Unexpected

I did not know what it was, the broad moving shadow over my shoulder. But the wide arc of wings became clear, then the gray-blue feathers. It was like a mountain landing, a canyon settling, an entire pine forest coming to rest. I had never seen a heron that close, so I looked at him for a while, while Nikki kicked at stones on the bank of the Cuyahoga, and watched me watching him.

What I decided for him, must be true for me too. I do not write language poems; I do link the universal to the personal. I am a simple person writing on a two-lane bridge.

I want to fly. I want to fly in a way that makes people turn their heads and marvel. I want to know which perch to call home for a while. I want to stand there, so at ease, my barrel chest is exposed. I want to be still. I want to be able to tuck all of the largeness in and be small too. I want to know that I can stand on one thin leg, when the other is not available. I want to wear the cloak of soft blue sky. I want to seek running water. I want my eyes to be alert, while the rest of me rests calm.

A blue Heron is within me. I do not know what is within you. A pinking sky in New Mexico. A thick boulder at the bottom of a waterfall. An acorn cap turned to the rain. All I know is that there is heron in me, and it is perfectly fine – I give myself permission—to abandoned my human brain for hollow bones. For sharp beak. For sweeping wings that use the sky to fly.

MInor Key

This is what the table looked like last night, after Christmas in a Minor Key. Each one of those small votive candles represents a person or a situation that causes pain. I know, for a fact that, three of those candles are for young men who took their own lives. One is for a brother who died at 22. Another for a baby, miscarried, deep into a pregnancy. Several are for parents who have died, or whose stories are winding down to an unexpected disoriented ending. One for a man who left his family. Another for a son who is jail.

It was a powerful night last night. To damn God. To see only darkness. Then to talk and sing our way to the light. There was crying in the chapel. I heard it after the very first passage was read. And, at times, there was sobbing and the heavy heaving of of breaths that could barely be breathed. Yet, it was not uncomfortable. It was not hard. It was the softest and most god-filled space I have been in in a long time. There is something about raw truth that orients us back. Not to the nature of life's suffering, but to the fragility of our hearts. And the gentle care we must take of each other.

It is an amazing gift to sit in safety, surrounded by others who are bruised and yet still leaning. Towards God. Towards honoring. Towards being naked, yet swaddled in light.

I'm scared

...by this storm,

by the prospect of driving home, from Cincinnati, through it.

I'm scared of driving alone, everywhere

always, for the rest of my life.

And, if that is true, I will drive less and less,

and everything I will see is Lake Effect snow.

I need to have more confidence, in my courage,

in my car, in my carriage, in my ability to move

from one place to another, as I have been doing

for the last few year. I got myself to whole again,

I got myself to Los Angeles, to Columbus, Indiana,

I got myself to fearless again, to sassy again.

I brought myself back to myself, so surely,

if I just try to gather the truth and not

the unknown non-truth, than I can get myself home.

All by myself. Because that's the kind of person I am,

and the kind of person someone else will

be so glad to know.

Two boulders

I keep asking the same two boulder questions over and over:

who will she be and when will love happen?

The same two questions most people ask, I bet.

I am as common as Ohio flint.

But today I have decided to ask things a new way,

rub raw more memorable stones.

What sound do I miss tasting most?

How many eyes will I need to see?

Why would the tree not bend in the storm?

Is it the clouds moving or the wind?

Is it the falling or the landing of the snow?

When is the skin too waxy to take a bite?

I keep trying to crunch off a morsel

from the same large boulders,

but instead, it would be so easy to put

a small river pebble in my mouth.

No god likes to be nagged into submission.

Instead, let me turn it all inside out.

Ask myself down a new path of thinking.

This year, I decided to have the kids learn about hurricanes.

(I know, that's an unlikely choice in Ohio.)

I wanted to tie what we were doing in my class

to the regular science studies, and since they "shape and reshape

the earth," hurricanes were a viable curriculum link.

You can ask me anything now; I learned along with the kids.

Barometric pressure of a category four typhoon,

the string of named used in 2005, the year of Katrina,

the lay-out of the levees in New Orleans.

How to spell Ponchartrain. I know a lot.

And the thing that surprised me the most was the list

of conditions needed for a hurricane:

moist, hot water rising from the equator, and

light winds aloft, coming from the same direction.

I thought, I'd imagined, that hurricanes start in a furious way.

They don't, they are nudged into existence.

The woman I used to love is single again,

and all it took was one quick sight of her on my computer screen,

to begin the roil. Not something large, or speedy.

She rose up from the equator, the rubbed raw middle of me,

then one distant fact breathed on me from a westerly direction

and there it came: the tropical disturbance, the begin of the spin.

