across rooms in random chaotic scribbles.
Furniture is shoved aside when the need to dance arrives.
Passions stack up for the weekend
when a mere word like “mellifluous” can extend the day
into a ‘never get out of my bathrobe’ flurry,
a tigerlily tangle, an elegant mess.

Orchids bloom in steamy bathrooms, but die on precious shelves.
Can you smell the wet carnations, vanilla, violets, and bread?
Do you notice the ladybug on the light switch -- in my many rooms?

In my many rooms there is moonlight that slides in
through partially opened blinds; moonlight like memory
that lays in blue-white streams over elbows, wrists, and fingertips—
moonlight like memory that cannot be held.

On Writing

"The goal of writing is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest."

~ William Carlos Williams

Where Does the Poetry Come From?

On a Sunday morning

after coffee in bed

and a book

and a word like mellifluous

tickles my ears and tongue.

I do not know this word,

this mystery,

so I explore the dictionary

then think of honey

and remember

those Bit-O-Honey candy bars

that we kids bought with dimes

from the general store at Balsam Lake.

I remember

those northern lakes

many years later

when I went skinny-dipping with a lover

I think of bitter honey

and I write it down.

Honey

Mellifluous memories
harden like taffy candy
Cracked on the sidewalk
Bit ‘o Honey
Shattered bit ‘o love

Tongue the edge
hot lick saliva
Seal you back
soften in my belly hold
Barely

Lurid butter-yellow pieces
trapped in paper folds
Wrapper cracks
and barely holds

I long for the wholeness
that never was
But you were bought, already
already
broken

Reflection onf Thich Nhat Hanh and Negative Seeds

Between My Neighbors and Me

I begin with me,
my garden, my internal landscape.
It's all I can do
with these autumn leaves
that bluster over neighboring fences and walls,
leaves of anger, resentment, jealousy, and fear.
Walls that raise more walls,
fences that separate us
from our humanity.

It's all I can do
to try, keep trying every day,
every way I know how
to blow those rotting
leaves away
in this season before death.
And yet,
damned if those leaves
don't just drift right back,
silently in the night,
to my side of the fence,
while I sleep,
not trying so hard,
not trying at all to resist the wall
or rake away the leaves.

It's the walls, really
that must come down,
the fences between us,
that divide us.
It's not the leaves of emotion
that spread seeds of negativity.
It is the walls
that must come down
so we can gather all those leaves,
the leaves that make us
who we are,
into one bountiful pile.
Then and only then
can we leap, weep
and laugh together
beneath our shared oak tree.


-Wendy Thompson, 9/15/2007

September 11 and six years of still breathing

Today I decided to fast in memory of 9/11 and also to support the forgiveness of debt. I've also been studying Thich Nhat Hahn's practices and Buddhist breathing practice of breathing in the negative and out the positive.

I inhale
debts of the world.
How can we owe anyone anything?
I exhale the generosity of God, who has
given all.

One of Hahn's Gathas I've chosen for the week is:
"Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion."

It is so hard for me to do this, both wake up smiling and live fully in the moment. I am such a planner and spend much time in memories, and my depression makes waking difficult.

Know I
am breathing in
reluctant wakefulness
of morning. Know I
am breathing
out dreams.

Know I
am breathing in
latte's chicory scent
I am breathing out today's
long fast.

Staying present and noticing on the drive to work is difficult and actually dangerous:

I lean
softly into the curve
of highway 405. I am easy
easy like Sunday morning that plays on FM103.
Drive time.

An organic
produce truck rumbles overhead.
I am present and aware of the barreling
Swift Movers and police sirens coming from behind
my exit.

I am
nearly cut off because
I drifted into memories of MayDay
and turning away from my intended 6th Avenue
destination, work;

and instead
turned onto North Burnside
to meet my lover for kisses.
How do I stay present between the past
and future?

Breathe in ~
purpose in the office.
Yet, work isn't all there is.
So I breathe out freedom to just be
simply me.

The power of poetry: Poet Sharon Olds Declines White House Invitation

This is an open letter from the poet Sharon Olds to Laura Bush decliningthe invitation to read and speak at the the National Book Festival in Washington, DC.Sharon Olds is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed poets living in America today. Read to the end of the letter to experience her restrained, chilling eloquence.
"Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure,and the inner and outer news, it delivers. And the concept of a communityof readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom,become our teachers.When you have witnessed someone non-speaking and almost non-moving spellout, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing.When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely non-speaking and non-moving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song. So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to. I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness - as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war. But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration. What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us. So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,SHARON OLDS"

This exchange was forwarded to the original sender by the famed American opera singer, Marilyn Horne, who had also turned down a similar invitation some time ago, as follows:"Brava! I did not write a letter when I was asked a few yrs. ago to sing for the Christmas Tree lighting at the White House. I refused, but did not go public about it. I just could not be seen as supporting this regime. It was the first term, too......." MARILYN HORNE

Why I Write

Kim Stafford writes, "Life is a universe of fragments yearning for coherence." And this is why I write, for synthesis, wholeness. I write to understand the fragments of my sadness, like individual cello notes longing for both the harmony and dissonance that create a concerto. I write because there is dew on the Canna and I miss you ~ yet I'm not really supposed to miss you and I don't understand. I write to make sense of why some people irritate more than delight me. I write to try to make sense of a senseless war, of hostile treatment of others, of differences in beliefs and the need to be right. I write from wonder.

Paint peels off the summer deck. What does it remind me of, teach me to re-member? Antique gray pushes through a fresh coat of green ~ indentations of the past converge with now in a message ~ a message of what? Planks of pine are filled with woody knots, whirls of trapped grains pooled together to create curves of intrigue, or are they bumps in an otherwise straight and narrow road. What layers of old are ready to peel from me this day, this weekend, this minute, starting yesterday? Paint chips, morning stillness, crimson honeysuckle and hummingbird busyness, blackberries in an orange bowl. And ease. I wonder.

These associations, oblique to cliche, can transform me if I choose to notice. If I listen to the universe outside of me, the large and the small of it, maybe I will begin to make sense of what churns within. Maybe I will begin to create my own whole constellation of random stars, asters from dis-asters, lucidity from these fragments of light. And wonder.

Garden Beds on 54th Street

Garden Beds on 54th Street

No more garden to tend with winter tears.
Pink lady iris will bloom without me.
It was not you who made me cry, my dear,

but rather the dark soil on my boots, too many years
weeding through bleeding hearts and rambling sweet peas 
No more garden to tend with winter tears.

Did you know that trillium plucked will not, for seven years, appear?
You never promised me or arranged a single guarantee.
It was not you who made me cry, my dear.

I was just a tourist through your beds, that was clear,
planting impatiens, a hapless rose, yearning for intimacy,
but no more a garden to tend with winter tears.

Elusive blend of petals and rain, lilies and Shakespeare,
we were both gardeners then, a laconic iris of discovery,
and this made me cry, my dear,

that like sundials in the shade, I fear
our wisp of time has gone to seed.
No more a garden to tend with winter tears.
It was not you, really, who made me cry, my dear.

Prize winning poem

This poem won a prize in the Willamette Writer's Kay Snow contest:

Flow on River
(with homage to Whitman)

Once I was
naked
on a rocky river bank
flesh on granite
tender curves
a lone drape and flow
over rugged stone
at ease
and at ebb with the ebb-tide

Once I was
stoic
baking in a summer sun
squinting
at the world
and wondering
why I stayed
at water’s edge
while fine spokes of light
glanced like
shimmering gems
off the Klickitat
Flow on, crested and scalloped-edged waves
flow on

Once you told me
you like to read the obituaries --
“Not ‘like’ as in it brings me pleasure
to read them,” you said,
happy to be alive and 50,
“but take this one for example:
23 years old, gone…
makes you think,
don’t you think?
What if you only
had 23 years, or five
or just a 3-hour river run?”

Makes you think,
don’t you think,
about the choice
to flaunt away the day,
just receive the summer sky.

Are you ready, you ask,
to pass through a class III?
“You know, it’s okay
to back out,” you say
as a curious white goose
bobs effortlessly by
suspend here and everywhere

but then I go nowhere
so I know
it’s not okay
to stop short of the finish line
shy of sunset
it’s not okay
so I catch one last gaze
from your loving and thirsty eyes
and dig my paddle
in white water
drenching me
I follow you
into the V
into the splash
of canyon shadows
and fears
and mere seconds pass
soaked and grinning
the moment splendors me
then spits us out
from the river’s tongue,
alive

Seek justice, love, kindness, walk humbly

I just received a letter from my friend Char who has completed her first year of Buddhist retreat where she meditates all day in solitude. She says she would like to be in retreat for the rest of her life, but will continue only until 2010. I think, 2010, that is so far away, but really, it’s only three years from now. I don’t claim to understand what she does in retreat or why she is called to separate herself so fully from the world; maybe though, in my ignorance, she is not separating, but entering true intimacy, contributing love and healing to this wounded world in a dimension I only dip into for a few short scraps of time in my week.

Along with paragraphs of gratitude, Char sends photos of her new retreat space behind her house, a “mini-barn of enlightenment.” I want that space, that solitude, that clearness and quiet for myself, too. I want to step out of the busyness of my days, the dis-integration of this world where we resort to cruelty and killing in the name of freedom, independence, righteousness, democracy, and peace. We are fighting for peace! I am fighting for peace within me. Every inch of me is tugged by someone(s) in need and my compassion is spent. I long to be with one Mary Oliver poem all day, stare at an uncluttered pine paneled wall, be still, just be in quiet, simple grace. I am certain that is not an accurate description of Char’s days, but from my weary vantage point, I imagine her life in a diaphanous ease. My heart, mind and soul are jammed with horrific news of each day, crisis management, reaching, grasping longing for communion, opening my heart only to have it slashed and burned as a result of someone else’s fear of intimacy. Anger rises in me and I am desperate to turn that anger into change, into slashes of red paint for frescos of enlightenment; I am desperate to turn my anger into action toward justice, into slaps of a kayak paddle through the river, making waves, into fierce loving, fierce rightness, fierce loyalty, fierce prayer, but where do I begin? Iraq? The orphans in Darfur? The undocumented workers interned in Tacoma? The hideous repetition of our shadowed pasts? The liars, the cheats, the combusting egos, the abusers and users, the game players, the politicians, the Pharaoh in the White House, me? There are just too many notes in my life and I long for a singular bell tone, one focus. Of course, I know I must begin with me, the violence within me, the self-abuse, the avoidance, addictions, fears, cravings, ego-driven actions. Char’s practice, as I perceive it, is that beginning with self, reintegration of self so that we stop contributing to the off-centeredness that threatens to destroy us.

A friend told me that her overall impression of my blog postings was that there was an unquenchable longing, thirst, desire for intimacy. Her take is accurate. I am seeking intimacy, ultimately with the One Creator God. I do seek at-One-ment. But so much of my journey has been about a mediated experience of atonement, seeking intimacy with other mortal souls to reach an ultimate intimacy with God; I have neglected to sit for too long in intimacy with myself. Perhaps that is what is so attractive to me about Char’s practice and the photographs of her mediation space.

I trust that Char is performing invaluable work in her practice and I wish to do the same in mine. She asks me how my “word work” is going. I have neglected and avoided the word work, detoured through a superficial dating relationship that circled through a whole lot of nothing, exhausted myself with menial tasks at a less than challenging job, worried about money, only sang on Sundays, barely wrote, barely gave a nod to my higher purpose. (Okay, I know I am being a bit hard on myself, I am doing good work, have been doing good work, but it just doesn’t feel like enough right now.) Char reminds me to get back to my practice of centering myself, listening for the care-full words, being courageous in new ways of being, shedding my fear, and donning the sheer, gossamer poetry of truth.

Power of Words

As more of my poetry gets out in the world, as I enter the field of poetry/journal therapy, I must be conscious of a few things:

1) First do no harm
2) Say only what is necessary, kind, and true
3) What has the power to heal has the power to hurt
4) Words bear power in their lucidity and universality. Sometimes readers think that if they resonate with the words they are also resonating with the writer; they believe they know the writer and make assumptions of false intimacy. Beware. Be careful. Be care-filled.

Am I best that way?

"I am lonely, lonely
I was born to be lonely
I am best that way..." ~ William Carlos Williams

Was I born to fly solo
cries the red-tailed hawk
as she canvases the desert sky?

Was I born to be alone
asks the single thistle in the sand,
her scarlet center aching to bloom?

Was I born to be lonely
coos the mourning dove,
her song echoing through redrock caves

And what of the one
cluster of paintbrush,
the one magpie perched
on a manzanita branch,
the mariposa lily,
cream white petals
flung open to the heat
of each day?

What of the one poet
hiking alone
with a single pack
a single pen
and a single page?
She is alone by choice
she notes
it is best that way
when the desert is in full bloom.
It is best that way,
alone sometimes
she is best that way,
alone.
She is best
alone, or not, but for now
she is
and she is no less
alone.

It has been awhile

I have been immersed in academic writing, preparing old work for poetry submissions (just sent out my first full length poetry manuscript), and so haven't been as communicative on a blog scale.

But here are a few poems:

Living at the Limit of the Habitable World
Alone,
the albatross,
no wish to swallow sky,
cries out the salt of sea water
my home




(Wo)
Man-i-
fest light.
May I please have
epiphany –
seamlessly celebrate
reason and mystery –
together in one small yellow
corner of un-i-verse, to claim
my own
my whole

A Lenten Question

Encountering Dangerous Beauty

Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands,
parched places of apathy, or are you
agitated in desert wastelands ~

awake in the dark light where mystics stand,
or do you slump in your usual Sunday pew?
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?

Do you fill your life with privileges of every brand
or do you empty your cup of all you once knew ~
agitated in desert wastelands.

What do you require to acquire? How do you fill your hands?
Can you reduce possessions to just a few
or are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?

Commercialize, privatize, merchandise: your life in a can.
What do you get from all this? What do you construe ~
agitated in desert wastelands?

To bloom in the desert, don’t you understand,
you must let go of the last hope of morning dew.
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands
or vitally agitated in desert wastelands?