Tag: poem

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Playing the Song

I can feel in my bones this moment 15 years ago, freshly delivered of my second tiny babe. That tender mama sits halfway between the age my daughter has become, and the age I am now. Oh time, beautiful and terrifying friend!

I’m aware of the world’s unraveling, and also: standing amongst five hundred robins flocking and singing along the Rio Grande; the way my breath merges with my patients’ breath when I check vital signs at the hospital and we merge for a moment; walking through the shifting light over the course of a day, light that is like a great ark I climb aboard, or a book whose only line reads, We will survive this season, we will be changed by it, we will change the world during it.

I am making a little book of collages as a visual arts practice, writing as wildly as I can as I compose my own version of Four Quartets which has me drawing from the deep well of female mystics, and also being inspired by the Divine Imagination by keeping my tiny toe stuck into that river.

A handful of the more photogenic books that fight for my attention these days–all so good. Annie’s book Singing Under Snow wins my favorite book of the winter award, as well as best collection of love poems to mothers, lovers, fungi, and the wild. I am not sure I have ever cried so much over a collection of poetry. It is one of those books that makes a poet want to renew their vows to poetry forever, just to continue the practice in order to see what unexpected wonder might come next, like a handful of chanterelles popping up when the conditions are just right.

Here is a poem from late fall I included in a little chapbook called Archive of Lives Left Behind . It was generously created when I participated in a local reading series called Floating Words.

Keep playing your song, friends. Underline what you love. Be well.

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Bones Break Us Open

Just back from visiting a friend on Bone Mesa on the far side of Colorado, where snowy peaks towered over the mesa. Deer grazed on grass shoots at twilight. Blossoms from wild apricots blew along the dirt road like fallen stars. 

A poem practically wrote itself, in that moment. Except I didn’t write it down, but rather wandered around inside it, as happens when we realize we are actually walking through a poem, we are the poem, that the mesa is really bones, and the bones are poems.

My friend served lentil stew and fresh bread. A fire roared in the woodstove. The night grew transparent as a veil that the wind can lift, revealing that we aren’t in this world at all, but in the place where imagination lives, where we are fed on earth and stones. Where bones speak.

Bones more or less open Far Country, and in an invocation that may or may not have to do with every word that follows, we are reminded in the first poem that it is “Better to ask / what these bones will hatch, what lies, / curled, inside the shells of the dead.”

In “Blood City,” the ground we walk upon cobbled in fossilized snakes curled into balls, which turn to eggs. I can’t say that I always understand what the images that enter my poems say, but I trust and obey them. My friend and fellow writer Jennifer Ferraro read those lines as a call to perceive more deeply, to open our field of awareness to the memory of the land.

When I check my copy of The Book of Symbols, it says that bones suggest that something “hard” within psychic life endures beyond bodily death, and that a structure of ancestral experience supports us. In the Orthodox Church, the sweet smelling bones of saints are venerated as holy relics that bless us. Bones as bearers of life. Benediction and medicine.

Bones accompany the poet/speaker/me throughout the book–as talisman and key. There is an underworld called The Boneyard to be navigated. And in every poem, there is an invisible skeleton holding it up that is not, entirely, of this world.

The earth is a realm of bone on bone, in all the ways that can be understood. It can hurt to be here, magnificent as the scenery might be. Throughout the struggles, bones remind us that something unseen supports us, lies hidden within the known world, bears new life within what is buried.