Yesterday a wind blew

Yesterday a wind blew – a wind without urgency, a wind that held me in its arms, a wind of promise. I recognized that wind from the dreams I have had since childhood. So many nights I have heard its call to fly and have soared across the skies of dreamland.

The wind yesterday waited outside my door. And as I walked, it called me to the sky. I raised my arms, just as I do in my dreams, almost believing that the wind would lift me up and carry me. And when my feet held firm, stayed in the world’s grip, I pretended to stretch. I have been taught to keep my dreams to myself, yet I raised my arms more than once, as much a gesture of love to the world and sky as a hope that I could fly.

A gauze of clouds rimmed the sky, diffusing the sun’s light. I walked further than I normally do, immersed in that cool, soft wind that gave and took my breath away.

Later in the morning I saw the geese flying, carried by the same promise, arrowing across the sky to places I cannot go. I trembled at their loveliness and listened to their calls, a language strange and yet familiar. I watched them, and my heart stirred with a longing for a place I cannot name but want to call home.

What wonder is this that I could see the sky so blue, filled with geese, their cries filling the moment like a cup, brimful with joy, prepared just for me.

Photo on Wikimedia Commons courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/people/37804979@N00

The land of giants

When I was small I lived in the land of giants. People and building loomed large, towering over me in a world that pulsed with power and strength. In my first eight years when the year changed, I sat on my grandparents’ porch, coated and mittened, to watch the New Year’s parade march down the broad street. The porch stretched half a block in length surrounded by concrete walls I first had to tiptoe over to see the marchers.

When my years grew large, my grandparents’ home grew small, their porch unable to hold more than a few chairs, a table, a bench, and two or three small children.

I knew a man once who slept in my mother’s bed, a man not my father but who owned her when he changed her name. He walked in fierceness, his words the mace he swung to shame and mock and ridicule. He slew me more than once. Though I had more than a decade to stand on, he towered over me, an insurmountable wall that kept me in a place of fear. I hated him.

A full generation passed before I saw him again. This past week we met. The years have left him frail, thin, and sick. His legs hesitate when he tries to walk, and his ears fail to listen to the soft voices around him. Old angers still smolder in his words, but the flame no longer leaps out to scorch and singe.

All of us come to rubble eventually. The mortar weakens and our walls collapse. We lay down our weapons and surrender to the years.

We talked, the two of us, and told our stories. I searched for my old hatred and found it gone, lost on some path I took decades and decades ago.

I left that man, surprised at my great peace and my great guilt. I am not innocent. I have wrecked havoc, too, shook the ground with anger, pierced hearts with sharp-edged words, and held others hostage behind walls I built myself.

I have grown small again and hope to stay that way until I leave. I have had my share of hurts, but I have also hurt others and must make amends, for none of us escape this world unscathed or guiltless.

The body remembers

The body remembers.

The sun-scorched skin can number the days beneath the sky’s great torch, planting grain, lying on the beach, and walking to the train. The knees recall each road they travelled and the weariness of sidewalks and pavement. They can count the ups and downs of stairs you’ve long forgotten. The back has followed every step you’ve taken, holding you upright through the hard days, willing to bend at your command and lift small children, boxes, and bags and bags of groceries. The bones empty themselves to make space for all the memories of stillness. They languished those hours, longing to carry you, to feel the heft of life and movement. In the unseen places, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage journal every blow, fall, jolt, jump, stroll, dance, and spin; most of which you cannot remember.

The body grows weary of silence.

Year after year the body waited, remembering. The few times it spoke, you listened, tended to its needs, and heard no more. Stories must be told and now the body speaks. The skin brings up memories of the sun, like old photographs printed on your face. The knees insist you listen to the recitation of burdens borne; the back wakes you at night to tell its tales. Day after day the memories excavate within the bones, hollowing them out for a place to rest, nestling within the fragile spaces of the clavicle, radius, and femur. Tendons, ligaments, and cartilage lose themselves in remembrances that stretch across the years.

The body must tell, and should you turn away, it speaks more loudly. Listen it says, this is where I’ve been, this is the road I trod. And you must listen. Where else can you go?