One day, flat clear water -- a clean mantle of happiness --

then, the next, something cyclonic. I wish I could see

the event from an outlying planet, or I wish I could

be a visitor on this planet, an alien star seed viewing

this treacherous twist with amazement and awe.

Look at the image now, the pure white of the clouds,

the distinct eye wall, the tailwinds spinning off the edges.

Something as massive as this is also rare and beautiful.

I know that, even as the surge wave is rolling toward me.

My friend chided another poet today because her poem

did not seem to revolve an idea that was dying to be written.

Something so powerful that it had to be spun onto paper.

And then, as our conversation turned to love, I asked my friend

if her love was one that she would die for, or die from without.

It was not. It is not. She could see herself being single

the rest of her life. Not me. The one love I had, the one

that whirled me 180 while I was in it, and then cast me

out into centripetal orbit when it was over, has shaped

and reshaped me. If I could look inside, at the skin of my heart,

I am sure that I would see the chamber marks a bullet

has when it is shot from the barrel. Though I will not

know what I once knew with the woman who tore me

through it, I would die for love again. I would lay my body

on the shore of the gulf, asking to be swept up and carried

until I am dropped into it, mangled and naked. I would stand

in the face of wide gathering cloud, my arms akimbo, shouting

let love kill me, before not having love leaves me dead.

the thing about Christmas

...the last few years, was the box. That box of decorations that has not been touched since January of 2008. Nearly three years. Before, I could not bear to see the ornaments Carrie had made me, crafted from the sawed-off-trunk of the Frasier Fir. She would use the stump wedge to make an ornament, adding tissue paper or paint, sparkles and extensions. In December, 2008 I could not even look in the attic, where the box was. It would have sent me into a gloomy spiral. I decided against the tree, and, instead, decorated my mantle. Then in 2009, I could not go near the box again. This time, it would have unleashed fury, painting the holiday and my house with a black tar goop. A sticky, sludgy, hard-to-remove wrath. I decorated the mantle.

This year, it seems very possible, even probable that I could open the box, find those stump ornaments and just chuck them into the garbage. Not down into the ravine, or into Lake Erie, or burned in a cauldron for cleansing. I would just find those ornaments, and throw them into my green garbage bin. With the ends of the celery, the egg shells, the catalog from LL Bean, and the cable bill I paid online.

You see, Carrie does not have sway over me anymore most days. She is as immaterial as those living dregs I dispose of every day. I don't want to eat the horsey ends of celery. The egg shells are broken and contain nothing anymore -- the good yoke is gone. The catalog of options from LL Bean are unnecessary. I have a good winter coat, plenty of cotton turtlenecks, and treaded boats to use on slippery days. And the bill? Well, it's taken care of, the services have been rendered. So, too, with this person who promised she would love me until the day I died. There is nothing else good to reap from love or loss. I have ways to keep myself safe and protected, what she gave me is done. The time has passed.

There will be time for a tree. And all the wrangling that comes with it. The tree stand, the twisting of the bolts into the trunk. The wrestling to make sure it is straight. The disagreements whether to string the lights or the garlands first. The placing of the ornaments, some in front where they can be seen often and others relegated to filling up the back, the window side. There will be time for the messiness of love.

For now, it is December, 2010, and I have again decorated my mantle. Not to avoid something, but because this year, it is what makes me happy.

Chambers and valves

I know someone who is having open heart surgery tomorrow.

It's hard to wrap my mind around it. The way someone,

a highly trained someone, will crack Bill's chest,

put his heart on bypass -- his life hooked to a machine,

his heart will be touch, valves will be replaced,

then he will be sealed back together layer by layer,

until stapling one side of his skin to the other.

It's mind boggling. What people and their tools can now do.

But when I think about Bill, and especially his Lorene,

I am reminded that we all go through open heart

surgery all the time. We all have congenital heart failure,

holes and flaps that don't quite work. And now would be

the time in the poem when I could list anorexic daughters,

sons who commit suicide, dogs who run away and never come back.

I could tell you about my mother's face when she died,

or the story I just heard about a mother bleeding out in childbirth.

But that is not what this poem is about. This poem is about

the surgeon in all of us. How we know when to knock

on someone else's ribs, how we gently pry open the latticed cage,

how we say -- with words and actions, with a softness in our eyes --

I will hold your heart. I will put my thumb in the hole.

Here, breathe through my arteries. Sit in my chamber.

Rest, let the thub dubbing stop. I will be your bypass.

Your blood can flow through me for now.

