green-striped melons (a poem)

Green-Striped Melons -Jane Hirshfield

They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.

Some people
are like this as well—
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.

An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.

i'm loving this poem

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears. The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed. Is it safer to be gray and numb? What turns hard becomes rigid and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain. Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel, dares you to become the wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

a poem for the full moon

These Hips (For the Full Moon)
-Adele Brown

They carry babies to term,
cradling them beneath ilium crest
until full moons rise over tide waters,
stretch long white fingers over the dark
horizon, and pull.

Lunar gravity bears down
and spreads the bones apart.
Pelvic plates press clean
against layers of glycerol flesh.
They stretch skin
wider than the wings of
a Rorschach butterfly,
leaving offspring behind
stained in dark reds and blues
of old blood and afterbirth.

As a river mouth
makes a bed of its own sand and silt,
these hips find softness in their own refuse.

a hand -jane hirshfield

A Hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

Prayer -galway kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

so much depends...

So many big things depend on such small things. Today i feel like im stacking dominoes, like so much is hinged on so little...


The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Hope and Love -Jane Hirshfield

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one--
not knowing even
that was what he did--
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

2 things that are lightening my soul

The Art of Drowning -Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

Details in the Fabric -Jason Mraz click here for the youtube video
Calm down, deep breaths
And get yourself dressed
Instead of running around
And pulling on your threads
And breaking yourself up

If it's a broken part, replace it
If it's a broken arm, then brace it
If it's a broken heart, then face it

And hold your own, know your name
And go your own way.
Hold your own, know your name
And go your own way.
And everything, will be fine.

Hang on, help is on the way
And stay strong, I'm doing everything

Hold your own, know your name
And go your own way.
Hold your own, know your name
And go your own way.
And everything,
Everything will be fine
Everything...

All the details in the fabric
All the things that make you panic
All your thoughts, results of static cling
All the things that make you blow
Ain't no reason, go on and scream
If you're shocked,
It's just the fault of faulty manufacturing
Everything, will be fine
Everything, in time
Everything...

Hold your own, know your name
And go your own way.
Hold your own,
(all the details in the fabric)
Know your name
(all the things that make you panic)
And go your own way
(all your thoughts, results of static cling)

Hold your own,
(all the details in the fabric)
Know your name
(all the things that make you panic)
And go your own way
(is it mother nature's sewing machine?)

Hold your own,
(all the things that make you blow)
Know your name
(ain't no reason, go on and scream)
And go your own way.
(if you're shocked, it's just the fault of faulty manufacturing)

Everything, will be fine
Everything, in no time at all
Hearts will hold...

Birds Again

sometimes i refer to our babies as little birds. this poem makes me think of all the babies inside of me just waiting to take wing. it gives me hope and makes me a little sad at the same time...


A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.
(jim harrison)

medley

 but wherever you are you are likely to have this
idea of what it means for spring to come      and you know how
it will come and when it will come      because in your
expectations it always comes      in a neat order the way
  seasons do      because there are exactly four of them and
they are very nicely named and there are exactly three months
in them and they very obediently follow the astronomical year
-spring love noise and all (david antin)

It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.
-Toward the Winter Solstice (timothy steele)

at night my hand can touch your feathers
and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,
you who have made bright things from shadows,
you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.
-Birds Appearing in a Dream (michael collier)

Fragments for the End of the Year

On average, odd years have been the best for me.

I’m at a point where everyone I meet looks like a version
of someone I already know.

Without fail, fall makes me nostalgic for things I’ve never experienced.

The sky is molting. I don’t know
if this is global warming or if the atmosphere is reconfiguring
itself to accommodate all the new bright suffering.

I am struck by an overwhelming need to go to Iceland.

Despite all awful variables, we are still full of ideas
as possible as unsexed fruit.

I was terribly sorry to be the one to explain to the first graders
the connection between the sunset and pollution.

On Venus you and I are not even a year old.

Then there were two skies.
The one we fly through and the one
we bury ourselves in.

I appreciate my wide beveled spatula which fulfills
the moment I realized I would grow up and own such things.

I am glad I do not yet want sexy bathroom accessories.
Such things.

In the story we were together every time.

On his wedding day, the stone in his chest
not fully melted but enough.

Sometimes I feel like there are birds flying out of me.

by Jennifer K. Sweeney

How to Make a Game of Waiting

This is a capsized game
and there is no display of aces at the end.
Buy a rare and expensive plant that never blooms.
Rearrange your books by the color of the spines.
Bury all your keys that don’t unlock anything.
These are not rules but merely suggestions
of what has worked for others.
For instance, the man who painted landscapes
on his daughter’s sheet music.
Put a big rock on your desk.
Do not name the rock.
Take the numbers off the clock and mail them
to your creditors.
Stitch the hours onto a kite.
Every night, ask until you can hear what replies.

-Jennifer Sweeney