Lesser Shorebirds (with Tania P)

Perhaps my love for the namers rivals my love for you: be you godwit, whimbrel, or dowitcher, your tan vault of a self ends in a v and nothing interrupts the fuchsia stem of your bill, tipped black, from its ravaged drilling and suckling for what the retreating waves stir loose below sand's horizon. I want to sift, like you, amid the dark stars of heaven for what god made just for me.

Maybe as a line of pelicans flows low across the water, only a wingbeat from the waves, I set out walking along the shoreline to follow. As ear and eye compete I look to the left, listen to the right; my attention sliding between drifting blankets of birds and the fluttering heartbeat of the sea.

A Mild Enchantment

Perhaps in a country in which people’s eyes water from their habit of looking both ways before crossing the street, the scent from a common flower is measured to be swifter than thought. 

Maybe in another part of the world, a man reaching his right hand into the pocket of a new coat will find a cold, shiny coin that he will toss to settle an issue of the heart. 

The Hummingbird's Complaint (with Tania P)

Perhaps the hummingbird, when still, juices the morning complaint. Once airborne he snips his phrase in four. When he lands he barely bends the bough. Whatever the source of his methodical mincing, he repeats himself and I listen again for the triplet trills of silver which come, when they come, towards the middle and cap the end of his arc.

Maybe in the cool mornings of fall when the brightest jewels of the hummingbird’s garden fan out from twining vines, sky blue and fuchsia before a violet sky, each tubular bloom that later curls closed in the heat of the day curls slowly, in its own way – for there is no end that does not end by degree –  as the flower’s secret diary reads: now shuttered closed, I let the room grow dark around me.

Moving Portraits (with Tess P)

Perhaps Leonardo Di Vinci described clouds as bodies without surface that never sit still for a portrait. And much as Mondrian painted tree trunks that rise from the ground into which their roots have penetrated only to disappear into panels of bright color and brushstroke – today I am moved by the sight of faces caught in the windows of speeding trains going the other way. Half-smile, glazed eyes, I stop what I am saying in mid-sentence.

Maybe part star and stargazer, dumbfounded to find the relative racing past us in that distant glitter that spilled over holidays, we open our mouths to the scintillating snow falling onto our faces as if to speak.

Fall Mystery (guest blogger Julian M)

Perhaps the field that was once green is now golden and tan; the tree has no leaves on its branches but a blanket for its feet, preparing itself for the long winter ahead.

Maybe my eyes search for light - dwindling, fading - until something is visible in the distance. A ray of reflection from a glittering source. What could it be?

Red Rose (with Tania P)

Perhaps we see a rose as red, yet the one color in which the eye sees it dressed is the very color the rose rejects – and much remains hidden in the solitude of each silken pinwheel grown thick with fragrance where unseen colors continue to dwell.

Maybe that is best, to allow the center its private inward furl--a destination navigated most unbiased by child, dreamer, painter before assuming palette.  How tightly each petal grips the common stem. How equally pleasing: plucked petal and its perfect swath around three sides of human thumb.  

Light (with Tania P)

Perhaps light is the opposite of entropy, travelling at a speed hummingbirds match in nectared dreams of planets without kestrels.

And maybe as this thin purple visitor pushes its way into the darkness it streaks right to left before disappearing; traveling toward some unreachable point well past the Milky Way after emptying the menace of our minds onto the still wet grass – after brightening fallen fruit and illuminating the rotting boards behind the barn.

The Last Question (with Tania P)

Perhaps while we can’t yet turn smoke and ash back into a tree, we can train impossibly shattered things to mend themselves: a crushed hope, a fractured trust – an anguish suspended in a dream.

Or maybe stepping foot on the train, we are meant to notice the girl to our right, her red hat, her brown eyes eclipsing the pall of methodical predictions of heat death—oh imminent end—in favor of her shoulder against yours, the driverless hours in which to ask her which of the poems in the book in her lap she loves best.

The Last Question by Issac Asimov

Sonnet: Against Entropy by John M. Ford

Hair (with Tess P)

Perhaps having lived more that half a life, when I lose my hair I should stand on the steps out back by the dogwood and sassafras, letting the silver strands slip through my fingers to be taken by a breeze; hair that once was glossed like a newly combed chestnut mare, now hair that I hate I even hate to lose but let the birds make nests of it, the hatchlings dry and kept by a few strands.

Maybe the neatly woven cup that cradles a clutch of small white eggs sprinkled with brown so near to where I stand, well apart from the urban pulse, lends me improbable comfort, a reason to pause, as I scan the landscape of tree and sky searching for a flash of wing, a cinnamon colored breast striped with rose, waiting for the evening's quiet to be gently filled with an elegant assembly of silvery notes.

