Tag: poetry

Learning, Poetry

Preparing for Bed

smirkpretty

FERGUSON February Snow Compton Downs _1

This is the prying open
This is the aeration
Who said sleep would be painless?
Down here something like earthworms
turn open
settled places
that would
given the choice
compress
to stone.

The merciless law
of this dark place
withholds that choice.
The next seeds
will have their chance
after all.
The soil beneath will churn
like water
like everything else
up there.

But this is winter, you say.
Hibernation? Rest time?
You have been awake
in your dreams
so you know
better. The turning goes on
and on. The surface arcs
in spectral color,
splits along seams
invisible in the dazzle
of daylight.
Detail falls away.
The blind, blunt nose of the soul
comes drilling through
to open a story
in the dense fabric, to force
breath between threads
and tease loose
what holds you
to you.

 
—
Image Credit: Andrew Ferguson, “February Snow, Compton Downs from the Ridgeway,” Woodcut.

Parenting, Poetry

Tin Man

smirkpretty

Chain and door lock

He is a knot
lashed to a lock
hasp snapped tight
as lips.
Planting himself at the edge of the room
he holds fast to the border
between thrust and withdrawal, steel bars clamped
across his chest.
Silence thuds out from the footing
where he has sunk
his fury
and pulses
through the planks of the floor.

It is impossible to know what someone else feels.
I know exactly what he feels.
The vise grip jaw is mine
writ small. The iced chassis, his
unfortunate inheritance.
I approach with a voice of WD40, the thin straw
laying a bead across the distance between us.
It takes its time leaching in along the thread
of his coil, feeling for tumblers
and any hint of give. I fold my arms
like the mouth of a spaniel
around him and trust in the unctuous
persistence of my proximity
until his grip slips loose
enough to push free.
 

Change, Poetry, Relationships, Things I Can

86. Things I Can Clear: The Haze

smirkpretty

Recovery taught mindset before mindfulness
was a word. For today, the glass
is the eye. For today, shrug
and surrender. The shoulder
gives way and even grief
recedes. See now
where three cranes have paused
in this brown place we forgot
to consecrate, each half
gripping its parcel
of terrain, half clutching
the sky. We are all falling
even when pinned
in place
(especially then)
and always,
the option
of flight.

 

Change, Poetry, Relationships, Things I Can

85. Things I Can Hold: The Promise

smirkpretty

Honeysuckle Tag

Months after the last blossom
wilts and lets go, a tendril
of scent unfurls
among the parched weeds
and knotted shrubs edging
the broken road.
Only at night the perfume steals
out to stretch its cramped
wings and lean
into the hum
of cricket’s legs
and streetlamps. It will be gone
by sunrise, tucked
under winter straw
that falls in summer, swathing
thirst and throb in a jacket
of silence.

Growing Up, Poetry, Things I Can

75. Things I Can Lay Down: A Nest under Sky

smirkpretty

From the dining table of a rich absent landlord,
from a rooftop tilting over
screaming streets,
from the hide of a man
whose soft fangs belie
battles he claims
as the source of his scars,
I plucked splinters
and locks of discarded hair.

I was ravenous
even for hollow breath
echoing against a bare wooden
belly. Strings cut flesh to callous
and every song clanged
like paper against my hunger.
I tried to pry frets
from the neck. I tried to harvest
spider legs.

A sign was necessary. A silver
ring or maybe a strip
of fur curling on the tip
of a thorn. I walked
not away. Something else.
Out.

Towards.

Under
a canopy of sumac, bent like a crooked
house, I passed
through to the first division
and pressed petals
back into their seed.
I swaddled my thighs
in creek water. I bled
into moss.

I lay down a bed like a bow
to the half open moon.
The voice I used to call
up the shape of a home in the sky
Goodnight you moonlight ladies
was the same lunatic jabber
of coyotes coursing through folds
in a mist forever closing
between us.

I wake now to the face of a frozen sun,
my bones young and brittle, hung
with crystal globes and gloved
in frost. I glitter like grass
and shatter in the light. Blowing
out from a depression
in the earth shaped like someone
exhumed,
I catch a full spectrum
of morning

in each one
of my birth’s hundred
billion prisms
every time
I refuse
to die.

 

Poetry, Things I Can

71. Things I Can Let Be: Spider Brother

smirkpretty

Fine as needles and just as quick.
But for the ants, the broom,
I say, yet the company is welcome
such as it is. A beating heart
of any size, really.

