Hinge

I get up to let the dog out
And a feeling of balance and
Insight just settles for
A brief moment and my
Body lifts away from terra firma,
Snow-covered and slippery,
As I watch some snowflakes
Sift down in the lumens of the
Porch light
Pinwheeling, slow and lovely,
And I turn back into space lit
By candles, waiting for him to
Wake from a rough day, each
Brand new, and
We go on.

An old composition last night

So I have need of

Darkness and the wind, it

Comes up, and

At first I want

To not like it,

I ask or 

Rather wonder

If I’m looking in all the wrong

Interstitials 

Being, thinking

Never to be young or old,

Just discard the context, what’s 

Important is that 

I devise solutions, the work-arounds to the 

Demands of crisis

And the more I go

Into those worlds, the more 

I seem to fly,

Noting that while 

My feet are on terra firma,

Balanced and so forth, 

I tip as I reach into determination, up 

To and in to some unfamiliar places 

Truest to say, all I’ve thought about

For some weeks now is light,

And I’ve hacked down trees,

Run from forest, gasped at those 

Beautiful sentries crowding out the sky.

I am looking for the light, but 

My prairie senses

About all of this mean

Absolutely nothing, 

Because if I can’t find the light,

That right light,

No opening spaces matter. 

I suppose it’s time to remove

The soft-needled, unadorned 

Christmas evergreen, hosting strings

Of small white lights, that’s all, so

Time to take it 

To the newly-building berm between

Our place and Bobby’s fields,

A way to signal ourselves into this earth, 

Compost into whatever comes and 

Likely as not in spring 

Bobby’s fields will continue to bloom

In long western light, the one 

Beginning as a bathing sun

Waking me this last morning

I was asleep and far away in to

The death of a Grand

Mother

As I turned to settle,

Unearthly light, pink crimson blinding

Sunrise glowing light

Burned up from Cayuga on my east, and 

Slipped along, upgrading from the 

Water’s lake-banks to the fields, then 

Slipping as the morning glazed

Old fascia windows.

It lasted only seconds

All things jumble now

And I sleep and move,

According

To the

Light, and finding 

That without the dark,

Nothing means one thing. 

Then wind. 

Steadying into New Year

The weeping and fear 

Dissipate, 

And the tethers of 

My own life

Grow shorter, longer, shortening, 

In some concert with what is, and 

I think to myself that  

In this life 

Crisis hits hard as a boxer

In the ring, 

I see, though I might not wish to, that 

I am in a long-haul fight towards 

Unknown and 

My mojo hammers on me, 

Buck up, you. 

T told me, in an elemental

Wisdom, that P must be 

Who he is, and that filled my heart,

Essence of passage and struggle,

Real as stars, and there was clarity

And then, like a selfish dreamer,

The light of this new year and my

Impulses woke me

And I said to myself, 

In angst and near-delirium 

You are who you are as well, woman,

You want the fire, you want the heat, and 

You too want the

Light 

Moving Through This

I was thinking about lavender 

How depending on the light

It deepens violet 

Into fields where I have been 

But often can’t

Quite adequately recall, 

The pictures in my mind’s eye bracing

Or is it bracketing  

One grove after another, 

One grove into another, 

Other times the color shifting 

Subtle as it 

Fades, as it

Pulls my eye to 

Horizon. 

Let what seeks you find you 

I think about that 

I begin to understand it.

Let all seeking find you;  

Paths with newness 

Never contemplated, 

Pushed away, haze obscuring 

Such connections always 

Waiting, although 

I fear to look to

Find them. They may find me.

i don’t do this 

I say to myself 

Slow down, you move too fast

Now, breathe, and wait, 

It feels decision but therein, 

Some needed, wanted  

Worlds exist in perfect tension. 

Anyway

In the night black house

The dog snores

Into the next, and beside me 

He too snores, sleeping deeply now 

Perhaps even healing into 

This. 

And this. 

I close my eyes, 

The colors of

My sleep arrive, scented

And wafting

Across the Pyrenees, winds swaddling

Memories, the young girl on her bicycle, 

In Isere

Not knowing then how 

She’d be pedaling now 

Across the fields of France. 

December 15 

Homesick in So Many Ways

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WyHlchGBD2E

In a New December

In deepest trust

Therein the tacit blooms, we 

Make our deals,

We do what we want, need to do,

The coming quarter seems, so far,

To be all right, and we 

Find, we are finding that 

Path that looks like love. 

Breathing Room

A gift like no other

Another kind of making space 

For clarity,

Like light, it seeks 

All of its rays, answering 

Such questions as

Why not?

The fields along I-90

Upstate glowed gold,

A pale ethereal, 

Vast in formative, familiar vista, 

But underground sublime

In geologies of ice and lakes

And another time along the 

Lake, cast up from eastern

Morning storm, a grey pearl 

Pink thrown to the sky from water. 

What I needed, what was 

Answered, a way to keep

On moving,

Whole.