Morning Light

Morning Light

For Jay

Perhaps it was a Sunday

I can’t remember because it was one of those days

held like the sun’s heat in rocks

that precious, sometimes unexpected, welcomed warmth

but it was morning, and I had slept in your arms,

and I didn’t open my eyes hoping for love

because, like this morning, everything seemed right there

and at breakfast I felt light cascading

across the Westport River, through the cottage windows,

onto my face, my tired, pregnant body

while I was drinking a little coffee

with milk and cinnamon

and eating pea greens with my fingers so I could see

closely such intrinsic beauty

And I was looking at you (though you were looking away)

and I was thinking of you and how I could spend all my days

with this feeling of sunlight, with this palpable love

with your not needing to go elsewhere, but here

with you sitting next to me,

drinking coffee in the morning light

with those pea greens, that green against your eyes: serene

---

Some days I wake up not knowing how to feel loved.  It isn’t as though love isn’t there, but rather that I am so sensitive to words and touch.  And so if the day doesn’t begin with “I love you” or a thoughtful kiss or embrace, I am yet to know how to feel the assumption of love as something strong enough to sustain.  But this morning was one that made me feel whole in terms of love.  I woke up on his shoulder, swaddled in his arms.  I woke up feeling his body’s warmth and feeling so comforted by his smell.  And then came, what seemed, the first warm morning sunlight of spring.  It flooded the space, seemed love itself, simplifying the room into an essence that couldn’t be retracted.  And in this space it felt so good to drink coffee and eat pea greens and look at him and think what I always think, and yet today to also say so silently into sunlight, I love you, I love you, I love you.  I would spend all my days with you.    

---

February Tulips

February Tulips

I bought these tulips in February

because they matched the sky

the day you left, that slight orange

fading, folding into cloud layers,

another sunset that we look at

from different angles, places

and now, with you gone,

I wonder as I trim the stems

if there’s a way to arrange them

to forget these thoughts of her

whose daughter sometimes stands

here, wanting a flower for her room

I move petal upon petal to hide

images of how you, perhaps,

you looked at her pregnant body

felt her skin, drank her milk

bought her tulips to look at

while you were there, at sea

and she was left with a baby

your support, and flowers that maybe

reminded her of the sunset

on a day you kissed, left,

and yet I suppose there is no use

in rearranging flowers to forget

the sadness of an always leaving is

all I seem to know it seems

a series of passings, of sunsets

of sunrises, told through flowers

and here I am, perhaps another

version of another woman

who held her pregnant self

and trimmed tulips to see

something more than transience

something as present as this

this deep beauty in February

these orange tulips against baby

---

There’s a certain intrigue in the contrast of holding bright flowers against a grey New England winter sky.  The stark grey, so enclosing, and, to me, so oddly comforting, juxtaposed to what seems a color so foreign, that it all becomes so arresting.  Fourteen years ago I bought yellow daffodils in February, and I still haven’t forgotten how their yellow changed the course of my late winter.  And now these: these orange tulips under a February sky.  They spoke of her, of departure, of the cyclical nature of life, of love, of a flower. I saw in these the sadness of feeling a repetition, just another version of someone’s pregnant girlfriend.  I saw every kiss they must have had, every flower he must have given her in the midst of winter, the way he told her he loved her, the way her must have felt her growing belly before saying another goodbye.  Though, simultaneously, though I saw such a pattern, distilled things into the mere simplicity of category, of night and day, and sunrise and sunset, and love lost and gained, I too saw each intricacy.  I realized that I had never seen this day, this particular light, that I’ve never held these flowers, that I’ve never seen my body like this, that I have never loved a him or he a me, and we have never loved each other on this day, under this light, with these flowers against my pregnant skin. 

