For A Finch
When I returned
The tiny spice finch was hurt
Caged and held
She is unable to fly now too
Fear filled both of us
Hers is vibrating
A will to survive
A smear of blood staining her perch
We wait sitting together
Communicating the watch
Our hope for stay of this
A tiny finch hurt while I was away.
Silences
It may seem to you
Better to remain in stillness
Nothing said ever enough
But it is a punishment
Meted out to someone
Who loved to hear
Forest
Standing in their presence you felt
Life and time differently, not as yours
Great beings rose before us in silent strength to welcome perhaps,
Or just to stand as still as one's embarrassment strangles a moment,
I held my face up into the majestic, tilting back to take them in
A speck of buzzing insignificance
Bowing to the wood as it took in my breath
Realizing they couldn't be seen in their height
Without the raising of my head in acknowledgment
Without my turning a bow into an action of praise.
Mother of Earth
For a time as a woman you hold her spirit
Filling with the life of a child
She becomes you as life is given to a birth
It transforms your body and being into we
The morning after such a delivery is as wonderful
As it is strange and distant.
You grew a life that is never yours
It belongs just to itself, placed into your care
Into your blood and sinew incubation
You nourished the beginning of another
Of you, not you, that plants itself upon the earth
Tender care and fertile ground, your wish roots, becomes alive.
Free Fall
It would have been easy to climb up
Easy to fall
Easy to let this forest floor welcome you
To the velvet of the needles.
The thought a moment passing
As the picture was taken
In the pain of walking on.
Melodic Pool
If one drop of water is the note
The drops falling from the sky
Forming a sweet tune that ran
Into a piece of melody
Rising from a brief refrain embedded
Into the river running in the orchestration
Of a symphonic harmony that rushed
On into the greatness of the ocean
Pounding to a crescendo that brought
With sun's fire the rising
Of the drop again to cloud
A tender little song drops
Tearing in the eye of a cloud to
Sing to us again our days.
Laughing
Joy is harder now
And a smile comes at a price
Pain is harder to bear
Inspiration more difficult to find
In the name of right things
And honor.
My Houses
It went like this, it was always about going
From one I loved to one I didn't.
It hasn't changed in the years of moves.
There were the years of joy and the years stuck in a box.
I recall 15 moves, but there are issues with memories
They shimmer here outside the edges
Teasing me with a tremble of vague blurring
The best was a Victorian, white
Stately with maples in the front and a porch
That blurred really by my being so young
Actually the room I had felt so large, the closet was a terror
For me at night, had to conquer it every evening with my will
Cannot really glimpse the apartment in Madison earlier, the hall, the trees
Of living in a graduate apartment. Others followed.
We lived hard years in my childhood on Roosevelt Street
In a box with carpet that was colored satan's puce
That carpet that couldn't be replaced with wood
It was a hard place to hang your head to see your lacking.
And then I propelled myself across a continent to nowhere and to couches
Marina was fresh and full of the sand of the yard
A simple little house I love to reclaim in fantasies
Coming to it from the slum of Salinas, a dirt floor in a tiny town before
When apartments were places to get your deposits stolen
The house that buried the living was in Salinas,
We lived in the cook house too, Mom
Called it Frank's place, I sat the jaundiced baby in the sun
The heat almost took him, as I followed
Doctor's orders too well. The cool den of the next
Holding all of us as the children played and grew
This will be the happy times they recall on Seashore.
And it will be their big closet of fears I think.
My house now? It's on a triple security sanctuary
There is no doubt about why
It is a compound that I am camped in awhile
Defending against bleeding to death.
Until moving to freedom from walls.
Could I Ever Hope For That?
There would be several places, three, I would like you to know.
My hill overlooking my town where I sat and dreamed about the
Arms of the one person that might look at the lights
Like tiny jewels twinkling and stilling the night, the distances
Melting into a poetry of glistening sweat and fireflies
A hill in a tiny sandy town around
The bay from Monterey where the ocean roars and
The frogs are talking through the nights cooling
It is a place that calms you into thinking of
An ordinary day in a simple life of tender time.
Would anyone walk by twice an old white shambling
Victorian house that needs too much work, aging maples
That hold on as it leaks into plaster, needs foundational support
Funds and hand, carpenters with plans
This place I would wrap around you too, as a Sarah.
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