With thanks to Lorene, who has healed my heart so many times.

because...

she had to face an empty attic and the fact that her mother would never be back,

she had to call two doctors, and say words that are nearly impossible to say,

she needed to rework the work and did not realize that the work was done,

she had her tonsils out, at 36, and no one was waiting in the waiting room,

she has to let go of a lover who her body loves,

she is growing up too fast, and dragging others, who are not ready, along too,

she has a pain in her flank that just does not seem to go away,

she is tired about worrying about her children's education,

she is taking chemo, and does not like the thought of poison trying to kill poison,

she is somewhere, alone, not sure that she can make it through the night,

she knows the whiskey is nearby, but not something that can really make it better,

he does not know how much her life has changed because of what he did to her,

she does not know how much her life has changed because of what she did to her,

she will never be able to say the things that need to be said.

Because she is pulling in and might not find her way back.

Because she is naked, outside as the weather ignores how cold she feels.

Because it is all as heavy and immalleable as bronze.

Because.

dallas, 5:29 pm

I forget, sometimes, that the sun exists

under the cloudy stuffing of a winter Cleveland day.

I forget, sometimes, that the sky is blue,

that the stars shine, that there is a moon

reflecting back light in a universe

that is far larger than the bowl of life I eat from.

But this night, seven nights ago, I felt the whole world.

The earth beneath me, its fiery core, the storms on the sun,

the pull of orbit, the small child scooping rice with his fingers

ten thousand miles away, a lone kingfisher singing in the morning,

my home on my street, my mother's ashes in their box,

the dented light from the milky circle of a distant galaxy,

a monk bowing to the west. This night,

seven nights ago, I felt the one pink womb of living.

Wandering in

Last week, at this time, I was in Dallas with a friend. We went to an outdoor sculpture garden. One of the installations was hard to figure out. There was something that looked like a sealed off stainless steel service entrance. Heather and I approached and, I tucked my head back in surprise. It was a door made of brushed glass. Then, upon entering, a black hallway that wrapped around to another double doorway. We opened those doors and stepped into a room with soft sandstone benches and, above us, an open window to the sky. It was a space, in this beautiful place, where we were asked to stop. To look up. To see what passes by. Just sit and see.

And when the sky rolls by like that, in this fabric of grays -- something I would ordinarily clump together into one dismissed color -- I could see it. The way the shapes shift. The way the shades evolve and fold into each other. Then a patch of lighter white. A bauble of blue.

Today I spent six hours watching a television show, the whole series in one day. Some people would say that that was a waste of time, but, not for me, today. The main character has cancer and she first turns radically self-indulgent, then she backs her way into love. Into slowing down her life. Into seeing her husband, her son, her neighbor, her brother. Her life.

I think that's way it needs to be with me. I need remind myself to see. Maybe it's slowing down. Maybe it's focusing on one small patch of my life. Maybe it's not permitting the blur.

I suspect that I am in the process of backing my way into love, too. Not like Cathy, with stage four cancer, but by just being the age I am, closer to the terminal end. It would be easy for me to lash myself for all of the time I wasted, all of the years I clumped it into one blob of gray, but all I can do is realize that I am here. On this night.

I wandered into a coffee shop to write a letter to friend, and there was a bluegrass group called "Porch" playing. The lead singer, here in Cleveland, had a star Nashville voice. Amazing. Near the end of the show, the lead guitarist's niece got up to sing a Gillian Welch song, Miss Ohio. She's sung in LA at the Whiskey-a-go-go. I really do not know how to adequately tell you of my marvel. At the music, at the ring of family supporting the group, at this young woman's voice. Her uncle's harmony. The bottleneck blues. I was smiling at the woman, and the women watching the woman, and, even this capacity to feel part of a family -- if only for a moment -- that I will never know.

I just wandered into it. This moment. Just as I wandered into that installation last week. I don't exactly what it all means, but I know it is something. Something I'm going to straighten it out sometime. For now, I just must give thanks. For that square of sky. The quilt of gray. The tv show. My inclination to get out of the house into the world that holds the sky. It all brought me here. Sitting. Looking. Seeing. Hearing a stunning song in a small beautiful box of time.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

The rooms were full of relics,

ornate boxes and vessels for holding remnants

of the saints. Shoulder bones

and teeth, tunics and corners of burial shrouds.

The people believed that if you saw or

were touched by something that had once been

part of the holy, you could be healed and holy, too.

One box was my favorite. It was filled with

sacred objects, treasures of heaven. At the top

of the box there was a hole through which

water could be poured. The water would seep

in and around the relics and then fall out of a lower hole.

People could drink this water, or clean themselves

with the water. Baptized, again, with hope.

