....From The Tree Of...............Seeing Beauty
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_______________________________________________________ Restoreth My Soul Nimbus me with rings of rosy love and rising from my couch, all girlgold dreaming, I am ever wreathed in really joy. Hand me what you need for me to carry high, I'll hold it. Never drop a warble, hear it? It is my heart. Sleep now, there is nothing leaving. Nothing needs to be as much as one hair's breadth from you, so listen: this is soft and this is safe, the sound of it- I'm beating, though around you, there is silence that's me too. Twelfth Month Odd Seventy degrees in Pittsburgh, December fifth and I've stepped into someone else's life. Someone who lives far from here where birds come in clouds, clot trees and ground beneath like some dark rock concert chirps atop the grass, enlivened in ways no other December fifth has been. The plasma of their movement, shifting pieces of wing and sky, all together make the world move so unlike the dull, still, icy month when the shimmer of baby Jesus comes. I saw the tree just now take off and fly... Escape Before I roll into the carpet of sleep tucked cheek to nap, fist in fetal curl while thigh slips over thigh in just the right way, I think of how my carpet flies to places that daylight wouldn't dare mirage up. And if I dance, I dance only here, and solely for my pleasure. Put me in a pocket of pure sweet. Do me deeply, rock me, sleep. Morning will come smoking up Rapunzel's ladder in fireman's boots, and later there'll be genocide in every letter; we will shun the postman. Take to moving. Moving targets hard to hit, so play me carpet now, for sleep's light slip of it. Gifts I remember a spring walk in woods so mossy fresh my nose opened up to ferns and grass. The green lush hollows under a bridge were cut with knives of light. A stream glittered, giggled beneath. On a sloped bank, with teeth exposed, claws up lay a dead raccoon. Yellow movement all around, a busy-ness of butterflies cluttered at his death in such astonishment- and I thought of all the ways that beauty comes like an assault, gets hold of the stomach, gives a squeeze so tight it takes the breath and there is a split second death to everything but it, and the eyes held open. Hunkering Down January brings cold feet and hairs stand up. Turn skin to sand instead of silk. I can't get warm, get liquid-centered. Air around me has a slab and toetag feel. Dormant as a bulb I hunch here. Quiet as the tulips are beneath a cracked, cold sky I wait for robins. Yellow In weeds, in lot abandoned, long stems held miraculous movement: half-hid yellow heads. Pecking bobbing, sometimes wings of lemon, sometimes black, a busy flutter five or six were sucking sunlight being little parts of it. Clung to reeds of what they so delighted in and chittered flipped tail, took off in a joyful twirl a saffron puff of goldfinch, proving wonder sits and waits for eyes: the wild canary eyes my grandma had. Together Blue-fluted sleep the pure, cool notes of somnolence, snowmelt thoughts are drawn away till meeting with the dark, down pulling shade that flaps in birdwing pats and off you go to a place where you are weightless. Where we meet where we are seated side by side, then inside butter pools of muted light and love liness. Reach out- and there I am. Folly You take a perfectly beautiful name like Machackemeck and update it to Port Jervis, there in Orange County New York, you've stolen its Indian soul--and although I know it's politically incorrect to refer to the Red Man as anything other than Native American, I like the image of copper skin against a flaming hill at sunset. Feathers lifting slightly in autumnal wind, in the sour of apple, with heart rising like a kite; some things should never change. Reminded Of The Thing Inside By Looking Out Throughout the blended misery of day slid into day, the chance encounter with a honk or screech of wheels, the phone calls like the knives they are and nightly in my bed, the tossed back heat my feet can't get completely free of; though I try to shake it loose, these dog days dig in deep. So the thing was unexpected in the coo cool cleft of morning, but it sounded louder: more insistent and so close. The cats were up on hind legs, standing straight as butlers, mewing back at a soft, beige mourning dove perched on my windowsill, unperturbed and cuddled in her nest. Just some twigs, some twisted bits of string, but there she sat while cocking her liquid calm of eye at me; the first time I saw bravery of purpose staring back with all its mustered power, compressed into the reddish brown and ladybug-sized eye of a bird -who sat it out on a sill, a pane away from what she should have feared, but somehow didn't at all. Isn't it the small things make it easier: jokes that make the yoke feel light or a random whiff of honeysuckle or me- immersed in gray, goodmorning fog coming upon evidence of god or something wonderful, out there on that windowsill with spider webs of dew and one white, perfect inch of egg. Aren't they the things that make it feel like we might live forever, or we should? First Awareness Amanda lay on the bank and sun was breath: close, warm. Stray hairs from her pony tail tickled nape- thin weed of girl knew her only skin. Even fish, slick, sensuous- leaping into heat of sun were her. Lips spread wide on softest mouth alive- alone Amanda was and busy. On To Page 8 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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