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

---

Water Sounding Words

Water Sounding Words

I don't know you

on this day, now

under a sky so blue

you know this place isn’t always this

way; this pond sometimes has no lilies 

and so I know what it means to forget

what it means to remember and

how a single flower becomes you

                                                      how the water is

                                                       right there, how

shallow the light becomes near dusk still, the sun, its

                                                      reflection

                                                     across this calm

         water sounding words

invites the memory, not as awakening

             just as one loving

the invitation of light

the equivalency of projection

                           of how we saw pinks like this ten years ago

                           of how you placed your finger into that yellow

as though to pull yourself to a different horizon

so far beyond that exhaustion

                              to a place sensing as a water lily knowing

when to close, to open

---

It was a morning of pervasive pink.  The color urged me on.  The magenta ironweed on the mountainside held my attention under a rare blue sky.  And then it was this, this water lily, petals so strongly opened toward the sun, that drew me to my mother and a moment at the end of her life when she, once again, found respite in feeling the heart of a flower.  

---

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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