How long will it be?
We have been watching the moon
which waxes and wanes and
renews itself and brings,
usually, decent fortune
How long will it be?
We have boarded the plane
taken seats by the window
settled in for a movie
hours/world away
How long now?
I read the journal back to front,
an order that makes sense
to a brain most intent
on knowing endings
How long now?
Until life has changed enough that
the current era is only be seen by
standing at the window,
looking through a glass
The Community Garden
It is not what you expect to find
after trekking uphill five blocks
in the Japanese District after a
hot day in the city. It smells like
compost tumbling over itself
here on the side of the hill,
is strewn together good enough
with spare wood, multi-multi-use
buckets and laminated signs
some person with a printer
tacked to tree trunks to guide
visitors toward an exit; yes,
wabi-sabi enough to get lost.
It is how we ran our land when
I was young, making do with
parts of things and scraps and
pieces of other things. I forget
the city outside. Chicken coop
signs (please do not feed us rice),
sunflowers grown beyond a
hand’s span whose peach fuzz
necks bow to watch weeds sustain
this morsel of wild in the city,
now I barefoot along stone steps,
toe my way down the other side,
find a sitting-rock in the orchard
and do that a while among this
stench of four-days-fallen apples
and flies on a summer afternoon
and when I am done scribbling
memories search for more to do,
for more to think about, perhaps
another reason to stay put.
(August 27, 2019)
Returning Home
I haven’t seen you with your hair down
parted middle, pulled behind your ears
in a while – you’ve been away and the
roof is crumbling and a decade is gone.
See how the grass has grown up wildly
and now we have to lift our legs high
to carefully meander through; thank you
for never complaining about dandelions.
Have you opened your upstairs closet?
You’ll want to fasten a ponytail for this:
when you left were you running toward
or away and is that why you rarely wrote?
Home again. Our front window is broken.
This is and isn’t the right time to review a
former life and old limbs trimmed so you
could flourish year-round away from me.
For thirty years I watched you, held you.
There is no surprise within my pine walls
to see you grown, waving new branches,
but you did return, if only to say goodbye.
(August 18, 2019)
Meditation of Sorts
On the days the words don’t come
let’s use sounds as I’ve done here
or pair silence with stillness and
within this sacred space let only
one voice be unearthed: intuition.
How is it that what we cannot put
our finger against is always most
powerful, and asks us to consider
the times we did not seem to notice
the passing day but instead pushed
too hard in many uphill directions?
Sylvia
You and your cocker spaniel
and when Erin passed, the spaniel
that you owned after her.
The dam and her filly who,
as a young girl, I would clap beside
the fence to see her run.
Once your husband passed
and you could no longer care for
the horses, you kept goats.
Two maybe three years ago
I was home and walked over and
found you remembered me.
Everything around you had gone
to the ground, except the plants
springing up from your yard.
As I grew into a woman you became
just Sylvia, living in the last home
on acreage in the neighborhood.
I sent a Winnie-the-Pooh card
the Christmas after I’d seen you.
No reply was received.
Then I dreamed of you. It happens
in my family when time closes; I will
check when I return home again.
(August 4, 2019)
Praying to Ancestors
Thinking the Dead have the answers
– that if we could speak to them
they would give us the knowledge
we have not yet acquired in living –
I pray to a formerly flawed human
who I long thought of as a saint,
asking for guidance, asking for help,
forgiveness and wants of the living.
I summon my ancestors, my father,
men I once loved who left too soon
when all I had needed was to ask
myself the admittedly trite cliché:
what would you do if it were you?
What path becomes best if breaths
become numbered? Well they are.
Here is the funny thing: the dead
and the alive, as it turns out, we
tend to share the same answer.
(written in 2018; edited for ColetteKay.com)
Landmania
At the feet of mountains, meadows and shores I turn from busy-minded woman to awed servant of our earth. I breathe the pines smelling like childhood camping and hold to mind valleys cradling cloud shadows in the afternoon, once in Montana and another time in New Mexico.
I know now: that the still of a mountain lake arrives twice daily, at each end of the light; the embrace of everyday grass under bare feet; the change in the air that signals an ocean is a few miles out of sight; a love affair that, next to humans loving one another deeply and intimately (the only way worth doing it), most makes apparent life’s worth.
Love and land. Currency of choice, given the choice.
A stretch of road once led (still does) through northern New Mexico toward Colorado. Such flat, open ground is good for the mind. It doesn’t change at every turn; it doesn’t make you work to maneuver through it or ask much of you but to hold reasonable speed, if you like, and keep one eye out for the pronghorn.
If arriving somewhere new at night, then you are not yet there. The exploration begins in the morning, when the sun rises to reveal the surroundings. The evening before was merely counting a series of freeway exits, unpacking the car and falling into the bed or chair or arms of wherever your inner compass has taken you.
“I began to feel I loved the land and to know that I would never forget it. There I would go for long walks alone. It was alive, I was sure of it. I wanted to identify myself with it, to lose myself in it.” – Jean Rhys
(written in 2014; edited for ColetteKay.com)