My friend, Nikki, went to the river yesterday to

fill up a bottle with its thanksgiving flow.

Her life like the Cuyahoga, is moving to the silty sweet delta,

somehow, on a crooked path,

the same way drinking water runs to

the low spot before it can be taken in.

She makes necklaces from red glass,

she throws a slobbery ball to her dog Bill

over and over again. I collect

acorns and black stones with magic white bands.

My neighbor places her childrens' stick leg drawings

into boxes marked, "Keep."

I do not know what you do,

but I know you find small holy things to hold onto.

A peach pit, the college ID with the good haircut,

a piece of birch bark, a golden bracelet with

links shaped like leaves. I do not know what you do,

but I know that something some time kissed your palm

and your fingers wrapped around it and held on.

Held on the whole night long.

Racing sticks in the river

I did not know what Ruth meant when she wrote me last week

and told me to come out. Come Out. “There is room for you here.”

But today I saw it happen. How I left my body and watched myself

ride tangent to real time and place. Yellow light living,

merging cautiously, one foot on the brake and the other accelerating.

The volume turned down low, every misstep rattling in the trunk.

I wanted to tell Emily that I was mesmerized by the ladder legs

on her black hatted warbler. I wanted to stand in front of the books,

and memorize every title. I wanted to run my hand on the red orange walls.

I wanted to give Bill a head hug and lay down on his wide bed.

I wanted to ask you where you slept. Wanted to use the hula hoop,

try on a silver beaded ring. Wanted to stand in the river.

Pick up acorns and whip them at trees. Throw them hard.

I wanted to take back what I said about my dream.

Take back what I said about everything, supplement the text.

I wanted to go into the kitchen and get my own glass of water.

Touch the purple skin of the eggplant. Taste the pesto.

I wanted to sit down on something green

and say nothing at all for a long time.

But I did not. I do not. If Summa Health Care asked me

to take a drug test, I would come back negative for everything:

smoking pot, drinking whiskey, dancing until I busted a knee,

writing with permanent ink, loving another living being,

giving a friend refuge, feeding a dog bacon, sleeping soundly,

rubbing the chimney head of a baby, walking on a thin mountain path,

driving 12 hours to get anywhere, swimming in the ocean,

folding a fitted sheet, fucking, letting a man kiss my back,

baring my back, baring my shoulders, baring my dry elbows,

holding out the white wrinkled palms of my hands, asking for this.

Knowing I would never live in a town like yours,

I took the long way home. Read a book in Darrow Park.

Bought gas in Twinsburg, stopped in Hudson

to see if they had a shirt big enough for me. Two Xs, one L,

enough room for who I am and all of the layers

that keep me from being me – keep me from coming out.

The woman there told me about the way the Japanese

fold shirts. They criss, cross, then pull up with two fingers

and the whole shirt collapses into the right shape.

They said they wished they knew how to do it,

but loved to use their folding board which worked just as well.

I thought about shirts for next eighteen miles, the sides

that are never seen when they’re on display. The belly of the shirt,

the hem of the shirt, the back, the tail, the inside of the sleeves.

Then origami. The folds within the swan. The flaps inside the peace cranes.

Then I thought about paper, paper so durable it can hold anything.

How it is all just lines on the paper. Lines that make the drawing,

lines that make the letters. Letters that make the words,

words that record the life, stabilize the confusion, bring understanding.

Then I thought about the wood pulp that makes the paper,

the trees lining the banks of the low Cuyahoga River.

The sticks that we raced under the bridge. How that moment

felt real to me. How I was there when that was happening.

How you knew to chose a thick stick, a dense stick,

and I kept selecting thin quills. How your stick found the current,

and mine was never solid enough to slide.

How, despite the weight of me, I am too buoyant.

Not really in it. How, then, it became my instinct to find a better stick.

A wider stick, a bulky stick, something with living marrow.

Not to beat you, but be close enough to be close enough

to see how you are surrendering to living,

so that I can give way to living and surrender my second skin.

The one that keeps me shorebound as the river moves around me.

coming out of the closets

...the t-shirt I bought to remember Tybee Island and our house with the pool,

the Saugatuck sweatshirt, the dress up capris for out-to-dinner,

the Steelers sweatshirt I wore when we both cheered their Superbowl victory;

at half-time, we ate homemade food that was all black and gold.

The skirt my mother wore to Theta conventions, because when we

were packing up my mom's clothes, she said it might look nice.

16 non-matching socks, a fisherman's knit sweater that will never fit again.

A dozen teaching skirts in various tones of blue jean and khaki,

that shirt she made me buy even though I never liked it.

