Mondays chain your bones
And in winter
The only cure is sleep or fire
But sometimes I haunt myself
By pacing between both
And rattle weary hallways
As pale as pointless ghost
Without sweet and dying sleep
Or the rousing of the heart
I’m bound to weighted marrow
And frozen to the start.
Between youth and age is where we all live.
Break it up if you want by who is most relevant;
Who can pull off a beard,
Who likes sarcasm and who prefers psalms,
Who remembers Aunt Bea and who among us
Just.
Can’t.
Separate those who hook up from
Those who make love,
Remove the walkers from the hikers.
Cleave each from the other like
The rotted from the ripe
And still, it ends the same.
To know the shape of the world,
You must hold it all.
On the night before Christmas, all through my childhood, we were allowed to open one present; our annual Christmas ornament. And even though we knew what it was, it was what it would say about us that mattered. These were meaningful and unique gifts, chosen to tell a story of who we were and what we were becoming. They were talisman, prophets, little hanging enneagrams. They gave us our place in the order of things. Dancers, music, ponies, owls; whatever we loved, we would find.
On December 24, 1968, at the age of 11, I opened my gift and found a blown-glass Pinocchio with a nose in full-lie position. I was immediately embarrassed, and wished to be swallowed by a whale. Whether I loved Pinocchio or not, I honestly can’t remember. What I do remember is a needle-nosed stab in a very tender place, because 1968 was the year I got caught telling lies. I lied about eating the last Eskimo Pie, about who broke the lamp, about being sick. I lied about the teacher who’d won a trip to Peru (she hadn’t). I can’t remember all the lies I told, but I do know why I told them; I wanted to be special, I wanted to be interesting, I wanted to be better. I wanted to become a real girl, no strings attached.
My Pinocchio ornament broke mysteriously when my kids were little, (to this day no one’s confessed to the crime), but I still have what’s left of it, and the long lying nose remains intact. And year after year on some cold December night, in the middle of a family gathering, I’ll unwrap a pocket-sized shard of shame and marvel at its staying power. For such a fragile thing, it’s lasted an awfully long time. But what a gift it is to take it out of hiding, and place it on the tree, and watch the light reflect across its brokenness. It hangs there between an angel and a king, with a small winters tale to tell. Whether you believe the tale or not, is up to you.
And today let it be said that each of you
Every one
Shapes me and shapes the world
And for this
I am eternally aware
And utterly grateful
For the light and the courage
Of those who act bravely and deeply
And those who laugh hard
And grieve wide
And bake pies
And make art
And offer tremendous generosities that make me cry
And fall to my knees
In awe of humanity
The first thing the Pilgrims plant
Are the bodies of the dead;
Half of everything they were
When they embarked
Succumbed to sea and soil
This unspeakable loss
Buried in the night
Seeds the harvest yet to come;
They are forsaken,
And soak the ground with catastrophe.
The first thing the Pilgrims meet
Is not kindness
But their own mortality;
And the loss of all benevolence
Gets folded in a prayer
And on their knees they face away
From the leaving of the world
And the coming of the cold
With eyes clenched tight
Fear is all they see
The first thing the Pilgrims thank
Is god to be alive;
And in their isolation
I wonder if the loss
Killed everything they found
Without homeland or mercy
Terror was the harvest;
Without love
Vengeful was the god;
Without giving
While moons rise untethered, and days unfurl, and shadows stretch and yawn, we stuff entire seasons into wood chippers and shopping carts, killing all our time. We stuff our beach bags and turkeys and stockings and tiny mouths with bunnies. We stow our secrets in closets, shove our gifts out of sight, and cram all of our words into causes and cures. We guzzle the new, and crowd out the old; and fill all our heads with our pockets.
What’s left of us is accidental. We wedge ourselves into the crevice of a day, and become narrowed and flat; our bodies numb; our hearts crumbling between the speed of errand and the weight of obligation.
Gather the fragments of your days in separate pieces; sea glass, chestnut, pinecone, egg. Let each one rest in the palm of your soul until you feel it’s endless edge. Stones and stories will give you weight; feather and friend will lift you; branch and bone will give you shape. But space and breath will hold us all together; each to the next. Unpack your hours, let joy tumble out, give her room to spin with open arms; she’s got all the time in the world.
The pond is deep with pine trees now
And in the night a film of ice arrived
Around the margins where the evergreen shades
Everything that’s hushed and still
I’m wrapped in wool and standing fixed
Staring at the frail and fractured waters
Thinking of how it heralds and hides what’s
Constant beneath the blur
And on Thanksgiving the gathering noise
All that marching toward the center
All the chaos and the churn
At the edges of our love
Breaks apart the holy veil
That waits for rising sun.
I’m not good with blind anger:
Not with pundits who sling it freely
Or families who slam it into cupboards
Or strangers who spew it into comments
Or stuff it with statistics.
I can’t sit in your putrid stew
Or near the bellowing of your gross opinion
I don’t appreciate the cloud you fill the room with
And how we all are left to swallow your second hand stupidity.
While you rise in an uninformed frenzy
While your madness recklessly bellows
While you inflate your mindless case,
You are victorious!
You’ve crushed the gentle
Who are sealed in unbearable tension;
You’ve decamped the wise
Who have already left you behind.
But you’ve got your crouching army!
They fill all the fields and the pages and the conversations
But you should know
The only thing they are loyal to is rage.
Listen: if you are angry at least have the decency
To shove it up a bad poem;
To unpack your tiny brain and try to understand
What it really is.
Listen: we’ve been working really hard to rally the mercy
Of optimism and light;
To fight the relentless, stinking, piles
Of what it really is.
But compassion is muted by your battle cry
And silence misread as retreat
So nature and art must carry us on,
And one angry word:
Enough.
Rain falls fast, lamps are lit, coffee’s made
And my day begins with a prayer,
Because I saw the first fully decorated Christmas tree
On a Facebook page this morning.
And like October displays
And November carols
And everything about Black Friday,
I feel not joy for my friend whose home looks lovely
But a lonely space between us.
The season has arrived
And already my heart is left behind;
Without a house full and a cart full
And a month full of frenzy,
I feel separate and apart.
Why the divide?
Am I not like you?
As if my soul isn’t longing for lights,
As if my smile doesn’t come from a gift,
As if my home isn’t found in a pine?
And so my prayer this season:
Let me not remove myself from the world
But add to it a silence and a star,
A fixed and quiet point
For us to meet.
Amid the spiritual wreckage
And cyclical lapses into dark
What keeps me looking for
Beauty and meaning?
Sadness and radiance walk
Side by side
And I can’t stop seeing
Either.
Always, always,
The cardinal in the snow
The bittersweet
The pointless and the reason
I see your side
I get that how that could happen
I was once like you
I still am
Remarkable, even trauma
In bedrooms and boardrooms and passing the salt,
Near birch trees,
The ground you die on is mossy.
What keeps me up
And keeps me raised
Is that we are all strung together
On the vine.
Starting Close 