Elderly woman:  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

Eating summer

We eat the strands of sunlight that the plants spend their days gathering. We eat the roar of volcanoes, old memories of fires and dinosaur bones, forgotten car trips, purr of cats, chatter of blue jays, breath of smokestacks, and all of our words, even our silence.

We eat earth’s metals – magnesium, zinc and copper – that the plants mine. They find the wells of sweet waters far beneath the soil and draw it up for us.

One day in July the garden calls us to eat spring and summer, sweet, salty, tart, and juicy. After we slice the sunlight into a blue bowl, we pour the sun’s golden liquid that we gathered from the tight fists of olives, and eat until our bellies fairly shine. Then we lick the bowl like it was the sky itself.

Vegetables

Slices of my heart: In the year I died

We rent a third-floor apartment and drink coffee from mismatched cups. The coffee pot costs fifteen dollars. It is temporary. We must make do; we are temporary too.

I sleep on a mattress on the floor. I am alone for now. The man I share my bed with is away. He will be back. Someday. We don’t have furniture in the bedroom. We are waiting.

She comes into my room at night after I’ve gotten to sleep and kneels by my bed. Sorrow takes her breath away, leaving her speechless. She tries to form words, but they sound as if they are wrapped in cotton, so none of the sharp edges of the consonants can be heard. All I can hear are vowels stretched out like a dirge.

The sobs begin softly, but soon come louder and quicker. Tears flow down her face and onto my shoulder as I put my arms around her to comfort her.

“I hate … ,” she says. Him or it, I think she is trying to say. “I hate him,” I hear at last. “He took everything.”

We are stranded in this unfamiliar room, empty of all but us and the bed, a raft carrying us into an unknown future. I rub her back and say, “I know.”

“I hate him,” she says again and again, doubling over and putting her face down on the ground.

I hug her and hold her, but she cannot stop crying. We cry together and I tell her how sorry I am that it happened. If only I could go back and change things for her, but the past is permanent. Only the now is temporary.

I fumble with words hoping to say something of comfort. I pray for her and whisper my love.

“I’ll never be the same.”

I know and yet I cannot tell her what I know. Death changes everything it touches, but not every death is fatal.

I ask her if she would like to lie down and try to sleep. I get pillows from her bed to make her comfortable.

She lies next to me and says, ”After this, I’m not going to have any strength.”

“I will give you strength; God will give you strength; strength will come.” I speak the words aloud and then repeat them to myself, arranging them like furniture in my empty heart.

We are silent, floating, carried out to the sea by grief, hoping to drown ourselves in sleep.

Winter rime and winter rhyme

Winter’s minions stand their ground.

The book of days that hangs upon my wall told me more than a week ago that spring was here. I’m waiting, trying to believe it’s true.

Yes, the time of rime is now past, but winter lingers, reluctant to leave. Though the thermometer says it is 23 degrees this morning, winter sends its winds to swallow 5 degrees or more.

I brood. Rime, the ice that winter paints the trees with, rhymes with “rhyme.”

The time of rhyme is also past. Once upon a time, poets moved in measured footsteps, inviting us to join the verbal dance. Often when a line stopped and bowed its rhyme, the next one mirrored those same steps, matching the sound in kind. Some poets slanted rhymes or placed them inside, waltzing to a steady beat until the final curtsey.

These days we like our rhymes sung, whether hip-hop, pop, or rock. Our poems are free to wander, twirl, and spin. Free verse creates its own steps and feels no constraint to follow someone else’s choreography. It rhymes or not, according to its own interpretation of the dance.

I would like to rhyme and dance a poem, but I have two left feet. However, it doesn’t stop me from trying.

So, today, I’ll share a poem of winter’s end, written years ago for my children. I warn you now: should you cross beyond the yellow tape, you’ll wind up in a rhyme scene.

Winter

Sweet swift dreams buried lie,

Mourned with long and silver sighs

Winter bares his strength ice-cold,

Tyrant clothed in robe of snow.

None would even dare to try

Reason with those deathful eyes;

Piercing, chilling, large and small;

Well he knows we’re cowards all.

Oh so proud, he comes with foot

Booted. And where once had stood

Tender creatures soft and green,

Sterile, barren world is seen.

