Penumbral Garments
You turn your blonde head away from me
where I can still see the shadow on your cheek
My naked eye is always looking for your tender skin under all of those garments made in the east
the search for you is never tiresome as the loss we turn away from
or as weary as this pretending that you don’t have a dark side
the coffee is lukewarm before it gets to my mouth
the taste buds on the back of my tongue say nothing
not “delicious” not “gross”
the habit of the french press and coffee beans
are overlooked just as the habit of biting one’s nails
but the sweat when I lick it from my palm still has flavor
i think it is because i am paying attention
death is at the doorstep of my friends’ homes, soon their fathers will be bones,
their mothers, roses over the clover
but driving through the country on a sunny day, I think we are children picking blackberries from the vines with our loved ones
we don’t remember the briars are there
so we smile as the juice drips from our chin.
i kept thinking of last night:
a small and open cage
upside down and empty
a heart captive inside of a bird
fluttering
breaking its wings
against its own reflection in the window
feathers everywhere
Always I am a tiger inside,
running through the golden grasses
up the acacia tree
up to the blue and bird wing wind
But I look like a still life tiger
not moving my sleek grace muscles
toward the great green sea
toward the great green as green
I look like a tiger in the city
wrapped in a fur coat too tight
burning hot and spewing city water
lukewarm city dead water
And I see from the tops of that citys towers
gold patches of home
And I see from the tops of towers
a cold spring river cutting through
the city to find me
Today my eyes are a lake and the reflection is the overcast day where trees are hidden behind the green turning brown lowness of sleeping fish lower than lukewarm rain and voices of namelesss birds
I remember you aren’t here now and because you aren’t here maybe there is no lake at all to dip into and swim naked in our sameness like stars falling through the sleep seeking sky
Today your shadow walked by and I could see it in this water just the way you would see a bat passing in the darkness after it has already flown away with the bug that hovered above you in its throat
You were here like everything else was here and just like all of those things you’ve become a rippled edge of murk and light moving away from the center of a skipping stone thrown from a child’s hand
You were the center of my eye once but the child let go just to watch the water ripple
The unmoving grasshopper on the edge of the weathered and soft shouldered road is as big as a raven’s head. No one is there to see him watching me drive past at thirty miles an hour.
The last day of summer lives on the edge of the trees, on the edges of the birds nests, on the soft shoulders of every country road in Georgia, ready to fall like wheat. Nothing is moving forward or backward and no one is singing with an arm hanging from a car window. Nothing is waving summer from its ledge.
Not even me. All I can feel is how I am dry grass still standing after all the fields have been harvested into bales. Dry grass tied to the earth like a city built for no one but insects to inhabit or dwell.
But it is just a moment isn’t it, a passing day where the sun doesn’t dance like light but directs a hollow glare like a scorching judgment over the fields, over the edges of every mile of the relentless journey.
In the rearview mirror I see an old car approaching and still that grasshopper large as a raven’s head and unmoving.
I drove ten hours toward the gravity of mountains
Away from the withdrawing bay and on the other side
of the Cape the sea’s constant worry-beads whirled
In the many-fingered tide. I was home and a long way
From it. I was twenty trash bags tightened one at a time
With old things, stuffed with the past in a dark garage.
I was inert explosive. I was upright. My father’s lips
And eyelids affixed shut, his hands folded, all horizon.
Modest shadow details of sunset on a strange beach.
I was home and alongside the creek I was alongside
When my father spelled out the last word he said to me:
“Yes.” The creekbed’s brushed knuckles just below
The surface of running thought, watered down mountain
wisdom. Summer drifted like a jellyfish. A creekbed
Mumbling yes endlessly. A cloud over a hospital wing.
Ritual shawl over a…
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To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
by Mary Oliver
1.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say–behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings of this gritty earth gift.
2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.
4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.
And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same or we change.
Congratulations if you have changed.
6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?
And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—
what would do for you?
7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements, though with difficulty
I mean the ones that are thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the ush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world
The world is over me
Not the glazed hills that sit across the river
In the summer when fishing is good
But the sirens on their way to a fatal accident on a dead end street
Heart palpitations and uncertainty are clouds we cannot see our way through
We blame it on too much coffee, not enough rest but it is the world, it is our neighbor we cannot trust
The world is over me like a black bag made large enough for the dead leaves of a city’s lawn
The blue things that come with thoughts of oceans and skies over the Rockies are darkened and without waves or wild animals
Death tolls from fires and earthquakes rise insurmountable against Walls and false democracies
A sign in my house is painted with flowers and it says Be Still, as if being still will get the world off the ground again
Will turn back my sheets for me
Will correct the wrongs I’ve done, that you, a stranger I have never seen before have done
The world is a January with no warm days or compassion or arms for loving
I’ve hated January my whole life for her brutal strength revealing my weakness but she is a truth teller
She is a a hand covering the lies we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night
Beneath the fireworks
On a dark windowsill a bird
With no intentions chirping
Like a clavary marching
Without a purpose but marching
Because it is a calvary follows
Command because it follows orders
The bird chirping sings because it was born
To make the sounds that travel through darkened windowsills beneath fireworks on the last night of a blackened year or the first night of a better one
Jessamayann 