She Thinks of You While Cooking

She Thinks of You While Cooking

It’s the crescent of the body,

a relief, the way to yield

across the kitchen table,

the way body becomes

vulnerable, soft indentions into wood.

With our reflexes, we become tasteless

in all our desires in the wait;

she finds you in the fragrance,

and creates a marriage—

the lemon, oil, and the pepper.

This is the nature of all fruit,

The offering, the submission of their only flowers,

an exotic display, a culinary play

narrated daily by the heavens.

The Position of My Dreams

There’s geography in my dreams,

Where ribbons recoil and poetry joins

Our discussions, bookmarked…

Like the body that remembers,

Or the navigation between us, where

I sit hundreds of miles to the north.

What We Choose to See

Your fires start with the sound of the axe splitting wood in the garage.  Only a man who’s in love with me would build me a fire.  I admire your wintered masculinity, the leather gloves you wear as you carry the bundles of split wood into the house, the focus of fire pressed deep into your eyes, the scent of cold ash that escapes from the open glass door of the wood stove, and the splinters that stick like lint to your sweatshirt.  With every fire, you kneel before the wood stove with your back to me: I see the backside of prayer.  

Childhood Light

The beauty of the mountain evolves with each season and impregnates my mind.  It becomes an ever-growing presence, dovetailing its wild and mystic manner with life on Glen Echo Road.  Shades of green, amber, and sunflower yellow sporadically slip off the mountain and into the paintings I create in my room.  There is always something for me to see, I just need to look for it.  And I find, regardless of the seasons, that love and loss is simultaneously cradled, almost as if they rely on each other for their existence.  There is no way to separate them from one another.  I scribble the day’s event in my diary.  Love opens up, always knowing the right words.  I watch a golden globe for a sun sink in the backdrop outside my bedroom.  The moonbeams come out early in the summer.  We’ve tried to catch them outside our house before…standing there with empty jars and lids, our arms swinging together, crashing like cymbals.  How long will the light live?

Love Travels

Love Travels

I recently read, “If you dismiss your heart, you will end dismissing theirs.” The more I thought about this statement, the more I stumbled over it. Yes, it true…we’re only capable of receiving love to the extent we are able to give it. Simple, but profound. Is it a case of where the laws of attraction become validated? Perhaps, but it could be a bit more complex and involve the basic components like, trust, or hope. On the other hand, it could be a result of more definitive circumstances, such as loss, growth, and finally allowing yourself to reach a state of unsurpassable vulnerability that the risks (and the true nature of trust) are completely dismissed, and you become blindsided in the act of absolute living. But are we capable of surrendering to a continual vulnerability? Does it work if forced?

Being vulnerable requires a total eclipse of submission. It’s another level in the semi-state of unconsciousness, and perhaps even leans towards the edge of insanity, a type of madness where love has a chance, a real chance to bloom, and whereas the conditions present themselves where the seedlings of desire can finally take root. So, if you’re denying yourself love—simply through the act of “dismissing your heart,” then, are you in an essence, denying your existence? I believe so.

In the poem, “Consort of Viols,” by Kathleen Raine, she says in the second stanza:

Your life my death

Weeps in the night

Your freedom bound

To me, though bound still free

To leave my tomb

It’s as if she’s already recognizes that she’s unable to reach the “freedom” of the other, perhaps the one she loves is but a prisoner, and possibly a prisoner of her own heart. I can understand that, but I also know what it's like to love from afar--and I wonder, can love travel that far?

Risk

For the ones that risk to feel or share their stories, energy and dimension is possible.


~ ~ ~ 
I wrote this weekend on a train journey. I watched the Central Valley turn from scrub to the beginning of the Bay Area. I watched the light surrender, falling into itself, becoming shards of gray sky. The fog loomed in the distance like an old friend, a reminder of what has happened, and what is about to come. 


In my departure, memories pressed themselves against my heart. I've been here before. My future became hypnotized; my mind lengthened, and I wept as I watched the landscape move in reverse, my eyes stretched to see the last of your face.