January 11, 2010 - Hope Like Egrets

Now there is only stillness
This very day it is only calm, only gray and waiting.
Blue droplets gathering silver,
Dross transformed, and hoping

Straight lines like clavicles
That start off at the center—bold—
Have tapered off behind narrow sinews
Disappearing into the greater structure
Absolved and absorbed
And it is good.
That clarity waits to shoulder the curves—
The weight of everything not yet made straight:

Hiccupping impasses,
Whorled, woolly declarations,
Cloaked eyes and hurtling hearts—

All will bear down on this road
And not, not, not snap the fiber that came first.
It is in that grace that they exhale.


There was another day with a shallower stillness that came before.
The dam held back the flow of everything behind,
November crisped out of everything that lay ahead—
Like small gasps under small steps,
Fallow things snapped out the rhythm of vacuous deaths beneath my boots and the season

Then one white bird on thin, long legs.
Stark, cut curves poised over foam-scraped sand
Tall and sharp like elegant rejection
Beautiful like grief and steel.

Everything shudders to a halt.
Months of chaos and isolation stare back, drip off a beak; made still in rigid eyes
One white-draped spot in a haze of yellowed green-gray, and the world makes sudden sense as an egg.
Every bit of now is the groaning—
Unhatched but incubating hope, joy just beneath a shell.
Lean-lined life that looks beige, too delicate, until it breaks through and isn’t.
So much life held in with paper-thin birthing barricades
But it will be born. It will all be borne.
It is in that grace that we exhale.

And hope is a swirling thing that grows from one to many—
Letting go is like the steps that came after; braver from seeing the one bird, but prepared for it to be enough—
Despair and Peace will both hear you coming, and sometimes still waters can go either way
That lake met me with undulations—Soul-holes whistling with the static charge of wind where barbs had just been pulled out—my acceptance, my approach set the sky in a flipped-white blaze
Wings everywhere
Fifty birds swirled around us, twisty circles, swift oscillation
Green-gray lines swallowed entirely by ribboned white, now flapping, now dropping
Hope like egrets, folding; feathered origami blossoms in the trees
Small and white like elegant redemption
Beautiful like thorns and tears

It was like the first snow of winter, and it has caused the thaw.


Posted on 11 January 2010 at 11:27 PM Comments (1)