Simply Poems, a reading (with breeze)

Metaphors (with Tania P)

Perhaps when my daughter orders me to stop using metaphors (You're not off the hook. Don't ride me. Give up the goat) she secretly likes it. I can't stop anyway, these birds of paradise tight green canoes holding decks of tufted cards in their rims fanning melon to cobalt to absurd summer popsicle pink. Or this set of chestnut black hinged halves of fallen palm trunk against the fence; wooden fins for a mahogany boy just now reaching for her hand before I can intercede.

And maybe while sitting deep and idle as a cat I feel at my fingertips a little eternity, smell in my breath clouds of steam rising from a warm cup - hear voices and listen so intently that my body, nothing more than a chiffon shawl tossed over the back of a chair, rises up to inhabit a face that emerges from the fragrant flesh of a sweet apple that has fallen into a pasture mirroring a still twilight sky brimming with a tightening circle of stars that solicit my seeing if only for the fact that the beauty of the evening is as wild as the roses are. 

All This is That (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are a taxi driver and in your hurry to find one final fare you ignore your instinct to slow down and instead accelerate. In your rush you accidentally hit a shadowy figure who, looking in the wrong direction, steps in your way. The man is carrying a mirror and at the moment you hit him you see reflected back to you a clear image of your mother’s face on the day she saw your father alive for the very last time.

Maybe long ago, somewhere in her past, the sleeping mother hadn't noticed the few strands that had strayed from her careful part, nor had she felt the blue, kaleidoscope of Xerces that had escaped her slumber to gently pull the lock to one side before returning to the dream, as easily as one enters a mirror, as simple as the moon accepting light from the sun. 

Lost and Found

Perhaps it is good to stand beneath a thing that means to take words away. You may be shocked to find out that there are such things. That’s because the closer you get to them, the further away they really are. 

Maybe once you get close enough to escape within a melancholy charm, you begin to feel comfortable, and hang there free against its sides. But then, just as your breath catches up, you suddenly feel uprooted. It is as if it was there, just a moment ago, but now it is gone. 

The Guest, a reading (with hawk)

Goodbye, the light

The sunshine of poetry casts shadows 
                             - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Perhaps it is quiet in the pine woods. All the trees are misted with the day’s last light. A small, dark bug turns on the lip of a green leaf where tiny white flowers are growing out of a damp log.

Maybe as you stop at a rock by the water to watch the sun set, the evening breeze carries an aromatic elixir of pine needle, waterfall, and mossy trunk. The horizon holds open the landscape to an enveloping cloud of darkness, the precise shape and contour of the granite boulder that you are sitting on. 

Vanishing Point (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are a bird pulling out your tail feathers, passing each day making light, opening spaces; cleaning closets, painting the air, the walls the color of the center of the sun –white, white –as if you could chase suffering from your planet; and there, at the vanishing point, you see them, holier than anything these elephants in the summer haze.

Maybe in reverse perspective, your line of vision diverges against the horizon. Such a wide vista provides the elephants the necessary space to recede from your sight. Only then, as white fades to black, are you able to stand far enough outside yourself to notice a pair of singing birds with moons in their feathers perched at the edge of a leafy branch or, as seen under a microscope, nesting deep within the bright room of your heart.

Translation, a reading (with sunbeams)

Chalk (with Tess P)

Perhaps as you were falling asleep, the image arose in your mind of white path meeting white path. Upon the paths was a webworth of deer tracks that ran to the shores of the land gleaming gold with the day’s last light.

Maybe like a fish you suddenly shatter the water, leaping toward the dazzling golden light. Then return, meeting your shadow, sealing the wetness of your world as if a black table cloth were thrown across the lake; and as you drift in the dark, you can still see flecks of light and small creatures with wings that dart at the water's edge.

Translation (with Tania P)

Perhaps translation can be likened to traversing the Grand Canyon by mule-back instead of on foot, gauging how far the gut of the hooved can permissibly swing over trail's edge and back while keeping its rider.

And maybe translation is a way to think in a way we never dreamed we could think as we travel to a place not easily reached in a climate which forces solitude even on its atmosphere. Upon reaching our destination we find ourselves engulfed in a landscape rich and various because its messages can be received; personal prayers that invite us to travel further across a ravine through the city that surrounds us and down to a tiny town in the palm of our hand that our children call home.

Without Change

Perhaps without change, one could argue, there would be no butterflies. Their lives are so brief, what can it matter? They are like leaves that painlessly drop from trees. Plenty of nets to go around, with scarcely any turf left; as it is, they have hung on many decades longer than expected.

Or maybe the butterfly, as if in flight from itself, zigzags through the air as it senses, everywhere it flies, the ultimate difference.  Yet change remains, and our tender attention to it need not be narrowed by the broader world contained within the innocent, unguarded space of the one great sadness obstructing our view of it.

The Eighth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke