her star saw her, with a candle in her hand

Here in this garden among the tomatoes are wheels within wheels. The guinea fowl are guard watching the perimeter of the yard. The planks of wood for building a tree house are an on-the-ground-house amidst circles of daisies. The tree is still a tree and the children take a photo of it, because of how they admire the branches. The smell of these round red cups, these tomatoes, these sweet waters, is a kind of heaven. I am flanked by the earth in the smell. But the sky. Row back in memory a week or two, hands raised into the blue unseen, seen, unseen. Reach back a few decades ago. Realizing that I am the sky. I am its ventriloquist. I speak and the sky takes shape. Laugh into the sky. Pull the sky into the wheel. Come home sky, come home sky.

theme: simple:

I guess a year has passed since I rendered anything written, here.

The children are growing. The children are snakes.

More lists then.

New house and old house still on sale.

80 something chickens. Feathers and straw.

Greenhouse and greens all winter.

Who owns this rain water?

Why do so many people in New Mexico run red lights?

Healing waters.

Hikes and flint.

Some arguments. Some long walks. Consideration.

Dance is freedom. The body is right, always.

Dear silence: having spun in and out, do you remember my sound?

Redecorating.

Motherhood is an appropriate time to put faith in lists. Then disregarding.

Pearl beads of effervescence. Singing so the neck can realign.

Water.

into the conversation

This is my conversation with you. I close my eyes to have it. Our mouths open to speech and it takes us below the ground. What was once casual is now ecliptic.

We are in the dark together. We do not know where this will lead or how we will find our way. But this moment contains a sifting quality; we are sorted by our trust. What will remain of us is dust so fine it can only move like breath.

full moon list

Slivers that inch their way out of the skin or dissolve.

Palpating the major bones of the body, wondering, "How deep is the Yes?"

Thinking of the yellow marrow in the shafts of long bone. Where unprocessed memory (trauma) resides in the body.

How come it's taken so long to reach this blooming?

In the dream a man touches her face, says "You make me want to do 36 things I've never done before."

Leaving the bathroom light on for the children.

A notebook of letters, the jittery hand cupped around the probability that truth cannot be captured, only experienced.

Skeptical of the prominent sense that skin separates.

What did I just say and what the hell does it mean?

The bones of the hip take 25-30 years to completely fuse.

Rivers again, triple divides, water flowing to three different basins, prayers dropped over the convergence.

Wanting to walk out of my skin like a blank page into the night, refract the moonlight.

Scraps of paper.

The Universe and its secrets.

How a strong wind lifts the curtains inside this body, spring cleaning.

Phone numbers forever burned into memory.

Despair flies free of its nest, too educated to return.

Pairs. Friendships. Evocation of the Mystery.

All of the words in the mouth of conversations I want to have.

On a windowsill, water in a mason jar holding the moon.

opening the pages

Wake in the night and do not furrow into sleep again until you have heard these stories. This is the season of spring, of seeds unfolding, and the landscape invites me to still, enter the quiet alertness of the company I seek--this earth, all of its tremblings. No anthology as large as this one, well, besides the Universe.

Turn the page. In this new branch of time and space I am studying the body (again) but this time on purpose, with hands. Massage, bodywork, touch. What is touch? What is it to touch the story of the word yes? What is it to touch the story of the word no?

Inside of our bodies we have a felt-sense of the difference between these two. When I speak the word no to my youngest daughter it is full of ivory husks, the tools of tone coming from my body like a mother elephant giving warning by rearing her head to indicate danger. I say no, no, no, no, no, repeating the offense of the word until surly she cannot forget its pointed end. When I say the word yes it is definitive, without the accents of style. It is what it is. It is a state of meditation, a temple of worship where saints and angles are humming the strings of the Universe into weaves of light.

I will not tell the story of the word no tonight. But I have heard its story. I hear it all the time. Hello News!

I am turning the page again, opening the flaps in time where the body reveals its mysteries. To time travel, place the hands on the body. Quiet. Be still. Become present. Then the stories of different times and places begin to rise. All of the stories want to be heard, reaching forth by way of spring's returned light and rise in temperature. The body is an opening of pages, a scattering of lyric gestures set forth on the wind, floating up into the open sky. To catch the body again (after the flighty influence of the word no) one must fall into the open night, knowing and trusting the ground below, but not focusing on what is known.

To ground the body, to plant it again, to unfurl into the light, one must hear the body's stories and insert the word yes in place of all the nos. This is what bodywork does, or can do. This is why I am opening the pages of the body, again. Again.

back to the wind

Today I discarded the majority of my paper files from graduate school. I have certainly slimmed down a number of educational relics prior to today's happenings, but the impetus for the cleaning today was different.

I have been struck lately by the necessity I have for human interaction. My children, my husband, new friends, old friends, family afar. What does a pile of old poems give me in the moments I have available to share with these people?

For some time I have felt the urge to discard my material possessions. Or rather than "discard" my things maybe "recirculate" them, give them the freedom of a new incarnation, a new purpose. Books, clothes, dishes, sheets, towels. No rule exists that I should carry my grandmother's old fringed bath towels around with me wherever I go. And no rule exists that I shouldn't want new things to come to me, because I always do.

All of today's paper "recirculating" was not done without the eyes of tenderness scanning the pages, remembering the voices in the classrooms of academia, and the late night discussions revolving around one or two lines in a poem or essay, and all of the walks through seasons over train bridges towards green spaces with wind grazing the shoulders, dusting us off, making us fresh. Making us.

the widest measure

In the time it has taken me to post here we've been on grand family adventures. A swift cross-country move, a distant house in Minnesota with frozen pipes, long commutes across New Mexico--all a result of this thing, the yes that I keep holding to. A few times in these months I've wondered if I really had it, Is this Yes really mine? It is the stretching of the spirit, the truth of human emotional flexibility. We can go where the wind goes, where the roots of a tree grow. I hold fast to this. Challenge me if you will. There isn't anything we can't say yes to. For the love of yes, find a way to align unconditionally with each and every thing.