Morning Prayer

The sun begins its path across the window.
I lie heavy and full after sleep, a sack of flour,
thanking the lingering cobwebs
of dreams for their mysterious metaphor.

There was a sadness falling asleep
that I cannot remember now;
my mind, a machine defaulting
to useless, repetitive motion,
wakes as a soft, stirring organ.

I treasure these moments, so clean
and shimmering with possibility,
windows of the wisdom
that I can emerge into the day
as any sort of creature,
more compassionate, more present
than ever before.

I savor them, feel them dissolve on my tongue,
inscribing them inside myself
for the times I am afraid of change
instead of comforted by it.
I will remember the awareness of purity,
letting words like birth and death
simply collapse into renewal.

Gardener’s Instruction Manual for Self-Change

It will not happen all at once.
That is simply not the way of things.
There are millions of tiny choices
collapsed into your new self,
seeds scattered by the winds’ hands.

First, choose your location.
Find places of beauty,
the homes to generously growing beings
and gentle weather. Start there.

Dig a bed wide enough to hold what you need,
but narrow enough where you can reach
and touch that which you nurture.
Find spaces that will nourish the new growth
or watch earnest beginnings perish unprotected.

Cast with care and intention.
It does not take long.
Then – wait.

Understand the waiting
is the most important part.
Resist the urge to dig away the dirt
to see how the seeds are growing.
Understand that it will happen
without anyone but yourself
to bear witness,
moments where you did the right thing –
often, nothing at all –
and told no one.
Develop new habits
with the new life in mind.
Go for walks carrying a watering can.
Pull up unwanted influences
as they sneak in, sapping your resolve.

Look closely.
Understand the directions of movement,
decide what parts to trim
in order to focus the growth up or out.
Listen to what it needs,
what is turning yellow, bending over,
becoming unable to thrive.
Understand the life before you
instead of constructing the image
of the life you are after.

When at last you reap the fruits,
wear your humility
in the folds of your raincoat,
the lines crisscrossing your palms.
Understand the gifts you could not make
alone. You did not receive them alone, either.
Notice how your practices shaped the landscape,
inspired other growth.
Notice in your calm body, your steady spirit,
how it shaped you.

For My Friend On His Birthday

A decade later,
I am still making your scrapbook
illustrated by high school memories
and the stories you tell me.
I flip through,
watch you turn
from a smoking rocket schoolboy
to a buzzed head and brittle armor
to a corduroy garden feminist
to a color-outside-the-lines academic
to international teacher.
The pages curve at the bottom corner;
I never get tired of watching.

I can’t remember the last time
I saw you on your birthday,
but I always remember, anchored
by the 17 it shares with mine.
I play a Jeff Buckley song
and remember lying on the floor
letting his voice ripple through the room.
It is like we say when we talk –
it is always the right time.

I think of your storms
and of the beautiful moments of calm.
I think of your tree rings,
how your circle holds a little more
with every passing year.
Each character is more compassionate
than the last,
every rebirth more courageous.

I read through
when I need to know I contain more.
I read you
to remember to be brave.

The Phoenix Lab

The tried electrodes, but they were incinerated along with the feathers.
The MRI and x-ray attempts proved useless as well –
if the bird wasn’t moving, it was starting to smoke, and had to be removed.
They swabbed and poked in between combustions – a tricky task,
since there was no rhythm their computers could track or predict –
but the labs were all inconclusive.
Eventually they just put it behind glass in the center of the room and watched
as it swirled, smoldered, twisted through states of birth and decay.

It was the only one in captivity, and like any captured wild thing,
it’s behavior was notably strange and erratic.
Though the mythology books (how they hated to reference the Greek stories!) said
the birds would cycle through every 500-1400 years,
this one had been catching fire a few times a day, as if it were desperately trying
to emerge somewhere else, as something cageless.

Some were so frustrated by the end of each day, they would leave early
or continue to sit in a corner poring heatedly over more tests, more books.
But there were a few who lingered in humble fascination,
their instruments of study left at their desks, and a strange thing happened
where their eyes grew unfocused, seeing in a way that did not try to name
each movement, count behaviors, quantify the life before them.
It was enough, finally, to simply bear witness to a mystery,
look past the unexplainable into the familiar heart of the metaphor.

Scandal erupted one morning when the creature was gone,
a couple of the scientists lost their jobs. The lingering ones. Their faces flashed
through the news stories for about a week, looking calm and with no comment,
and the story passed from public view fairly quickly, what with people’s
capacity for such things.

