In My Heart the Sun

In My Heart the Sun

For Silas

Next to me, a sleeping baby

the safety

of his hands near cheeks

the same place they were

when he was born

and though it’s raining

its heavy pattering on steel

I can hear his soft breathing

his contentedness, his innocence

so lovely under all this

this morning

now this

this thunderstorm

seeming so closely violent,

the quick occlusion

of light

leaving

only a memory

of the stillness of

this summer morning

where we walked within

the softness of warm

fog that muted detail and distilled

this life into silhouette,

a few lines as whole

within this

as I changed his diaper

felt the softness of his belly on my cheek

told him how

this was the way I saw

the mountain

the morning of his birth

looking out,

thinking it would be the last

I would see it through these eyes

as I closed the door

to become a mother

I told him how

my golden sequins

seemed to glow

under that morning

under that fog

how someone from a distance

might of thought us light itself

and how I held the sea

roses, magenta, aglow

and how I rubbed the petals

between my fingers

so we’d have something lovely

to fall back on,

always,

the scent of

how I looked up once more

hand on him

and whispered into fog’s depth

I love you

I can’t wait to walk through the world with you

And I didn’t know how

it would change

as we walked through this life together

but how I thought it would

if giving life

is as transformative

as watching death

then the difference would be more

than the subtle newness of day

and so it all seems so close

to this: how within me there is

always the quiet of that morning

and yet, too, this sudden storm

inseparable,

this heavy-lightness of having

in my heart the sun

the rain

even the very seed

the most complex simplicity

and here,

right here, the breathing

the very breath of a baby

---

Without

Without

I wore mint, flowers, against my summer skin

I pressed my body into iron ochre

sank myself into rain-loosened earth, under this

 held my head toward the sun,

closed my eyes

felt loved

I read that Georgia O’Keeffe “confessed that she

sometimes fantasied about lying nude

on the dry, hot, reddish slopes” of Abiquiu

I wonder if she, too, wanted the purity of warmth

simplicity, movement’s beauty without external soundings 

I thought then of all the times I’ve pressed my body

against this earth to feel momentarily

without the complexity of layering, of overlapping  

I remembered Alejandro who poured honey

over my body, that honey, and pressed those magenta flowers

onto me, into that miel, into me, those flowers, matched my lips 

I laid there in honey and flowers and bees and sensuality

on hot earth as he photographed me, my shyness, there 

I tried to see beyond the construct of camera

beyond film, man, and what seemed a thousand layers

of honey, of flowers, of nudity, of sad insecurity

I thought of how different I am alone in beauty 

 in absence with earth and my skin

and a sky that lights it with a thousand colors

how simply I turn my head toward sun

close eyes, feel loved  

and not without

---

I often return to fragments of "A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe" by Laurie Lisle.  I've felt a certain connectedness to O'Keeffe since I first discovered a painting of hers on a greeting card (of all places).  And I've been drawn to New Mexico, one of her many homes (and perhaps the most "home" of any, yet who am I to say?) since my parents brought me there when I was ten.  I've since returned on a few occasions, and each time feeling a sense of belonging.  The subtlety of layers of reds and sages, and the intensity of the sun, and the immensity of the sky, and my thoughts of her, Georgia O'Keeffe, wandering alone in those hills to find things that speak, this all spoke to me, there.  And it was in Santa Fe during long nights and long bicycle rides that I began to allow myself to process the death of my mother and father, admit to myself a certain loneliness, a certain aloneness.  In the past years I've thought of moving, packing my things once again, going to feel the sun and to sense a different earth; I've thought of moving to the place where I first felt my own strength again.  And yet, this place, Vermont, too, holds me, not as all places do.  Here I have the space to wear flowers and mud and rain and let them melt into me as I do into them. And I think it is this, this more than the red dust on my legs and cheeks, more than the endless skies, that I yearn(ed) for.  I desire(d) to feel so close to a place, so at peace in a place, so alone in a place, that I can feel all its intensities inside and outside of me.  It was this closeness that I felt under this streaked sky.  I was in a space without and yet with everything--without eyes and voices, and yet with a love for being, so pure, and so full of joy.  

