When he left

We left, too.

Floating above our bodies

The whole of the world dropped far beneath our feet,

And all we could do was look down.

 

From here, he is the life we can no longer see;

 

He is the one bent blade in the sweeping green of earth,

He is the sap in the tree

The brine in the sea

The moss beneath the stone.

 

And as we fall to our knees

And back to our bones,

He is the marrow, he is the stone.

He is the whole new world, rearranged before our eyes.

 

From here, he is everywhere;

 

He is the clover in the greenest heart of summer,

He is the twilight blue

The meadow rue

The blackberry holding the stars.

 

He is the plum of the night

The grape of the vine

The pruning of the day.

 

He is the wealth and the mystery

The curious dignity

The aubergine carpet of thyme.

 

From here, he is the violet bruise on our gathered hearts;

 

Here to remind us that when he left,

All the purple asters stayed.

 

The way the cherry tree weeps is round with grace

Backlit with green and
Draped across the sidewalk –
The neighbors walk their dogs lightly
Beneath an ordinary arbor.

Others pause with reverence
Under its dappled nod and curve –
Hushing leashes, stilling time,
Grateful for the waking of routine.

But when she called to say her son just died
The scrape and scream tore the wind apart —
The branches just a
violent lash to the living.

Bent limbs laid too low
The neighbors step their dogs around and down
In measured arches past the crawlway.

Pink, the blossoms
New, the buds
Round, the way

Wailing,
Before the coming of the grace.

Don’t be afraid of the way things really are

Look them right in the eye

The way you did when you first fell in love;

In June, when it was easy to do.

 

Look the way you would the sky from the sand,

the fleeting green from the roadside,

The oncoming storm unfurling shadows

Across heavens and hills.

 

Across your view arrives the unexpected —

Here, where you never thought it could happen;

Sooner, then you ever thought it would.

 

When you wake to an August day

So humid it stills the sea,

When summer is stolen from the very air,

 

Breathe anyway.

There are lilies waiting for you

To notice something new.

Praise the man

Who tucks you under

And lifts you up

And holds you:

Praise the breadth of his hands

And the length of his reach

And the width of his thighs.

Praise the way he considers

And ponders

Differently than you do.

Praise the stubble, and the strength

And the ease in which

He reads a map.

Praise the palm that leads

The small of your back

To bend somewhere new.

Praise the voice that rumbles and bellows

And whispers and sings

And speaks snare drum and dog.

Praise the power of his step

The great strides

The energy he rides.

 

Praise the sounds and the snores and

The weight of him,

The warmth and the curl in the bed.

Praise the dungeon master and designer

And the tiny statues

And the Peloton.

Praise the storyteller and the spinner,

The fire starter

And the stoker.

Praise the beard of him,

The ties of him,

The way he grills the steak.

Praise the absurdity

Of stooge and pun

And dad joke.

Praise the boy in him,

The runes and the trees

And the ill-timed loon call.

Praise the fixer

And tinkerer

And tuner.

Praise the silence of him,

The one who sees far more

Than he says.

Praise the work of him,

The airports and phone calls and

Willow pruning.

Praise him who isn’t you;

Praise him who doesn’t know the way it feels to be a woman

Who has his own way of being in the world.

Praise the man

Who loves the woman,

this foreign body full of words and hairpin turns.

Praise the man who loves her.

Praise the man

She loves.

All that cellular energy looking closely has me exhausted. Honestly could have slept ‘til noon or 4 – sinking toward nothing, peated and mossy and dark. Wrapped in black and mulishly sliding toward the day I’m reluctant to wake and see where I am; in the thick and the grey of it, in the fog of it, in the endless stratus and stretch that I can’t seem to lift my head above.

Maybe I’ll start with vanilla, and nutmeg, and butter, to remember the sweet clarity of the now. The smell of coffee! The tactile presence of the dog! Steam, and soap, and scrub! But a walk dampens any effort; the dead lilacs, the goose shit, the green thick clog of algae on the pond. I’m dragged back under where love is flat and mute.

