Burnt orange taffeta, crisp and shining in the low lamplight
of a room that some say is small
but that seems to me to be spaciousness itself
this morning when winter bears down
on my eyelids, my stomach, compressing the light 
to this one point, this room, this tulip
with its roaring waves of flame, somehow serene,
somehow beyond naming,
the pointer to the space 
beyond and within space, the vastness in me, in you,
​when all the world obsesses with endings.

Courage, she says to herself in a giddy voice:
to look clear-eyed into the darkness 
and see the dragonflies fluttering low over the water in pairs,
wings shining of satin because they dare the wind
in the last rays of the summer sun before autumn narrows the aperture.

Loneliness is the precondition, the steadfast friend that says, "Stand up:" 
to plant and to harvest, to reach for the sunflower that wills the ink to the page
where the tapestry of hours and ages weaves
faith into words that become the way, the path to the core of the story
where the blinding brightness all poets have ever sought resides.

On the moors of the mind it is frightening,
The dankness smells of death, the fragile neck of life about to be broken,
the sunflower taken down so one cannot but obsess over the horror of it.
The courage of all things is the tragedy of knowing
borne across the glistening water, the hymn of endings sung to the skies.

He waved at me from a distance,
faceless.
Only the hand said goodbye:
"I have lived and loved this earth.
Now I return to the Mother."

Through the years, we smiled at the sky
over coffee in the sun,
a pack of biscuits split open
so the foil inside gleamed in the rays.

In our sweet-soaked white uniforms
zipped down to the mid-riff,
we laughed at the swelling of our fingers,
reveled in our tireless winged comrades. 

Sometimes I think all I know about joy
Comes from that birthing table.
Take some with you, you hear,
Leave the tools with me.

Lean on the Mother
when you don't know where to turn.
It's alright if you are small again,
Look what you have left behind.

On a form of goodbye to a devoted, beloved beekeeper, my teacher of nearly twenty years, provoked by the sight of these sunflowers on my farm.

Planted only for your beauty,
for the imperceptible way you follow the sun,
and keep yourself trained on life and its source,
unafraid to become the warm rays,
statuesque and unabashed by the murmurings below
that you have taken too great a risk
in refusing to be anything but yourself.

On the opening of the sunflowers on my island this August.
​

It was only a moment
when, at the water’s edge
the swallow hopped through the water reeds
over the fallen, the golden, from which it would make its nest;
only a crack in time,
when the garlands draped over the stone terraces
were loudly buzzing metropolises,
trading hubs for gleaming wings and quick appendages.
 
It was only a hollow in cruelty
when the swan with the torn leg grazed in the bay
and shook the water from its impossibly graceful neck
like nature’s Miles Davis or the doyenne of the dance;
only a hint of the passing scent
of cool white jasmine in the shade
or the sweet claws of honeysuckle in the blazing sun
or lavender’s insistence upon marrying the tangerine rose.
 
It was only a second in the universe or the universe in a second
when I saw the unsettling familiarity in the deer’s brown eye,
or the forest’s silhouette in the midnight sun
or the view from the lake’s surface under the gull’s cry.
 
A reflection on Midsummer’s Eve.
​

You cannot predict the world
Or a day or an hour or a nanosecond,
Or where the bird will fly or the seed will fall,
Or exactly how fast the butterfly’s wing will flutter,
Or what color the honey will be this year,
Or whether there will be rain tomorrow.
 
The ego craves a pattern,
To know beforehand, how things will revolve around itself,
Even evolve around itself,
But that is a dead end for delusionals and dictators.
 
Not knowing is alive,
Creeping, gnawing, decaying, growing, remolding, metamorphosing
Becoming, in every conceivable unit of time, not itself,
Pressing on and around like waves or quicksand or water in cracks between fingers,
Or air or clouds, not there as soon as you are in them,
Or touching a horizon and discovering the marvel of its disintegration.

Image below: Reflection of birch and sky on the still lake off my island.

Away, troubled time,
Rage of storms roiling
 
Melt, winter armor,
So I may touch my skin
 
Sink, grey clouds,
Into memory’s deep waters
 
Recede, ice, from my senses
So light may flow within.

On the island, Good Friday 2024.

Flags billow and fade
Into one another,
Colors bleeding
In the winds of war.
 
In peacetime, they hang limp,
Separate,
The colors keeping to themselves
In the dense silence before a new fight.
 
A craggy, ancient language
Bursts from a man’s chest,
Haunting in its tenderness
From which the angry passion of belonging rises.
 
Mothers’ warm tears trickle through time
And the dank crevices of stone walls
Into the tranquil sea,
The final resting place of children.

Upon driving past a row of flags billowing in the wind in the Pyrénées-Orientale.

There is forgiveness in the mountains,
In the craggy face
Where the ice of a broken heart melts
With each new spring,
Trickling through, down, down
Into the meadow
So the donkeys may graze,
bear food to the market,
and the toothless vendor may smile.

On walking in the foothills of Le Canigou at the outset of 2024.