Gaia

The earth feels sad. It has been hard
to see her shape-shifting goddesses go,
watch the solitary, able-bodied,
jealous gods take their place
in the hearts of her children.
Look at them, so determined
to prove themselves independent,
unrelated, even, to her.
The Greek myths rewritten to describe
gods being born out of Zeus’ head or thigh,
the characters surreptitiously flipped
in the Mesopatamian legend of mother Eve,
out of whose rib came the first man.
How hard they tried to separate woman
from creation,
even while insisting on virgin births.

But more so than that,
the earth is sad because their pain
is giant, and like with any mother,
it is also hers.
Children, they don’t always say what’s wrong
or even that they’re upset.
But you can see it in the way they act,
how they talk to you.
She watches them always,
their lives spent reciting their shame,
the mask they wear over who they truly are.
She listens to their stories, told over and over,
the ghosts of longing nostalgia flitting through
in the way Artemis protects the forest nymphs from hunters,
the beatific light around Mary’s head.

New Father

The wonder in his face is hard to get used to.
He was never an expressive man,
his favorite jokes marked only by a curt rush of air
through his nostrils, above lips pressed formally together,
never loose enough for a grin to escape.
Now, the word delight is fully realized
in how his whole body seems to smile,
bending towards the doorway like a flower to sunlight
when we go to visit him.

He does not seem to notice the gray
that slowly scrubs the brown from my hair,
the tracks of time snaking across my face.
The human brain is merciful sometimes,
ever creative, selectively blind,
to protect us from trauma.

“Honey, thank God you’re ok!”
My hands are clasped between his cold palms.
I always tell the staff to take him for walks, keep him active and healthy,
but he is usually too busy waiting.
“I got here as soon as I could.
They said you were recovering
after the surgery. How are you feeling?”
As soon as he is assured of my well-being,
his eyes flit back to the doorway.
“Where is she? I want to hold her.
Where’s my baby girl?”

I woke up that afternoon with my room full of sunlight.
They handed me my daughter,
told me my husband was here as a patient,
admitted six minutes after she was born.
An accident a mile from the hospital,
a massive head trauma.
They said, they did not know how bad it was yet.
They said, we will have to wait and see.
And, congratulations.

“Where is she? Where is our baby?”
My cheeks ache from the smile I stretch across my face
as I tell him she is being taken care of,
that she is beautiful and healthy and strong.
I lost count of the amount of times he met her
before she could no longer be mistaken for a newborn,
the times he looked briefly at his growing daughter
before asking when he could see her.

The conversation is always the same,
an unvarying, brief routine,
but is exhausting nonetheless.
Every so often he will ask why I do not share his excitement,
comment that I look tired
with more sympathy than I ever saw in him before.
He is frozen in a state of evolution,
and I am his reluctant witness,
watching as, every six minutes,
he becomes a father.

“Time for you to go out to the places you will be from” – “Closing Time” by Semisonic (written by Dan Wilson about the birth of his daughter.)

The drive home from the hospital
is a shared experience of new parents,

The abrupt re-entrance into the churning, unpredictable world
After days of soft whiteness, scheduled medications,
professionals hovering above the fragile life in your arms.

I was born during a snowstorm in mid-December.
I can only imagine my father’s eyes glued to the salted roads,
while my mother’s gaze anchored the precious bundle in her lap.

Two months ago, when I stepped out of my smoking car,
broken class sprinkling out of my hair,
looking at the passenger side doors completely crushed in,

it would be a lie to say I wasn’t utterly rattled.
My body felt like a cloth doll
when I saw how easily the metal frame had crushed in.
I saw but could not feel the cuts dotting my arms,
my skin the thinnest web of tissue,
torn by the tiniest fragments of the massive impact.

But in the hours that followed,
the thought that undid me
every time I finally controlled my tears and tremors
was of my parents thousands of miles away,
lying awake in a restless bed,
staring into the dark hard enough, almost,
to bring their baby home.

Birthplaces

Shame was at your big sister’s 7th birthday party,
When the colors and lights and noise turned you wild, high,
And when the giant pink expanse of cake appeared before her,
Dotted with the red melting candles,
Your breath exploded out of your lips
And swept out the flames,
Her eyes open before the mist had even settled,
Her wish cut off mid-sentence.
You were too young to understand the etiquette you’d violated,
But it was the first time you had seen her face crumple,
The first time the adults had looked at you with gravity,
Reflecting the power you had to shatter something so profoundly.