Sometimes I’m just
Calling
For the kind and sweet
Of you.
After the eclipse,
When my hair turned white
(and I’ll be writing about that later),
Now comes here Israel Iran
Biden Harris Austin, and
The tight circle of
Situation
This, and have at what/who/where
This is,
has been coming for decades,
Forever and ever amen,
Ancient
Mideast war that somehow
Has to happen now
Or the new world war will have
Finally come soon
Collision
Eclipse
Mids
Easts
Clouds, canopy and air,
Earth moves,
Quake and water,
These are the lights, they point to
real days beyond the flood
Drones
Missiles’ bombs
Fossils
To fossil fools
Revolution of
The Anthropocene
Arrives,
Rogue actors ascend
Though in our alert of senses
We know not who they are,
Nor yet how we respond.
Last night I dreamed
I lost my cellphone and my passport
And then, oh
I found after some
Ultimately futile
Contemplating
About what to do
That alas,
I’d also lost my driver’s license
And the billfold in which I carried it
And 800 dollars, and
But, and
Where, I woke to ask
Was I going?
In my dream,
After I knew I’d lost my passport
And my cell,
I was frantic:
Dad! Oh how can I even find you?
So I started
(In my dream)
To look through the cupboards
In my grandmother’s pantry
And just when I despaired,
I found I’d tucked my
Carryall,
My pocketbook—
The grey bag with lots of pockets—
Tucked it
Into the cupboard where
The china was,
That she wanted me to have
I found it
And so I woke to ask
Who am I?
Winter
Pondering if it is a truth, that I’m kind of isolated and getting to be an old woman up here, trying to make a difference, juggling integrity, weariness, love and all that bit. I sit looking out of my nighttime windows, and it’s the strangest outside I’ve seen in some time. The north is still snow-covered, though mud is everywhere the rest.
I realize I’m becoming used to green winter, though it does feel random still, and in my recall I think on snow pinwheels in May, early snow before Halloween one year, powdering an icy sprinkle. Seems a little frivolous, a frivolity I may need to think on a bit more.
It is 1-9-24
I wrote a poem a long time ago about green winter. I’ve been thinking about it for many moons. And ten years ago I sat to look into this kind of winter sky, wrapped as now into what just is, and later, in the shift in my interior wandering, I started to muse on my last quarter, and wrote about that too.
The arctic, though, in that poem I wrote maybe ten years ago, shivers now, still, and dissipates into another kind of moment, deepening into a whole again. There is breath and life in an arctic, and I breathe anew that breath. Part of me has to wonder if it’s about this last, a past, in the beautiful warp of time. Perhaps we take our leavings on a wild, wondrous cold slide navigating worlds, cosmos, and so forth, and so I ponder.
I didn’t take my hearing aids out tonight. I usually do. Oh wind-whipping beauty, oh the life pattering on my metal roof: rain? Sleet? Hail? Small messages from restive clouds, portending snow? I don’t know, and I could be afraid, and maybe I should. But I’m not, really. As I write, I think hmm. Derecho.
1-13-24
Sanctuary
Salvation
Approaching sleep I ponder these
Lovely words popping into my head
Beauty in silence and spaces…
So how old do you have to be
Before you can be
Just a little crazy
And no one will notice,
Except he notices
He does, and
Imagines what he
No longer sees
Except he
Does
What he thinks he sees,
Himself, is
What I think I see in
Myself.
Now here is a deep irony
Of confession:
A few days ago these words were
Gifted to me,
“I thought you were beautiful,” and
In that moment of connection
We were remembering a rafting trip
We took together on the Cheat
Friends, then
And in the long sighing
Of decades lost not knowing
That and
Turning to the solace of
I’d rather have what might have been
Than what was,
I’m not sure what to do
Some major contentment
Around me now
Gazing south,
Near west,
Up the road and across
The plain fields,
The Plains
Going to starch
Winter wheat sown
A light here and there
When they’ve gone home,
I fiddle with ours
Our lights of course,
But lights across the dark landscape
Enough to
Spark and flicker toward
The grazing forest,
Bobby’s farmlands,
Rural landscape nestled into
The curves of our long lakes
Small clusters of stars and diamonds, skies of
Families, maybe
Gone in the centuries,
Lifting souls
Mine and theirs
Up toward the
Hector Backbone,
Floating on lake dreams or
Settling maybe and
Breathing here and
Seeking balance, I
Sigh into
Sighing into
Sigh into this night.