Category: Uncategorized

Hairspray

I went to TJ Maxx to buy myself a new yoga top, hoping to avoid the ever popular pose of forward flopping boob. This seemed like a small way to do something kind for myself, and surely my yoga class would thank me, too.

I don’t go shopping much. Mainly because I am trying to live more like a poet so I avoid places where poets aren’t hanging out – which is any place money hangs out. And clearly I am very out of practice. I had just walked in with my empty cart and — ooooooh – purses! Half hour later I snapped out of it just long enough to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, with a fringed and brightly colored coral bag over my shoulder – I looked like a tree stump with a tropical bird. A mortician with a parrot. A poet with a purse.

But something about it all – the quiet building frenzy of all the pretty things – I moved from one to the next, deep in focus as if the decision to choose the silk floral blouse over the linen floral blouse would determine the course of all of my days. As if I came for a floral blouse. As if I’d wear a floral blouse.

But removed from context of my own life, I’m pushing forward, aisle by aisle, item by item, size by size, making agonizing decisions and piling them in the cart, barely noticing the people around me, barely recognizing myself as I hold up a lace crop top, a racer back t, a pencil skirt, a ceramic peacock.

An hour in, my cart is full of sherbet colored silk scarves and wispy little tank tops and a million thread count sheets and strappy sandals and stemware and lingerie and hairspray and nautical throw pillows and crisp white slacks and jackets. Who did I think I was? Was I packing for a tropical cruise? Redesigning my carriage house for the summer season?

And hairspray?? Really?

An overflowing cart full of accidental wishes later, I left it all. I just walked out. I was exhausted, and stressed, and sweating. I had just pushed around someone else’s life for an hour, and what did I have to show for it? It took just one hour to forget who I was. To forget all about my flopping boobs, my empty wallet, and the fact that my idea of a hair style is to pile it up in a clump on the top of my head, resenting the 30 seconds it takes to do that.

There’s nothing wrong with shopping, of course. I vaguely remember the “money is no object fun” of it all. But even then, some authentic voice was strangled by spaghetti straps and high heels – by the woman I hardly know, and that I can’t seem to stop looking for.

At least this time, I remembered to leave her behind. And this time, I remembered to laugh.

Wake

Sometimes sleep won’t leave the bedding of your brain, and every word rises only to find it self recalled, back to the comfort and curl of darkness. There are new words you long to think but each effort is quickly lulled and tucked under cover of an exhausted narrative. The one that says you’ve tried that before. There’s nothing you can do to change the way it’s always been. The way it always will be. The way things work. The one that says just five more minutes, disregarding all alarm.

The momentary stretch and reach, the fleeting light through your lids, the lifted weight of night – we know what that’s like; that soaring second when it’s entirely true that another life is waiting for you, and you’re heightened and heartened and here!

Where does that go, that fragile stretch of morning light? Can our newborn fist not open? Is our marrow made of ambien? In the raising of the sash, in the flutter of the lash, are we lit with possibility, or blinded by fear, or impossibly weary by what we think we already know?

Wake, now. And if the dream begins to yawn, keep your eyes open just another breath or two. Before you sleep again, say the words you long for.

Fools

April first is the start of National Poetry Month
And fools everywhere avoid
It because who wants
To decipher the
Words of
Fools,
Who write
To decipher the
Codes of the heart
And paste together the
Ripped and thinnest membranes of the day?

Hardly anyone who sees the dead wing in the windowpane
Spliced between the storm and screen
Will leave the house while
Her mind stays home
Sticky with
Fools,
Who die
Trapped between worlds
Pranked from their spindled legs
That carried them all the way here
Only to leave the very height of themselves behind.

Creation

I woke with a gentle but urgent thought – I woke with something I needed to do, some kindness that needed offering, or some idea I needed to explore. I woke with a loose and blousy image; some new creation was tugging at a thread. Something I needed to know was trying to be known.

And then, while the gauze was still across my brain and my gaze was still soft, I sat down at my desk and checked the news.

Apparently, my airbag is a serial killer, salmon have been taking Lipitor, and a woman accidentally mailed her cat. Closer to home, my daughter was diagnosed with an anxious vagina and the peanut butter was gone from the mousetrap, (which, after day 4, should really be called a feeding station).

All of this astonishment before I even get to the real stuff, of Pakistan and poverty and cancer and cures and beheadings and bombs. The attention and gasp is all worn out by the time you even check your first email. That fleeting thought you had this morning is crowded out. Before you know the words you long to speak, or the dream you need wake from – you are swarmed by the news of dying bees.

And it’s essential, of course; those dying bees. But so is something else.
What’s close up, what’s within us, is so frequently swept away in a torrent of information and data from the outside world, that the universe that is you is drowned. Drowned in headlines and crushed by all the little bits from across the globe. The weight of it all, the power of the moving tide of media and markets takes us along, and soon we are so far away from that single thought – the one deep inside of us that needed to be known – that we know nothing, and nothing new is created.

Maybe that’s why we are all so weary. Even with headlines that make our hearts stop, we are weary because our own place in creation isn’t reflected in that raging world. Somehow, all the words we’ve heard before. Maybe when we long for original thought, it is our own that we are missing.

We are the creation that will and can change the world. But we must find time for the silence, and space for the tender truth of us to emerge.

Resurrection

My body left me in the corner of a dark basement before I was 6, and from that day forward, it was just a burden I had to carry, or a stranger that carried me.

I lugged it once to math class, where a tall man touched it, but I wasn’t there so I didn’t mind. I let it walk ahead of me in the Easter parade, because it was wrapped in pastels and called pretty. I gave it away, and let it be taken, because it was never mine to begin with.

