When you long to let someone know just how bright, how luminous they are … especially when they don’t yet know their own radiance … This poem, written for my daughter Vivian, is the sixth track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world […]
Curled up beside me,my girl studies the laughof a man she admiresand the more he guffawsthe more she guffaws,which of course,makes me laugh, too,and soon the eveningis a riotous bouquetof giggles. I gatherthe sound in me like a fieldof wildflowers, a pleasurethat reseeds itself,lovely as lupine, commonas blue flax that thrivesalong even the busiest road.
There, beside the willows,two white-spotted fawnsclumsily stepped throughtall summer grass,and what rose in methen was such intimateprayer—not the kindwhere I praise or makerequests, but the kindwhere my whole beingbecomes a deep green field,wide enough anythingcan enter, not onlythe fawns but the mountain lion,not only the willowsbut the ones I call weeds,and all that is asked […]
Sometimes, when picking flowersfrom the garden, I choose notthe showiest blooms, but the snapdragonwith the crooked stem or the pink cosmoswith the slenderest petals or the delphiniumstalk with the fewest blue flowers. Aren’t you lovely,I say to them as I snip at their stemsand arrange them in a vase, placing themin the center of my […]
for Vivian on her 17th birthday I don’t understand how it is that loving youasks both everything and nothing from me.Every day since your birth I have nourishedthis love with time, with touch, with words,and loved you the way I was loved—knowingthere is nothing you could do or be thatcould make me stop loving you. […]
Listen to the rhythm of things that never die. —Mark Nepo, “For a Long Time” Worried about what was to come, I went to the riverand listened to the constant song as water met stone,met log, met wall. The endless white hush of it.Song of building up banks. Song of tearing them down.Song of surrender to […]
No, I didn’t just fall,I flew. Stubbed my toewhile walking downthe knobby, steep path,and I flew, did a somersault,too, and my hat and glassesfell off, and I landed, sprawling,somewhat upside downon the trail and whatis a human to dobut leap up and be gratefulall those big, heavy stonesare in the path and notin my pockets, […]
One more week till the album release of RISKING LOVE! It’s so fun to send out these cinepoems of our tracks each week, featuring poems by me, music by the wonderful Steve Law, and video by the amazing Holiday Mathis. Please join us for our release party next Friday, July 18 on zoom. Free. 3 […]
its early morning thunderstormthat wakes you with a clap,this world of early morning rainand dusty midday paths,this world with plumes of wildfirethat fill the air by evening,the valleys thickly choked with smoke,the mountains disappearing.You belong to this world of tinder.Sometimes it hurts to belong.You belong to the burning world of fearas much as the world […]