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.