The Three River's Arts Festival t-shirt we both got to remember a great day,

those shorts I wore in Ithaca, much to her disdain,

the shoes I wore when we first kissed, and every other pair of stinky Merrells.

The sheets we slept on in the downstairs bedroom,

the pillow cases too. Her beach towel, her washcloths.

And five other big garbage bags full of stuff my body

wore when my body was with hers.

Including these shoes, the ones on that day

when we were tourists in a graveyard in Savannah,

walking among the dead. All of it now, like bodies

carried out by a coroner, in black bags.

How do I say “I love you” to the one not on the path?

In tenth grade we learned about the way electrons

float in the outer shell of the molecule.

That these negative particles wander from the nucleus,

searching for a positive force that will pull them in.

Then they attach to the empty space on another’s atomic orbit.

A whole new substance is created in this bonding.

Ionic, it’s called, I think. It’s hard to remember,

I was so taken by Pam Robertson’s curly blond hair.

And, while I never had any reason to use that information

in the ensuing thirty years, tonight it is the thing I need to know.

There have been times when my electrons huddled

as close to the core as possible. I had an internal entropy,

and did not need nor want to wander, looking.

And there are other times that I was just a fired up particle,

jittering from one person to another, looking for

anyone and anything to coax the sting from my charge.

I groped at respect and security; I flirted with admiration and approval;

I made love to achievements, making it nearly impossible

for others to not douse me with high regard.

How hard I could hit the ball, how far I could hit the ball,

how many skip I could plant in a river stone,

how I could wind the words around a fictional story,

and how I could mesmerize the children in my life.

How the photos culled out the spirit of the person,

the mountain, the praying mantis. But all of that

was just a string of a million minuscule electrons

leaching out of every cell trying to find comfort.

Tonight, when Nikki asked me to ask the question again,

I realized that it is different now. I am willingly in the far reaches

from my nucleus because I finally know my own nub.

And this part of me that is longing for belonging

does not have a quivering within at all. My electrons

are on a purposeful pilgrimage. They know the proton they seek.

And while I know her, and could transfer my self to her self,

creating a whole new being with its own

atomic weight and strength, I will wait.

And I will say I love you to everything I see until I see her.

I will say I love you to this cold cup of coffee to my right,

I will say I love you to the keys clicking under my fingers,

I will say I love you to the red thread wrapped around my wrist.

To the red car that just drove by, to the man driving it.

To the street under the wheels, and the earth under the concrete.

To the rock now forming from the pushing we place upon it.

The grains in the sediment. The tiny shining within the stone.

I will say I love you to the sky that holds it all,

the things seen and unseen, the things known and the things revealing.

I will say I love you to all that is here

Then I will say I love you to all that is on its way.

Waiting for the deer

It’s far more satisfying to see them,

hunkered down on the woods path,

than to walk the path trying to spy

a patch of brown, a flicker of a tail,

the worn heels of horns sticking out

from the mix of branches.

Tonight I went to the river’s edge

to find another miracle, and

what I found was a locked garden gate,

a dog, unleashed, weaving between gravestones,

two school buses and the herringbone

flash of a falcon moving from a nearby tree

to the deeper part of the woods.

Even the sycamore tree who held

our worries and wishes has been chopped down.

The leaves are beginning to turn,

and the vast landscape of the northern shore

looked more like broccoli stapled to the earth

than anything spectacular. It all made

me think that miracles are wily

beasts able to chart their own arrival.

And tonight they are tending to someone else.

I am sitting where the nuns walk after dinner,

yet no one, this evening, has come

to enjoy the wilting light. It is just

an ordinary plastic picnic table.

a patio made with Home Depot molded stones.

A place of this world and not the other.

There once was a woman who loved the sound

of my feet crunching in the snow,

and tonight, I know she would have

heard the way the dry acorns shattered

under the weight of my steps.

I can see the way she would have smiled.

She is three miles from here, though, lost to me now.

Another is ninety-two miles away. And the last

who loved me because she knew I needed to be loved,

is resting in her bedroom seven states away.

How do I say “I love you” to the

one not yet on the path?

By walking it? By staring down into

the woods for anything familiar?

Do I hinge it to a word, just one,

seeing the way it shines inside out,

as if lit by the western light?

Or do I walk away? Knowing the deer

are grazing elsewhere and in time

they will come out, hungry for what

I can feed them from the palm of my hand.

History

The football coach was my history teacher in high school.

We'd spend Monday and Tuesday reading the next chapter's text,

Wednesday answering the chapter review questions,

Thursday watching a relevant movie, then on Friday we would take the test.

I do not actually remember this man ever talking to us.

Occasionally, a football player would wander into our class

and they would lean together in hushed tones while we read or worked.

I think, I largely gathered enough stuff into my head for the test

(which I promptly forgot) then the whole cycle started again.

The book was red, I remember that. And I remember Amy Paulus

laughing with me as we passed notes and chatted. Yes,

the best part of history class was Amy Paulus.

In the last few months, I have become the keeper of the family documents.

Boxes and boxes of letters, discharge papers, marriage certificates.

In some way, this is an ironic choice. Who will I, the single one, pass this onto?

For now, that is not my worry. I like having the boxes in my attic,

and the contents spread out over my dining room table.

My grandmother's photo album from 1922 when she was a young woman.

A paragraph about my mother washing me in a German sink.

My grandfather's manifesto about his quest to Maine.

Stories of all the men my mother dated in college. Branson, Beau, Dick.

A picture of nine Cowan children, a picture of my father holding up

his first baseball mitt. My brother's genius test scores.

The last letters between my aunt and my mom as Papa was sent to hospice.

And, my favorite today, this photo of Grammy and Papa Reinhold

up north in Wisconsin. Just look at them.

I do not know why there was a war of 1812, or anything

much beyond the tea dumping mythology of the Revolutionary War.

I have no clue who our allies and enemies were in World War II.

I know we slaughtered Native Americans, and that we conquered Hitler

a little too late, but who does not know that?

I did not know about Chernobyl when it happened,

and I was a full-fledged mortgage paying adult then.

I still do not know a Sunni from a Shiite.

If you asked me to name and locate three eastern European countries,

I would ask you if you would like a lemonade and some guacamole.

The box is like those bible verses I skim over, someone begetting

someone else, one lineage following an older lineage, showing that

we all come from one source. But this box, I could not ignore.

This is what I can tell you: My grandmother loved my grandfather,

there is not one picture with him where she is not smiling.

My other grandfather was on a lifelong journey to improve himself,

and that included marrying a preacher's daughter from Tarrytown, New York.

My aunt was born with curly blond hair. My mother, years after.

When she was 5 or 6, she fell and bit the tip of her tongue off.

In high school, she got a C+ in Latin. And a C- in "Foods."

She wore girdles that she bought in New York City.

Sometime, on all those waist cinched dates, met my father.

Years later, he left the service to make her happy.

They had dreams of living in Chicago or Arizona.

My brother was the happiest baby on the planet during 1965,

even though, he crawled backwards

for a long, long time to get where he needed to go.

And, before I could talk, I knew how to whistle.

That's all the history I need to know.

That's the only history that will ever really matter to me.

And the best part, there is no test. No review questions.

It's all just reading and looking, smiling at people alive

before I was ever a person. Linking one love to another

until they all end up here. On this day, with me.

Sparrows

There were so many sparrows in my tree lawn maple,

that a ten year old boy who lives down the street

stopped to stare into it from my driveway,

then he moved by the trunk

to look up through the branches.

It was odd, so far out of ordinary,

that a black kid with a mohawk

had to stop, that I had to stop,

that my neighbor silenced her story to listen.

How often do three busy people

perch to attention for the same thing?

It was a royal racket, dozens of them,

maybe even a hundred, gathered before dusk.

Like Muslims for the another lean to Mecca,

they gathered to a common calling bell

and began the Maghrib, a sunset prayer.

Yesterday, the song at church that grabbed my attention

was Khudaya Rahem Kar, from Pakistan.

The chant asks for God's mercy over and over again.

The first syllable, "Khu" swells like a flock of people

gathering, then surging, to a needed God.

The R in Rahem rolls, then the M becomes a hummm.

I have been singing it all day,

not really sure what mercy is or what kind of mercy I may need.

Leniency, clemency, compassion, grace?

Charity, forgiveness, forbearance, softheartedness?

For what I have done, what I will do?

The many ways I fall short,

swooping into my selfish self?

Sympathy, indulgence, tolerance, generosity?

Maybe that is what the birds were singing in my tree.

Every word they have for day, every word they have for light,

every word they have for flying, for being free,

every sound they have for flight.

Who knows what I say everyday.

All I know is that I said so many words this afternoon

that my voice grew gravelly, dusty, then was gone.

Perhaps it is best to stick to one word, one sound,

to save up my speaking for the end of the day,

and chirp it out over and over again,

under the darkening cover of green,

as the sun accepts its release.

Perhaps mercy, God. Perhaps, goodness, God.

Perhaps, thank you, God. For all that I have,

and all that I need, and all that is held

away from me, so that I must

make a pilgrimage to mecca on my own two wings.

In case I forget

I hold the pencil,

I choose the colors,

I decide the shape upon shape,

it is I who picks how hard to press.

I wait until the pencil tip is too dull for drawing,

then my hands are the ones that sharpen it.

I determine what gets posted,

my fingers clicked on this picture to upload.

My friend writes poems about clouds

shaped like aramaic scrolls

and veins of streetlights seen from a plane.

Currents under frozen rivers.

I am not as smart as she;

I have a much more direct metaphor.

This mandala did not exist until I conceived it,

or, more realistically, until I let it come from me.

I did not think that I was going to draw

concentric lopsided quadrilaterals.

But I did have to get the sketchbook,

I had to find an open page,

I had to be willing to select the first prismacolor,

and touch it to the page.

I had to figure out what to do next,

then next, then next. I had to cock my head,

and determine the subsequent step when none was obvious.

I did not know that it would turn out

beautifully, and so would this picture:

the one that reminds me of the work.

Every day is like this:

the black page, the empty white rim,

the medium, the intention, the acts

of imagination, formation, inauguration.

It is the same, filling the circle

of a page or the curve of time.

In case I forget, life is not happening to me,

I am happening to life.

The Cathedral of Life

...would be outside in a space like this,

or inside if you need it to be.

Not in a suburb of North Canton

in Stark County. The Cathedral of Life

would be in Greene County, Ohio

in a town named Grassy Point,

or Silver Creek. You would want to go there,

walking in upon eager feet, ragtag but ready.

No pressed shirts, no button down skirts.

Not a polished shoe in sight.

Dogs and ferrets, hummingbirds.

One eyed pirates and wheelchair dancers.

Everyone welcome, wearing the last week as clothes upon their backs,

and carrying a cup full of wishes with a bendy straw.

The call to worship would be spoken

in pentecostal languages,

the right one for every set of ears, or every pair of eyes,

if that is the way you hear, by seeing.

The wind through the leaves,

the acorns plunking,

a pair of blue herons on their dinosaur flight.

We would gather together, hearing the language

that tells us God is near.

The altar would be piled high with dog-earred books,

a jelly jar of zinnias, wet river rocks,

a bowl of ripe cherries, twisted sticks,

a tape of your grandmother's voice,

the drink you left on the bar in Montana,

her favorite pillow, a street truck enchilada,

a Huichol painting signed on the back,

a trinity of clay marbles, a cairn of sand,

a picture of yourself before you became you.

And when someone rose to speak,

(it could be anyone who speaks),

he would not talk of sins but stories.

Of splinters. Of something rising in his best self.

And we would listen, a cicada stillness in the air,

then laugh, then cry, letting the salt out of us.

Trading it for fresh water.

Someone would pray, or all of us would pray.

Saying -- with more words or less -- thank you and please.

Thank you for the five deer in the field. The nun on the bench.

The quick sprouting of fall peas. The phone call.

The smell of clean sheets. A room of one's own.

Please bring release. Please offer mercy.

Please show us grace. Give us greater capacity.

Let us bow down and lift it all, every bite of living.

We would pray to ourselves, our distant brothers,

our new sisters, the ones who see.

We would pray to our dead mothers,

the far away fathers. A humble Buddha,

a one-armed Jesus, Mohammad with hippie hair and flip flops.

We would pray to the eastern sun, the westward weather,

the earth that keeps spinning.

We would pray to the ones who hurt us,

left us, or recused themselves from our lives.

The ones who know, the ones who listen,

the ones who still can find the soft spot in our skulls.

We would pray in silence, or in singing.

We might shout out or at. You may even

need to lay your head on a cold marble floor

and weep. In each case, someone will place

a hand upon the small of your back

so that you will feel heat. You will feel held.

There will be music. Dylan, I suspect,

but played by a young woman on piano.

Maybe Thelonius Monk or Abby Lincoln.

Pink Floyd through expensive speakers,

Karen Carpenter and Mama Cass.

And maybe the music would not even be music.

Labs barking their "you've come home" bark,

soup simmering in the winter,

the clatter of a table being set,

the rusty hitch of a swingset moving back and forth.

I'd hear my music as a whisper, a night whisper in the dark,

the orange harvest moon rising in the window.

We would spend time in silence,

but it would be a ripe silence.

No bowed heads or nervous nail picking.

Our eyes would be open, every muscle relaxed

as we reclaimed the finite bodies that hold our wider selves.

One woman -- with dementia -- might speak

about her garden and some salty perch

throughout the silence, but her words would feel

like bubbling water, water cleaning us too.

