And one from a contemporary master:

Life will break you. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth.
You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed or hurt or left or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an  apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.


-Louise Erdrich

And one from the master...


You left me, sweet, two legacies,-
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had he the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.



-Emily Dickinson

Lead

 Reflection is Eve's temptation

to clone knowledge, assume power

Cells divide to live forever, and

love was made the fuel for their quest

The two way street became the curse, at once

the snake's lure and condemning deceit 

The circle is the absolute perfection of parallels

abandoning  Eden for the pleasure of connection

The lead chiming the harmony of sparkle

is the mirror's poisonous prize

Light fare

The fire inspection is today
Saving the candy thought
for the afternoon pick-me-up treat-
Kyomi, this one is for you!

Deliverance

Memory bank is empty
All the notes repaid,
forgiven or burnt

Fly little blue bird
for joy, and not hope

was your prize

Consolation

Heraclitus said "No man steps into the same river twice, for neither himself nor the river are ever the same again"

The fossilized leaf lays in pieces
on the concrete floor,
prisoner no longer at least,
still bearing faintly the green
that once had been

She bends to hold it,
the size of a heart, shattered
like the spring ice storm
that broke that branch once before,
shivering, alone again

The touch unlocks the chamber
of the crossover, and knows the sin
waiting behind, prepared this time,
 the sole antidote to blindsiding love
is a sealed tomb of longing

Scarcity

It makes me cry when it can't even be thought of
and the touch is the Judas
holding the seeing glass

Wanting

Words unspoken, plenty of conversations about anything else
bodies guarded, much effort to resist the maddening pull
Doubts mushroom, as ever so deepening the knowing of what it is
that delays the partings, blooms into sharing stories,
paints the canvas stroke by stroke, fixes the sadness in our gaze
 That cord that stretches between us is the executioner's noose,
cutting off air supply, the un forgiven trespasses is the caving ground,
the wet blanket that smothers the flames, but not the fire
Only when we speak of un forbidden pleasures, we no longer need
the language of control, of discipline and punishment

Space in  between

You wake up from a dream, but just before
The final thought of letting go has arrived, just before it is announced
The jumping off the cliff, and the mere moments of flying
The setting off on the ocean of change, in the flimsiest raft of hope
The welling of attraction, before the naming of love

Is the space of purity, and pathos tamed
The stilled eternity in the eye of God

Retour a la case depart

Wilted

The dew evaporated this morning,
the colors darkened
The sheen dulling fast
from the withering flowers in my garden
Petals not boasting youth's perfection any more
 yet their fragrance deepens,
as if the understanding of overdue debts
and paying time's demands
layers scent notes with consolatory dimension

It is for them to take center stage now, the upstarts,
the impetuous darling buds of May,
waiting out one more sunset
before the dawn's blooming glory

The face is somber, almost sad, unsuited perhaps for a wedding picture.
 Her beauty narrating her kin's thousand stories.
The brow barely raised, as if with premonitional worry and stoicism, about what is ahead, the mountain of grief to scale.
The lips closed, nary a smile to share with the nuptials' participants.
The complexion unmarred by time or sin, virginal luminescence so readily read.
The unruly tumble of curls, a sign of her obstinate stubbornness.
And the wide forehead, exposed, strong, like her force and courageous resilience.

My mother, on her wedding day, 21 years old.

m OTHER

Manic winds are blowing again
lashing at the distance of us, that grew bigger
slicing the hopes of kind conversation
much less of understanding

Fear is the fire that obliterates
shelter that took years to built
that umbilical cord, invisible, still strangles
the decades of individuation mere sandcastles

in the blowing khamsin