Mary Oliver says leaves dazzle in Autumn
because life lives strongest before it dies.

There is also the death that grasps the branch even as it falls through air,
or that lets go even as the branch remains.

A child asks "What will happen?"
This kind of death answers, "Here's what,"
and looks at what the leaf is doing.

Mary Oliver's death looks at the tree and the leaf, to see
how they respond to wind, to forest, and sky.

And says, "Let's see."

Once I lived my life knowing everything.
It saved me from despair, which was good for me then.

Now I live my life sometimes knowing,
and sometimes not.

How is it possible to hold on and to let go?

There is a pulse kept by monks in many temples around the world.
It is a pulse the Earth herself keeps.
Like the heartbeat, it closes, it opens.  

Everything that ever was, is, and shall be
emerges from the eye of that needle.

Where is the needle?
Seek, and ye shall find.
Find, and be found.

This kind of death roils through the blood,
but there is a kindness in its burning.

This kind of death is like the windows of my house:
drawing in brilliance of afternoon sunlight
from wind-tossed leaves that glitter the walls,
my body, my eyes.

​

Gather together
curls of dignity
fallen to the base of my spine.

Gather together
what hid to make way
for necessary functioning
in a loud place whose
anger drowned out wee whisps of becoming.

Remember the older woman who walked with me in springtime through grasses,
who listened, who said
she'd be there for me if I needed. 
Remember her hand on my braid in the dark
the night we sat around an unlit fire (to keep the land safe 
which had burned).

How true love stands up in every circumstance, untarnished by what, or who, or how, or when.   

I'm making a pocket of dignity here.
A space in which to care for me.
Not against but simply as.
an imprint.
a realness.
a me.

If I want to give away, it begins here. 
​By giving up the chains that have kept my  me-ness bound. 
My gifts arise freely from this place of unabashed dwelling. 

​Yielded from deep quiet,
and fertile forest of my heart:
a gladness.

Like a pale blossom appearing suddenly in the night.
Or a flash of hummingbirds,
ruby, emerald, magenta,
shimmering through pines.

An unexpected ecstasy quickens
then softens me,
leaving me fuller with sweetness.

I don't know what commands the particles
of light, of music, of heat, or pressure,
but there's a way my being is learning
to take That Hand

and be carried
while carrying

to be moved 
while moving

and held
while holding.

A stillness lifts my life,
until I wonder at the silk of the wings,
fine, freshly unfolded at my back.

I know all humans were meant for this.
I know the codes inside me have held this blueprint
since the first cells gelled in my mother's womb,
or even, some might argue, since before.

Yet I am stunned by the miracle.

Dumbfounded with joy.

To be this much more free, in the midst of life,
to be wide inside,
as the river of my days pours through
with ease
amidst foam and froth, 
teeming with fish, otter, heron, osprey,
children laughing in gurgles of mud,
silt, algae, eons of pebbles, 
even boulders, fallen trees,
but clean.
Clean, serene, unstoppable,
necking my way forward
toward the Ocean,
whose salt
I smell here, now,
in the sweat of my hands
as they build, and work, and play.

All I can say is:
Listen carefully for the silent bell,
until one day you hear it ringing in the house where you live,
and the people on your street turn their heads towards it.
​
Listen, and open your mouth, sounding.

Take down the banner in my heart.
Let me be new again,
like snowmelt running down the mountain.

It has been too long since I have heard You
whisper in my ear, Sky Husband.
I've been pretending to know myself.

Touch me.
Turn the clouds orange with Your mouth.
Awe is what kills me
over and over.

Who will I be tomorrow?
Let the sun, wind & rain decide.

​How many times must we go through this?
Let it be like the moon rising,
Your Face undoing me
infintely.

1.

Behind the ten-thousand things,
a nakedness.

Behind every name for "God":
light.

Behind the moon and sun,
behind the space they spin in:
That.

What touches what cannot be touched?
What hears what cannot be heard?
What eternally speaks itself
without uttering a word?

I wake in a rainy dawn,
in a place called "here."
From here I look toward "There"
and am moved to rise,
like hunger
and like ripening fruit.

When That looks out from my eyes,
I become stiller than still,
a dark glass lake, no wind,
empty,
then saturated,
when the moon rises,
with whispers
of myself.


2.  

"And then our singing brought on a different manner of weather.  Then animals long believed gone crept down from trees.  We took new stock of one another.  We wept to be reminded of such color."  ~Tracy Smith


Beyond purple, the flies see.
Beyond music, the wolves hear.
Beyond boundary of perception,
synapses gather qi to fire
our bodies like nebulae 
like paint in water
gathering and spreading,
blossoming in star flowers,
winding our way up the Tree,
like vines, snakes, tongues
of uncoiling phosphorescence.


3.

How many colors are possible when every lens
of every eye
on every surface
of every body
of Her Body
opens?

"Stroke precisely like this," he said,
running his finger gently but firmly
along the meridian line
on my pelvis
where womb channel meets
myocardium.

An ache like the grief of centuries,
and the fire of unborn generations.

A gold seed.


4.

There is a pair of legs beneath this seed,
and ground where foot meets earth.

I stand here, like a left lung in its left cavity.
He stands over there, on the right,
The sky is a little different, a bit darker, a bit thicker.
The flowers have different shapes.

He is remarkably beautiful, over there.

Like lungs of a body bathed in blood,
this rain which has touched a place deep
under the earth
and flown high over the land,
washes over both of us.

Washes and washes.



4.

Behind and within
​the ten thousand things:
a pearl.


~

​

~

Like a bud
brushing its
closed lips
against sunlight,
for the first time in months
he shyly grazes me.

Is it possible to be sun and bud at once?
​
I open to him and he rises
like the moon catching light.
​
How I live for the moment he hangs above,
full and glowing,
and at the right angle I can see
he is not the moon,
but the sun,
dazzling and unguarded,
with a curl of smile,
because he knows it.

~
​

​I have seen her soften
in the middle of an argument.
On her face: the quality of a just-lit candle,
and hope that the wind will quiet so the flame can catch.
I have seen her pause, deep inside herself,
to ask the question that could change the story.

To ask the question that could change the story.

I have seen her invite fresh seed
to land in soil that would give, 
and the way, when the soil stays hard and cracked, she gathers and holds the delicate lick of fire 
with the tenderness and patience of a mother, 
and the dogged determination required 
to tend the question through the night.