Her reality a mystery no greater or less

than the mystery of our own.

There would be touching in the cathedral of life,

though I do not know exactly how that would work

having never seen its natural occurrence where I worship now.

But if I need to reach out, a hand would grab for mine.

If a shoulder was required, your heavy head would find one.

If anyone needed to be reminded that each is wholly holy,

we'd find a way. Kisses on breast scars,

a leg pressed against a leg, fingers walking the lines

of waiting lips. It would just happen,

the same way a sycamore bends to the breeze,

the same way water springs from source,

the same way all life leans to light.

Communion would be served on rough hewn wooden platters

and in hand-thrown clay goblets. Still bread, still wine.

But they would not be body and blood shed for our sins.

They would be sustenance for the journey.

Food to keep us going. I would serve you, and you would serve her,

and she would serve me. We might hold our hands out,

like humble cups waiting. Or we might open our mouths,

so that something pure can be placed on our tongues.

Or we might grab the loaf and tear off the hunk

we need, some weeks more than less. And we might sip,

or we might gulp -- unquenchable -- or we might pass the chalice

back and forth between us until the glass is empty.

Still bread, still wine. Maybe peach wine.

Shared in joy, not solemnity.

Then we would pass the peace. And it might take hours.

Me telling you about my seventh grade gym class,

you reading me a poem about the bruise on your left arm.

Him standing alone in the meadow, counting the second between falling stars.

Her layering spinach on ricotta for lasagna.

A group playing two hand touch on the open lawn of the church.

Everyone doing whatever it takes to regain a stronghold on self,

on the beauty of other, and the goodness of God.

Feeling the solid certainty known from love and -- not forgiveness --

but the softness born in moving from strength into strength,

giving grace upon grace, moving from one amen to the next so be it,

until we are to meet again.

Tim O'Brien

...wrote an amazing chapter in an amazing book called "The Things They Carried." It's about the objects the men took into the fields of Vietnam with them. The things that kept home close. Things that brought solace.

I have a fine affinity for the objects around me. I am not sure if they bring me comfort. Or security. I am not certain if they are talisman. Icons. Touchstones. All I know is that I feel safe in the company of my beautiful things.

Today I took a tour through the museum of my house. Moved a small jar of marbles. Placed a lime green bowl next to a sea green bowl. I held a white beach stone, one that has a miracle dot in the middle. I hung up new art. I rethought the hallway to the bathroom. I found a spot for new balloon seed pods. Then placed a piece of glass in the western window so that I could watch the sunset through it. I made sure that every room had a ceramic ball in some corner. I put a shine on all the flat surfaces.

Everywhere I look there is something that can lift me. Put me back in my best self. Make my eyes happy.

Then I headed upstairs into the dry attic and started to haul bags and bags of junk out of there. I am sure, at some time, each object meant something to me or my mom or my grandmother. No doubt, there was a summer that I needed an oscillating tower fan. And I am sure that the van Gogh print I bought in DC hung in an important spot of another house, when I was a different person. For some reason, I have 8 sets of queen sheets. Some with flowers on them. And, perhaps, I wanted a red elephant, and 600 colored Christmas lights. I even found a map of Tennessee from 1983. Old standing lamps, a mixed-taped recorder, a thirteen inch TV, a brand new bird cage, a brass curtain rod seven feet long.

They all hit the tree lawn with a happy plunk.

Then I went one step further. Threw away things that used to mean a lot to me. A pillow Carrie made me on our sixth anniversary. A magnetic board where we used to post poems to each other. A bag of clear quartz.

I did not even hesitate. I did not stop to think, nor revisit a time or place that is not now. I do not need Carrie anymore. I do not need to carry the things Carrie gave me. The war is over. I am coming home from the paddy field. I am finally coming all the way home.

A poem for Nikki

I want to say to you

that I do not know the difference

between repentance and redemption.

You said one and I thought the other.

Maybe that is because, for me,

I will be delivered from my guilt

and atoned for my sins by repentance,

by taking another path.

I have thrown thousands of rocks into rivers

as we did today. And I wonder

if they have slid down the Black,

tumbled through the Chagrin,

and ended up all in one place.

I wonder if they have piled up,

every regret on top of every sin,

onto some silty floor.

And every day, they are baptized,

made smoother and smoother

by the gentle friction of time.

And I wonder, if, every summer,

some young girl wanders out into

that stream, some solemn brown eyed saint,

to stand upon the dam of my contrition,

so that she can be on something sturdy,

but not quite in the water, running.

Her bare tan feet on my life,

her small but able toes

curled over stone, as she faces where

the water is going,

not where the water has been.