3/26/2008

Less Real Than

I'm not aware of many things.
How do I prepare myself to wound
what I have healed?

I must ask the soul simply
how to recognize itself
in the dark

like the owl who leaves
its home and flies
focused and low.

Our path is not defined;
prisoner or freed our road
is dream, our wakening

shifting, changing.

Everything else, the beautiful
fading images, the coherent
fabulous things are less

real than memory.

3/22/2008

Barefoot

Black-footed, the girl
becomes a wolf.
Her mother's kitchen towel
a tail, her cheek pressed down
against the earth,

smelling earth.

In a city made of steel
wearing high-heels
shiny, red as blood, the girl
becomes a captive wolf, her heart
sunk down against the world,

her heart sunk down.

3/16/2008

Joints

Take care, the love
in your life will not keep
bones from breaking.

Notice the stalk, how
bending preserves the delicate
swan-shaped flower;

here, in the joints
of my jaw, a hinge to hold
the secrets of my heart.

3/08/2008

Internal World

I have been gone
awhile. As if life
had lost its voice

or more seriously,
heard itself
for the first time

and fallen, shamefully
quiet. What has been
said before can only

be said again, even song
with some diversity, like water
is re-arrangement afterall.

It begins like this:
astonishment. The texture
of grass, the blazing color

profusely bleeding from rims
of sky, rolling seas whose thunder
is a heart split open, rushing

towards an isolated beach,
the nightgull piercing through
the sludge of darkness. Then,

as eyes and ears are filled
with violence, awe becomes
a hammer tapping on the skull;

its nail securely fixing
what was found to what is lost,
that which gave us joy

to this internal silence.