Silence outmanned Eros
and he left for the second time
today. The dog paws at the patio door,
bends her head
and tries to peel back
with her teeth the intractable pane
on which a cousin clings.
This one is fatter by degrees,
brown as the wilting marigold
stems where it tatted lace
bedclothes and sampled
from the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet
mosquitoes, midges, mites.
To the dog, this one is meat.

She eschews shadows
inside where domestic kin live,
whole families of them,
behind the woodpile, under the toy bin,
tucked below the lip
of the bathroom cabinet
where my bare toes
trouble their determined stillness.

She pivots and tries again to press
through glass. I understand
this fascination with the promise
waiting outside, even if that promise
has better things to do
than wait
or be a promise
at all.
 

Growing Up, Things I Can, Writing

69. Things I Can Tell Myself: One Small Truth

smirkpretty

I am not going to read Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday.

Never mind that he’s on deck for a Monday evening book group at the Unitarian church right up the street. And I have two full weeks until then, which is more than enough time. And it’s an opportunity to talk ideas and raw human family concerns with like-minded, world-eyed liberals right here in my community.

And that I want more than anything to disrupt this aching lonely purposeless robotic toil-consume-pick up-drop off-sort-pay-do-it-all-again-tomorrow middle aged existence by weaving myself into a project bigger than me, and attending this group is one simple step towards a richer life.

Because that’s a lie.

I want other things. This I want, yes, but only as much as other things, not more than. Maybe even less than, if I’m really honest.

My 7am Zumba is a few notches higher. That’s why, instead of reading past 11pm, I turn off the light and quiet myself down.

Also higher on the list? Long, meandering walks through the neighborhood with Noodle.

Making my own hummus from scratch is up there too.

Drawing crayon doodles on the envelopes into which I fold letters to Bug at camp. And scritch-scratching in my journal. And tip-tapping here: All higher.

Also whirling through loops and riding over soft plateaus in nighttime phone conversations with My Mister. And deadheading the basil. And transplanting the peppers. And mining the deep vein of creativity when the tough tasks come calling during my 8 hours.

Lunchtime yoga. That’s higher too.

If I really want that book club and the currency I imagine it carries — I mean, if I really want it — the choice is simple. Kick Jared Diamond up to the top of the list. Let something further down fall off.

And here I am, standing at the local library about to wave my key-card under the scanner. I look at what I’ve got. An Alice Munro collection of short stories, a thin volume of poetry exercises, a Stewart O’Nan novel called Last Night at the Lobster.

And Jared Diamond.

I think, What would it hurt to just take him home? Maybe if he’s there on the bedside table, I’ll pick him up. He might enthrall me. Just imagine how edifying, how engaging that discussion group! Fourteen days? No problem.

But why do this to myself?

Why this relentless work to repair, mutate, improve?

(Or prove?)

Somehow, I still fear the call chorusing through me is a siren’s song. The desire I drive so hard to override must be Peter Pan at the window, stunted id and stars for eyes.

Somehow, I am still trying to get this growing-up thing right. And still doubting that the woman right here in this skin is actually enough.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

— from Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”

I’ll do better (because doing better seems to be so damned important) if Jared Diamond makes his 512-page case somewhere other than my bedroom. I set his down on the re-shelf cart.

The moment I do, two quick but powerful currents rush past from opposite directions. The first says, Rock on, Girl! You’re free of that pointless assignment!

The second one is harder to decipher, but I still manage to catch its gist. It says, There goes another chance to be a person of substance. Have fun playing in the shallows, my friend.

And because my father earned a PhD, lists dozens upon dozens of publications on his CV, and spends a good chunk of his weekends reading not only the entirety of the Washington Post but a good portion of the works of nonfiction reviewed in its “Book World” — because of all of this, I am forever falling short of the mark.

That mark written on the bones of ghosts.

That mark mapped in disappearing ink.

I beep through the library checkout with only poetry, short stories, and a novel. As I do, I take a deep breath and tell myself the true small truth. This one has nothing to do with Jared Diamond.

It is this:

I will never be my father.

The heart shivers, resists, cries out for the comforting lie.

Then lets go.

I carry home my works of fiction and image. I walk my dog, slice peaches and cherries, talk on the phone with My Mister, then come here to write.

Fiction. Image.

Lyric. Story.

(So much closer to nonfiction than anyone let on.)

Something alights outside my bedroom window. It calls softly.

This song, I’m learning.

This song, mine.