At the Turtle Hospital

Great maimed beasts swim listing in circles,

weights glued lopsided to shells like rippled sand,

drawing them down toward lost

unreachable depths.

Rescue a turtle drifting at sea

and you earn the right to name it, like Adam,

though its true name be always

unspeakable mystery.

If ever I saved a sea turtle floating,

I’d name it, mother, for you—

and you’d laugh,

you who taught me it’s all mystery, all holy,

fish and the leaping, moonlit illusion of fish,

sea wrack and driftweed,

dark tides and the body

bathed in luminescence,

the least, lost creature drifting toward home.

You, who after the stroke swam listing through time

on half-blind limbs, shut out

of the silted sea cave of memory

until at last you dove alone

into the deep welcoming ocean of home.

 EarthSpeak 7, Spring 2011

Poetry Plum

I wonder who it is that names the colors—

those six thousand eight hundred and thirty-nine

hues and tints and shades, the possibilities of paint?

Who wraps and ties these splinters of the spectrum

in tidy packages of words—alchemy, nankeen, tassel—

packages that split and spill their rainbow

contents all across the Earth—lacewing, picnic,

charisma, quest.     I want that job.

Can I be paid in colors—impetuous, carefree,

frolic, rain? Colors would lap around my ankles—

rapture, bubble, nautilus—and rise buzzing into air

as clear as gambol gold—bee and butter-up

and nuance vanishing among the trees at dusk,

the deepening shades of oakmoss, refuge, lark. 

Slowly all the syllables of color leave the sky—

moonraker, lantern light, inkwell, stone

and sleep comes murmuring

the full spectrum of imagine—

enigma, daydream, ponder, soar.

Witch Hazel

autumn

a handful of berries

opening

a blue glass bubble

of remembered light

burnishing

the trunks of birches

sorrow

the old crone’s shadow

on the white moth’s wing

dust motes

in a circle of light

the bubble

shrinking to a stone

inside the chest

stone

to build a fire ring

kindling

flame from ashes

before dusk

the scent

of apples—

bubbles rising

each a different mirror

to a changing face

hearthstone ashes

the price of wisdom  paid—

but

can witch hazel bloom

so deep in winter

firelight fades

the old crone follows

the glint

of drifting bubbles

through the dark wood

 Lynx XXVI: 1, February, 2011

Donors

The out-breath of trees

rides through seawater

on the beautiful

biconcavity of cells

traveling in their innocent

round back to my heart

until the needle prick

diverts them into the plastic

bag that dangles at my side

and silently fills

until the lever trips

to interrupt the flow—

which will continue

in the veins of someone

whose name I do not know

but who breathes

the same sweet air as I—

gift of anonymous donors,

the narrow veins,

the tiny silent mouths,

the myriad leaves.

          EarthSpeak 7, June 2011

The Fox

Listen

just outside the window

to the fox

whose single harsh bark

and running feet

connect the shuttered

windows of your house

to her own impenetrable burrow

under the root

in the wood

where she lives

her own incomparable life

knowing

how to travel in darkness

wait in silence

and seize

on tiny mysteries

in the grass.

Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems XIV:3, Spring 2011

Chalice

the cap

of the acorn

empty of seed

the bowl of the hills

where the doe lies down

two hands cupped

for a trickle of water

naked

the face of rain-

hollowed granite

the orioles’ nest

windblown

vessel of  eggs

the rachis of feathers

the hollow of bone

jack-in-the-pulpit

his sermon

the spathe

of the arum

empty of words

chambers

of nautilus

caverns at sea

auricle ventricle

salt pools of the heart

the house of the skull

its cellars of memory

the eye

in its orbit

this chalice of light

Lynx XXVI:2, June, 2011

Three Songs of the Body Eclectic

1.  Ossicles

Watching the fence swift—how the rough

gray bark of his skin vanishes into the rail

while blue flanks announce his readiness

to make more of his own inestimable kind,

I am gladdened by knowing

that inside the temple of my own ear

lie humming three ancient jawbones

of this small lizard’s kin—

the chain of ossicles, ancient migrants

through the planes and valleys of my skull,

three bones tiny enough to dance

all together on the head of a pin,

and dancing now to the eardrum’s rhythm,

transmitting to my grateful brain this feather of sound—

swift feet scritching on sundrenched cedar,

a message spoken in bone and token of kin.