 

Flat, and mute, and faithless. I become spiritually numb when left too long to my own complicated thoughts, when left to study all the objects in my way. I tend to think of spirituality as an outward orientation — toward something greater than all this grey matter, just on the other side of that bank of endless cloud. But does that mean something would have to change out there, to usher faith back home – like, the sky opens, and the sun illuminates the geraniums?

When it doesn’t change, then what? What is the pathway outward, beyond the grey matter, beyond the bank? Am I doomed to constant circumstance?

Faith can help, but what about this goose-shitted day? Because while faith is not situational, it does require some action. It’s like going to the gym – motivation arrives once you begin – not before. And whatever that path is up and out, whatever will start that conversation, it starts under your goose-shitted feet. Overtime, we build little structures, like bridges, to find our way; A potter’s wheel, church, a hike in the woods; to find our way out, we can always return to the pathways of creation. Overtime, faith has empirical evidence. We’ve found illumination before – the sun always returns.

But still, left too long under the weight of my own heavy thoughts, left too long under the gloom of a shitty spring, I’m paralyzed. And in passivity, I lose all sense of direction. I lose all my senses. I doubt the return, and I curse the circumstance.  And any conversation I have ends in a plea without promise; a prayer without faith. Spirituality, vitality, creativity is somewhere other than here – where geese only fly and clouds are cumulous.

In a fog, I can’t even see my feet, never mind find the structures I once built. But I’m reminded of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said before he died in prison, “Before God, and without God, we stand with God” – and while he used a capital G, I quite agree.  When vanilla and butter don’t lift you, ask what will. And ask again, and again, and again. The question invites the answer to reveal itself; and beneath your feet, in the mulish grey of the day, faith finds a way.

 

 

The first thought in my head upon waking was “what can I do differently?”

Anything. Choose eggs over skipping breakfast. Walk in the opposite direction of the pond. Make a call to a less familiar friend.  Shower.

Just – anything to break the bud on the branch, to start again in a new direction. I’m not suggesting ripping up roots, or messing with the solid stuff in the center. I just know that I’m being shadowed by my own umbrageous ways, and I need sun, and a new way up and out.

A breath. A large breath. And still, my whole being rises and falls the same way it did yesterday. I need to slow it down and find the smallest possibility. Close in. I need to find the nub and the node, the minuscule swell, the most generous cell for beginning.

What will bend the branch; where will I break?

I only know it stems from here.

No grand gestures needed. No relocation, no burn. Though a storm would be welcome; ushering in the drama and the drain, pushing me forward, or back, or down. It’s more difficult, I find, to be in the quiet light of day in the middle of the ordinary, and still, wake yourself.

To be born in middle of it all, to be new in the same afternoon, to burgeon in the plain – the stillness seems a rotten place for fresh. But I know the truth of it. I know that microscopic isn’t meager; it is infinite.  Whatever will blossom, whatever will grow, whatever will wake me.

It all stems from here.

If music is love
Your life is the record
That started off clean
And ended up scratched

By someone’s careless handling
One groove goes so deep that
You skip back to it over and over
And over again

As if you will find yourself
In the empty well,
In the narrow scab of space
They carved away from you.

You were played the same way
For so very long
That the dark and deepened rut
Is now your go-to-track

Even as the needle moves
And something new
Is calling you home
You can’t hear the sound

(You can’t be found)

When you fall into the dark
All music stops
And in that static, bitter slit
Nothing can live.

Love can’t live
In the scrape of despair.
Love is drowned in the sound
Of the screech and the grind.

And when you skip to the place
I cannot follow,
You leave me behind
With just echoes of you

One verse so lovely
I return to it over and over and
Over again,
Making my own deep and tortured wound

(Another old, familiar tune).

My darling,
You must go where piano notes can climb like the stars
And I must go where cellos swell my heart to the sky
Because love waits in the tops of the trees
where the wind blows
in infinite iteration;
Whole soundtracks we’ve never heard or imagined.

Are there ways to fix
A broken record?
Surely, my tears cannot do it.

I only know that
Love is not a war
That is won in useless trenches —
And I cannot live there, anymore.

Love is the music.
And as for the record we must simply learn to play —
Each on our own,
Each in our own way.