The poems are getting written but not posted. Life happens. I am working on a book for a class I’m taking called Maps of the Imagination. We are almost finished and it requires that I turn something in from out 8 weeks of writing together. I started weaving the pieces together (because we were asked for pieces, not a plot and plan) and find myself at over 10K words. True, it is a draft. But that’s quite the accomplishment for me: that I can put that many words together and tell a story.
Poem 65
Untitled (Titles are hard. I’m doing well to just get the poems!)
The white orchid is dropping its flowers. It has bloomed for over a month, a third cycle in some fewer than that years since I brought it home. This is something of a victory of life outside her natural environs – high in a tree in the tropics, living on air and the moisture from rain, roots tangled in bark, a queen of flowers surveying her territory. I am aware to the lesson of blooming where planted, also aware that I have lost as many plants over the years as I have managed to grow, life having its own rhythms and needs, drummers (one’s own or another’s) be damned. Aphorisms abound, along with an annoying argument in my head about adaptation and abundance and why can’t I just accept it. If it were easy we would all be happy. Is seems we are not.
Desperate times call
for desperate measures – all
cliches are small truths.
I bend over the green leaves and healthy roots reaching to breathe, run water over the potting chips, whisper encouragement, think of the difference rock or soil make for a tiny seed.
Poem 66
It tantalizes.
The mockingbird comes day after day,
sits above the prize, considers strategy –
you can see it: a careful drop to the ground,
a dance made to assert power – wings spread
then folded, then spread, then folded. At last
the attack, grabbing the bright sparkles, sun
glitters, pulling, pulling. We watch
from the window, amused, inspired by this
character’s tenacity, applauding the fearless
return, the desired in front of him so close
but tethered so tightly it will never be his, his nest
forever full of the absence of that ribbon.
Poem 67
The story reared its head in the midst of women dreaming together around a wood fire given to them by old oaks, a young apple, a lone hickory house cleaning their limbs. Outside the fire was darkness but the women were not afraid because they had each other. Each and each they listened to the quiet, waiting. And so the story became, more like breathing than words, more like humming than song. Watched by the eyes of the people, it rode the smoke of the twigs and branches, spiraled up shooting sparks meant to pull down star dust to brighten the telling, danced like dreamtime, began to speak in pictures and symbols.
One woman pulled a stick from the kindling, copying in the dirt the gift she was seeing, another began to sping the drawings into sound, a call needing a response.
All through the night the women toiled at translation and in the morning the story rose like the sun, shimmering in the morning mist like a newly found voice.
And the story spoke of the spaces beyond the light where shore and sea meet, the particular reverberation of the wild waves against the high rock outjut, how the ground quakes but holds; it told of the narrow path leading from sand dune to forest glade where sweet water waited to nourish the thirsty wanderer and farther back still to narrow huts beside caved caverns next to the bog where earth met air and energy stirred and knowing broke over All.
1 Comment
65, 66. 67 – Interesting to read three on one page – connections. Wonderful lines and, as always, so visual. Interesting about the mockingbird, I like the repetition of the wings opening and folding…..I repeat what I’ve said before – that you write so eloquently about nature.