Laughing with a blasting wind

Opens court, his reign begins.

Long he banquets, drinks the wine

Stolen from the summer vine.

Largely ‘neath his grey tent sky

Sated monarch, drunken lies

Sleeping. Snores with white-cold breath;

All his subjects wait, in death.

Deep in dreams his lover spies,

Hoary kisses tantalize.

Then sound with laughing fingers cracks

His smooth white dream, still unhatched.

Would one dare disturb this king

Who exiled thousands born to sing;

Southern regions welcomed them

Feathered orphans, fled on wing.

Still the sound, gentle laughter,

Warmly wrapping ‘round the rafters;

Anger fills the tyrant’s breast,

“Halt!” he cries with frosty breath.

Comes a child with melting smile,

Skips and flowers multiply.

Smaller growing, puddle king,

Conquered by the barefoot Spring.

Melting minions.

In praise of

The prepositional variety

Of those that screw on, pop off,

Seal up, keep in

And shut out

As well as those that

Require tools to remove

Whether bendable or breakable

Hinged or unhinged

Hard as roofs for the dead

Soft as tents for pies

Sturdy as helmets for pots

Or merely heaps of pot

Atop the heads of rich and poor —

Who need to be warm

Or want to be cool

Mighty eye shutters

Doors to dreams both night and day

Locking you inside nightmares

Opening up to set you free

Blink and wink makers

Whipping your forty lashes or more

Pandora’s temptation

Flipping open angry and crazy

Keepers of secrets

Stoppers of talk

Everywhere you look or don’t

Lids, lids, lids

In praise of

Photos: Commode lid Orange lid White coffin Eye Hinged chest Decorative Lid

Winter’s night

The shadows have been there all day, waiting for the light to slant. The world turns its back on the sun as the shadows tilt onto the ceiling above the kitchen lights.

Twilight awakens my longing, lets it loose like a hungry hound, searching for a bone I buried somewhere long ago. I miss the ones who have left. I hunt for them along the trail of memories, following a familiar path that leads to the river. Here as always, I lose their scent.

Evening washes the room gray. My eyes cannot adjust; details fade like memories. Darkness brings its own weariness. I wear it like a cloak or shroud. I am too tired to go further. I long to hibernate, to crawl inside the barren night, and sleep and sleep and sleep.

I listen to the lullaby of dark; I am weary, friend.

Don’t stop.

But I must sleep away this night that seems to never end. My tears will drown me if I do not stop.

Don’t close your eyes.

Why? Just a bit of rest and I will start again.

There is no starting after that sleep.

How far until the light?

The calling

Do you hear it

in the dark

moment

before you slip

beneath the cover

of sleep?

Does it murmur

you awake

call you back to

day?

There

between the worlds

do you hear

your heart whisper

what you must do?

You begin to see

there is an end

to the long tunnel

of time,

and your heart says,

Now

before it is too late

let’s look

just one more time

for those dreams

we’ve heard so much about.

The weight of snow

Today the snow fell.

The pine trees stood in the silence to catch the falling sky. Two crows watched, unaware or unconcerned. The pines had nowhere else to go. When their limbs grew tired, they laid their burdens down. Snow scattered on the ground, startling the crows.

The birch trees are bones picked clean by the wind. Summer’s silver leaves lost long ago.

I have never loved the trees more than now.

The snow knows something of letting go, words unspoken, worlds lost, vanishing hour by hour. I think a bush grew there; I can’t remember. My familiar path is gone. I am left with only memories.

The snow knows too much of death to make a sound. It writes without words — shows, but never tells. See, you will not drown in this white flood. Winter stills the water and commands it to sit at her feet. In spring, the water will move again, seeking the earth’s heart, flowing down, down into the River Lethe, drowning all your memories of this world.

The blue shades grow large. I watch them lumber across the yard into the night.

I promise myself I will not forget this day.

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year-struck

old age and other jokes I know

Writing

Yesterday a wind blew

The land of giants

The body remembers

Eating summer

Slices of my heart: In the year I died

Winter rime and winter rhyme

Winter

In praise of

Winter’s night

The calling

The weight of snow