---

Space of Buoyancies

Space of Buoyancies 

I feel lonely

but I’m still in love with you

the fog is thick, blurring

blue and loosening

what I thought I knew of this,

distance

it’s different

now in this early dusk

where this familiar mountain has become

something so bending as sea / water

where you are

is not where I am

but tonight it feels as though I could swim to you along this thin

line between stone and sky

gentle space of buoyancies 

of a thousand fond memories

allows me to rest on a calm alone

to close the periphery

that this isn’t the sea, but instead a quick and enclosing storm

and I’m on a mountain

with love/ alone.

---

I went with love but without expectations.  I wanted to call to a familiar face that the wild flowers, those magenta ones that so overwhelmed me recently, were still in bloom and that they looked extraordinarily beautiful under the low, grey sky.  But there was no one there to hear in the way I wanted to be heard and so I felt alone, despite the company of the colors.  And what was a mist of grey below became a purple-blue-black sky above.  There was just enough space in the sky's openings to see the effects of the setting sun meeting a nearing storm.  It was there that I felt the paradox of memory, that alone-togetherness, that feeling that both pulls me from loneliness and hurls me deeper in.  That bittersweet power of reminder.  

---

Space from Presence

Space from Presence

It seems strange to feel an empty pulse

under a sky like this with these colors,

textures, these remnants of a day’s emotions

and yet I see you there in those clouds

that blue-orange-purple sky and so

it changes what I knew of something like this

in such absence, I haven’t determined yet

how to not feel the magnanimity of missing

how to go through a day without transposition

of everything I know of you as we walked through

quiet colors like this, feeling closeness, the cerebral

hush of holding hands and the whispered I love you

and what seems the still stream becomes the sea

and you’re there, now, and perhaps the sky is streaked

too, with words and the feeling of skin meeting

maybe you, too, feel absence in each shell

those yellow, purple, oranges and maybe

they become the sun we saw rising, setting

and it seems this, this love through memory

spans such a different space from presence

from the quietude offered by your touch

you see, when I’m with you I see the sky

without the weight of a thousand projections

but rather as sky, beautiful arc we walk within 

---

I've just returned from Nantucket, this isn't Nantucket (quite obviously, if one has been to Nantucket), but rather a return from.  Though the ocean drew a certain sentiment, it was this, this sky and this notch and this stream that became the pulse of my feeling.  While there, though all the perfect distractions from missing were in place-- a friendship, a beach, a brewery, a restaurant worth spending money at, I couldn't help but see my love, my friend, who just went out to sea, in everything.  This is, I suppose, how love goes.  It is in every breath, and is, I believe, quite beautiful.  And so, though I traveled alone, my memories of him, with him, were the surface of my night and day and ferry ride and drive home.  I carried missing along quite gracefully, I thought, present and holding, as I allowed the feeling to thread through my movements.  Yet, this silhouette of home, of being under a new yet familiar sky, altered my relationship to absence. The quiet threading was suspended by the weight of missing and navigating how to go through a space I've come to know with another.  It seems the unfamiliar, though spurring memory, did not have for me the heaviness of the roots of familiar, the endless roots of familiar, that hold a presence known and remembered, and thus also serve as a perpetual reminder of the suspension of another's physical and calming presence, one that enables the present.      

---

Between the Two Skies

                                                                 today did not start this way

curled up under the weight of grey whose dimension echoes into hands

                                                                 the sound of underway, always

                                                                 the turning, the retracting, the

passing into and passing through the

passing away of the single point, the

elsewhere a pink sky, still dark ridge

ashes on fingers of what was, now is

                                                                  that feeling of the closeness

between the two skies, the tenses, the peonies no longer there but here

                                                                 some other sound, other color

                                                                 the after, absence of a syllable  

here a darkening, another rain

the dendrites of water moving

the seeing out and the seeing

through though not the feeling

---

It was sun and stillness at the base.  As I approached the crest of the exposed ridge I was met by accumulating grey-black clouds and sheets of distant rain, and a thru-hiker who, while looking back at the now ominous and blurred ridge, panted, "it's a bit scary up there."  Knowing that just as much exposed space rested before as it did after, I decided to carry forth, albeit running and scouting possible rock retreats from lightening.  It was alone and in the circulating clouds that I saw to the east this harmonious dissension in the sky.  And it was in that moment of dark/light that I recalled the dis/connection between trying to recall a feeling and in present feeling.       

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