2.  Limbs

Fish’s fin, hippo’s hoof

and my own hand stroking

the firm gray flesh of flippers

that hide, beneath their streamlined shape,

bone for bone the bones of my open arms—

humerus, ulna, radius, thickened and stout,

finger bones lengthened and cunningly webbed

for fluid flight, spin and sea spume

and the whole curve of Earth enclosed

in the leaping dolphin’s arc, the sea-silvered

song of a mind as different and as kin

to mine as the common curves and linkage of our bones.

3.  Mitochondria

How many of you, I wonder, sluice

down the drain each time I wash my hands—

you old invaders,  now tenderly wrapped

in my own cells’ membranes and powering

my liver, kidney, lungs, the hundred thousand

daily squeezings of my heart? Your nearest kin

are named for Proteus, shape-shifting god of the sea,

slippery prophet. Could he have foreseen, I wonder,

this—panther, cuttlefish, dragonfly, me—

blithe symbiotic satchels of bacteria

at home inside our cells and there empowering

even the cauliflower convolutions of my brain,

and all of us, dear sisters, from the eel-grass to the eel,

made of the same astounding particles of matter—

live dust from ravaged stars—from which flow out

this tenuous thread of thought,

the mad illusion of the separate self,

and the charged, sea-changing pulse of wonder.

Anatomy & Etymology 1:4, November 2011

The Face Painter

So you wake up in the morning

and it’s still raining

and your life is this puddle of gray

concrete and your feet are mired

in it all day long

until you see

waltzing down the street

to his own inner music

this skinny guy with a lopsided

topknot of dreadlocks

and bell-bottoms lettered in yellow paint

Peace Harmony Love Yourself

and he opens his satchel

and takes out a dozen cakes of paint

and a little pointy brush and begins

transforming his own face—

neon pink lines swooping outward

from the corners of his eyes,

a half-moon of silver dots on each cheek,

and somehow

the concrete around your feet

begins melting into a small rainbow—

a modest little rainbow tucked away

in one obscure corner of the cosmos—

but you can dance in its radiance

and suddenly

you want to take off your concrete

mask and paint the insides

of your eyelids with sunlight—

cerulean, lavender, emerald, rose.

Sometimes at Night

 

Sometimes at night the words

run through my mind

like sparkling water.

I cannot sleep but do not care

to stop the flow

even if no-one hears

except the trees

whose roots I hope

one day to enter

when my body and my words

are turned to ash and rise

through tiny channels in the wood

to write at last

with sunlight in the book

of many leaves.

Moss

Inside

the broken bottle’s throat

and the white glass jar

that once held some healing unguent—

moss has grown,

making a green cushion

for the roots of wintergreen

with its tiny red berries;

making

out of dappled light,

a faint rustle of air,

an accidental splash of rain,

and the pulse

of its own invincible cells

living and dying

in their ancient, nearly audible

and undoubtedly musical

rhythm

a thimbleful

of absolutely new

and nourishing

Earth. 

Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, XIV: 3, Spring 2011

Flying Blind

How exactly the wren’s body fits

the palm of my hand.  How smoothly

the fan of the wing opens and shuts,

the windward edge of each gray feather

laddered with brown and gold.

The bird’s head hangs limp,

her neck snapped in the collision

with a wall she never saw—

one eye is missing.  Yesterday

I touched a half-blind goldfinch

at the feeder, feasting on thistle seed

and unafraid. With side-set eyes,

a bird can see at once both crumb

and kestrel; the loss of an eye’s the loss

of half the world.  

Once a girl

sat in a green meadow

with an open book; a one-eyed

sparrow settled on her knee,

and stayed, cocking its head

and preening--and there settled

over the girl a sense of being

as solid, as rooted, and as trusted

as the limb of an oak

and therefore capable in turn

of trusting the unseen

half of things.

Sixty years on,

I see my life’s been less

like a tree

and more

like a half-blind sparrow

blundering through thickets.  

Which is why I gently place

the body of the wren

between the white oak roots,

the soft buff belly-down exposed

and the clenched, reptilian claws

extending toward the sky.

Pinesong: Awards 2011  (North Carolina Poetry Society)