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february 15th
the truth is i don’t really like light comedies where love is sticky caramel. i’d rather not be swept off my feet or transported to a tropical destination. i think roses lack character. the truth is i love the lemongrass on the side of the road. i would prefer a walk to a movie. i have a destination and i’m taking myself there word by word in the dark.
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trouble
enough, jesus. go away. i’m just going to forget my prayers and sleep. call me next week, i have time on tuesday. maybe. maybe i’ll delete your messages, ignore your texts, trash your emails. you make trouble and you argue with the cops. you bring all kinds of people to breakfast, you never get the bill. you lead me down wet stairs and i fall. i have gravel in my knees. i’m tired and terrified of your next suggestion. yet then i’m remembering that overpass and how you dragged me back, your persistence lifting me from the bathroom floor. you make me want the morning. am i really ready to kick you out? i’m not sure. let’s talk tomorrow. tonight be quiet. sit here and put your hand over my hand. let me fall asleep and undream everything. it’s always friday night
thanks to tom your car breaks down, the pipe busts, your kid’s temples grow too hot, your keys get locked in the car, your girl gets arrested, and it’s always friday night. the office is closed. go to the emergency room, go to the after hours extra dollars specialist, wait til monday. we have no further information. it’s friday night and you’re on a cold corner with no coat and no cigarettes. the music from the bar blasts. walk away. jesus is not in a shot glass, or at the bottom of that green bottle. here: your sister on the phone with a number for someone who might know, the locksmith arriving on time, a finally sleeping child, water from the tap. now a neighbor with five bucks, and an extra marlboro red, and matches. for mary oliver
it was not long after he died. i was alone in his trailer packing boxes, the light that afternoon was bleach on my hands. i had only been in the place once. he had been embarrassed, in the end, to have ended up alone, in a trailer park, with a silver pickup and a dwindling check. he didn’t want me there. and then on the bulletin board above his desk, a many times folded printout of your poem. he must have kept it in his pocket. wild geese. the heading home in it, the love in it. he was not always good, my father, and i did not always love him. but we both loved that poem, and the world it imagined. i threw the poem away but it sneaks up behind me some mornings when the light is particularly hot and dust dances on my desk. “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” i am turning toward the possibility that this is true. a prayer in real time
there are about a million things to speak against: from the definition of ownership to the desecration of the packed dirt, from the definition of borders to the desecration of my own body. words do not erase the ink on the judge’s papers, the surveyor’s lines, the letter stamped on your birth certificate. words do not breathe life back into the ones we love, or back into the days we let slip past. but these words are here to pick the lock, to lift the window. please climb out. i’m coming too. this is a prayer in real time: listen to it in your coughing engine, in that radio commercial, in the hold music. this is a prayer that drowns out your boss and the bill collector and the preacher who sells hell. the world is more than dust and sinew. i call you holy, i call us holy, i call it all holy. new year reflection two
(with thanks to Sam, and June) i wasn’t in a very good mood: thinking about family, thinking about all the work that didn’t get done, and the ridiculous pile of wrapping paper. then you laid your head on my lap curls jumping in all directions. you wanted me to look at your sketchbook. i was not prepared for your insistence that i look: really look. i didn’t, mostly. but tonight those teals and pinks are rioting my mind. you are eleven. all the possibilities are out there. you open their wire bound spine and hand them to me. i am officially over forty. all the possibilities are out there. orange and sienna and shocking green. something taking shape. i will dream loudly and in color. turning
when you open the story of your hurt you might be left alone chewing the words like sand. it’s ok. one day you will wake up and the sand will have dissolved like bread. you will sing the light back into the world. still waiting
(advent poem two) i bought all the presents careening through target three times cringing at each total. i ordered with expedited shipping. i argued with my love about what qualifies as ridiculous. i sped across town in the dark to get that one last thing. i’ve been pondering how to get my family, with their flip flops and tangled curls, into decent clothes for church. i hate christmas. i wish i could just take jesus out for beers next week, call mary on sunday. or hell, i’ll host a party with stars in the piñata, i make excellent punch. i am waiting to feel the spirit, again, the one who got lost in aisle nineteen as i was yelling god dammit because the man in the puff coat just got the last hundred dollar crock pot. and then she snuck up on me this morning at five a.m. while sleep was still stuck under my eyelids. i remembered in a few days i am going to tell a sanctuary full of children the improbable story, that i actually believe, of mary in the cold dark birthing jesus, and the light that finds the deepest cracks. i am waiting to watch their widening eyes behind the tangled curls as they fidget in scratchy dresses and too tight suit jackets. i am waiting for the opening of dangerous possibilities. teaching writing
every day i stand outside a different door and breathe. today, maybe i will make no mistakes. likely not. likely today i will misplace the file, forget her name, miss that planning meeting. today i will stare across the table after you’ve spoken your deepest hurt and all i will be able to say is thank you. thank you for opening up your mistakes so that we can see the possibility in them. thank you for damning the violence done to you without damning yourself. thank you for tossing that memory into the circle so we all taste your mother’s tamales, or cup of noodles with hot sauce, or burnt pancakes. i cry a lot. more and more as i get older i can’t contain the truth, it pours out of me saline on the page. i hold their notebooks away from my body. there are dangerous phrases in here, they could overthrow something. i sneak them out in my arms. later i put on an apron and an old shirt. working in the dirty sink i break the words so the pain comes out. advent
i am in love with the empty church an hour before the service while the chairs are still stacked and the coffee just begins to bubble. the altar is covered in a blue cloth, the spotlight is off. jesus has breath held, hoping the guests arrive. we row the chairs, stack the hymnals. they begin to enter, pressed pants and sparkly shoes. good morning. a small hand in a larger, rougher one. a cane scrapes the floor. a gorgeous hat, a wide smile. these weeks before christmas we say we are waiting for the light to be born into the world, for the first cry, the infant sigh. but mornings like this I think the light is already here. we are waiting til we’re ready to open our eyes. |
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February 2019
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