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?