All my life, I’ve watched it take me places I didn’t want to go.

When I was just 15, I watched as it got pregnant. I watched as it crossed a picket line, past a plastic doll impaled on a stick and a woman yelling “killer”. I watched as it searched for me in inappropriate places. In the arms of a married man, in a gay parade, and stitched into the folded lives of other people’s secrets.

As time passed, it learned to straighten its shoulders and lift its chin, but I stayed curled around its shame. I tried to kill it with cigarettes, and comfort it with cake. I called it disgusting, ugly, fat, lazy and useless, and hid it under blankets and books. Every so often I’d take it to the gym, and try to shape it to fit the curve of someone else’s hand, but that didn’t last; it wasn’t safe for us to be in the same room for long.

As I grow older and my soul returns, my body still limps a few steps behind. No longer young and sexy, it can’t carry me the way it used to. No longer ashamed, I won’t let it go where I can’t follow. So here it is, right next to me. But we still have our differences. I think I have forgiven what my body has not forgotten. It’s still out there in the world, stumbling through it all, sucking in its stomach, while I stay humble and here and fully at home. It’s been on it’s own for so long, it’s been so mistreated, it’s going to take a while to undo all the damage. But I hope to reclaim my body before I have to let it go for good. I hope it rises from the dead, is freed from the basement, and is saved by my own loving embrace.

Trough

What is the way we wake?
At the center of the center we feel a break.
Some fragile root escapes,
And slips from the seed of us,
From the place we were planted,
From the place we were placed.

As for the divot we were dropped in,
It’s holy ground.
But now that we’ve reached across
The underground rooting through the dark,
The scoop of time once meant for us
Will turn to leaf and lark.

Rise from your own depths,
Whoever left you here;
The furrows trench,
The rains drench,
The earth holds all the secrets in its universal plot,
To what is the way we waken,
And what is the way we sought.

Vernal Equinox

When you left
You carved a line in the center of
All my days and named them
Before and after.
Some days, I still count like that —
Stuck in the wish of before
And the yearn of after;

But in time the sun shifted and
On the tip of my finger
Spins a new world:
Before forgiveness,
Something must die.
And seconds after,
It’s spring.

The Studio

While you wait for god, god waits for you.
She waits in rooms of grief and glory,
Where pieces of leftover lives are heaving,
All brought to rest at that forgotten place
At the top of the stairs,
At the end of the hall,
Where the multiple, miniscule outcasts of our time together
Slowly rise.

Separated by color,
Sorted by knob and valve and thing,
Why they were lost remains a mystery;
(Why was this left behind? Or that?)
And why they were found does, too.

All we know is that the weight of all of this –
The sheer volume of the many losses –
All the precious bits discarded by the churn of time —

All we know is that each one was chosen
And waits to be honored,
To return to the world again;
A new configuration found
In rooms of grief and glory.

Marching Orders

March is an untrustworthy month – you can count on nothing, except the rudeness of the clocks springing forward as we grieve our hour of sleep and shuffle through the halls of an amputated day. The apple tree is not reliable, nor is the greening of the grass. Even the shoots from the crocus are uncertain. Just when the air softens and you feel like your tennis shoes belong in the world again, you get an icy wakeup call and have to reenlist the boots. Just when the t-shirt forces you to confront your arm flab, you’re allowed to slip back into the long and sweatered sleeves of denial.

March kicks off a season of trickery, and can be appallingly inappropriate. You can be woken and told that your father died in the night. You can have a miscarriage, lose a job, read the news, and sit inside your stunned and wintered heart staring out a chirping window, watching bikes come out and play. Easter-purple hops brightly across the grimy snow. Down jackets rub elbows with wispy lemon scarves. Sun sinks into your skin but your bones are full of ice.

You think it’s here, and then it’s not. You believe it’s arrived, and then it’s gone. What you’ve known to be true melts, and before the world is righted again you find you are standing in some bunny-colored slip of a skirt in the middle of lumberjacked day stunned by how wrong you can be.

Some wear layers, but you can’t prepare for shit like this without losing something essential. Kids laugh while others drown; there aren’t enough layers in the world to make that right. The experience of being in this incongruous day is hard. But as time shortens, light arrives. The true call of March is standing in the both and the all. The true call of March is always here.

free shoes & lo mein

I have a friend who is living in poverty, depressed, and unsure how to get unstuck. We decided the best way forward is one small step at a time, and so I bought her running shoes and took her out for chinese food.

This tiny gesture briefly lifted the weight off her shoulders – gave her a sense of relief, a sense that she is not in this alone, a sense that she is worthy of help and hope. And of course, it gave my own cringing soul a way to stretch again.

I don’t know why I forget how easy it is to fight the forces of hate. I guess I’ve been feeling so crushed by this bullying, racist climate; so flattened by the heavy torrent of injury and insult; so immobilized by the epidemics of addiction, poverty, hopelessness and hate that the swell of darkness felt like all the planets were made of barbed wire and bound together in endless, impossible, tangled loops. My mind has been bent in bloody complications. I’ve been pushing and fighting against it all, struggling to figure out how to start, hatching elaborate escape plans, concentrating all my intellectual and spiritual superpowers on the center of the universe and how I might set humanity free!

And I forgot how easy it really is. Go be generous and kind in any small way, today. New shoes and lo mein didn’t change the world – but for a time, it changed the way two of us experienced it. We woke released – she, from solitary confinement, and I from “cellblock trump”. We met in open air – and remembered what it is to be human.