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)

October 6, 2008 - Compost piles, goose flesh, and wanting

Putzing about and listening to William Fitzsimmons…somber, almost painfully candid singer/songwriter, and there is a lingering feeling of something that I can’t put my finger on..

And that seems to happen a lot lately… I find that I undulate between 1) grappling with not being conscious enough of what I feel and 2) feeling everything, but differently than I used to. I find that lately little things wreck me,.. that I can be sitting in a coffee shop catching up on my friend’s blog, and tears just drip out for things I’m reading, I brush past cloth that was given to me in a country I love deeply or I drive and listen to something that simply raises bumps all over the surface of my skin…makes them ripple out of nothing—ex-ni-he-lo—like they were always there… I’m not used to responses being so visceral, so wordless, unnamable…

I’ve been moving, and something about packing one place to turn it into another… undoing, deconstructing one era to build a new one; and maybe that’s a dramatic way of putting it, but somehow this time I don’t think it is. I was pulling apart a lovely apartment, a hobbit-home abode, ridiculous arched walls, where the bedroom was the living room was the foyer, and where the kitchen was the closet was the bathroom :), and everything I’d bought was designed to contain something else. Years of me bloomed there and some of me retracted there, and then there was the knowing that it was time to go. And now as I have been unpacking, I find I’m pulling out remnants and pieces of everything, and I am filled with nostalgia for things that are larger than me and that I may not have experienced yet.

One of my new roommates and I were talking this afternoon, and she mentioned the Creation… how first, for several days of the-seven-day-beginning-of-everything, God separated things: earth from water, darkness from light, one kind of expanse from another—stretching long and ruddy—bursting out blackness that couldn’t know itself yet. And then he filled it. Birds, trees, men, LIFE for the pulled matter-from-matter. But after. After separation, after movement. Then filling with all the things that are supposed to be there, in that place, then.

May it be so.


Posted on 6 October 2008 at 12:05 AM Comments (0)