---

If Words Could Be

If Words Could Be

Looking through glass at this

February sky threaded with cold

grey-blues, slightly softer lavenders

imagining if words could be

muted like this, this sunset

that so subtly whispers toward closure

and if they, like persistent noise,

could find a certain hush

under this, these crystalline drifts

you see, I don’t know what to with these

words that fell as simply as this

this snow that shifts everything I knew      

yet they seem a more solid something

something I can gather by hand and place

under this, these white layers

and let them be as something under snow,

a handful of auburn leaves there, suspended

matter under the seen surface 

maybe they will become as winter’s leaves

something of spring, folded into the structure

of globed beauty, the sun, the early daffodil

that spherical reminder of warmth, of words

of the heart’s topiary that does, with time,

as this sunset, this snow, those leaves

---

I was a few months pregnant and washing dishes at a house that isn't mine, on a holiday that often reminds me of how little close-family I have, and thinking about how my father used to hide the glass pickle in the Christmas tree, when someone quite casually said to me that the expectations are quite high for the baby in my belly and that I could only hope to have a child as wonderful and beautiful as the one my boyfriend already has.  Not wanting to be impolite, and quite frankly too struck by the comment in the first place, I softly nodded and smiled and carried on scrubbing, all the while wondering why someone thought that an appropriate thing to say to a pregnant woman who is not the mother of the referenced child.  Now perhaps if I were the mother I would have viewed the comment more as a strange compliment, but since I am not, I saw in it my boyfriend's past with the woman he impregnated, I saw a mother who created a child perhaps more wonderful and beautiful than one I could raise and develop, I saw competition and comparison.  And though I wanted to shrug them off and let them slip down the drain with all the particles from the pan, I found too much pith and stone beneath all the word layers.  And so these I've held onto throughout this winter, throughout this pregnancy.  But it seems, as a few months have passed, that I have allowed myself to bury them enough to give them space for transformation.  What will come of them, I do not know.  But as I look out at these winter landscapes and sunsets, muted or not, and as I feel my own body expanding and creating, I can only hope they are nothing more than matter for another wonderful and beautiful contribution to this world.  

---

Still Within Each Other

still within each other

for Jay

You’re gone

there, at sea

perhaps only a horizon,

distant thought of here, of me

though I’d like to think

you’ve seen me, my

silhouette somewhere in the wake

somewhere in the line

between sleep and dream

as I see you cast into this

winter sky, this shallow light

these familiar trees, always

you, it seems, standing there

as something more than memory,

you’re so far away that all I have is wish

and I wish you could see me today

as something more than picture

something more than transposition

something more than reflection,

than subtle dissipating fragments

because today I see myself as more

than a filament of doubt left by mother

I see something more of this light

and perhaps if you were here you’d

see in my eyes what I rarely see

and you’d fathom another depth of me

  yet perhaps you see me always

as whole, as something more

than I see myself, than this

sadness from a mother who worked too much

who tried to love and did but was tired

and you see, this is what I’ve been seeing

when I look down at my pregnant body

I see myself as her, her never seeing herself

as something that could be enough

as something whole, as something of depth

and now this, this heartbeat within me

has brought me to see a certain grace

and I feel untangled from a part of her

though I was once a pulse within her

as she was within her mother and

I wonder if she looked at her pregnant skin

And saw something more than a mirror

reflection within of a mother who clung

to bitterness, who left her with this,

this fragment of an unexplored self

that grew as concentric circles in water

unknowingly expanding toward distant horizons

and you see, though you can’t see me,

today I feel separated from mother after mother

and have shared with this other

this exploring, this pulse of earth

this feeling of rock and snow and happiness

in the depth of a mountain’s silhouette

and I just want you to see my cheeks

after the cold, and notice how my hair

held the snow in its curl, and how it shaped

my face and how when I looked down

I felt beautiful and loved and seen

as though you heard me hundreds of miles away

and reached out your hands to brush my wet hair

behind my ear, to warm my cheeks, to kiss my lips

to make our hearts beat a little quicker

as we, so distant, are still within each other

---

Though there seemed a vastness in the night sky, there existed within it a space as enclosed and tranquil as this distant landscape framed by nearby pines.  And though my route to reach this narrowing space might appear the same day to day, it is part of this natural world and part of a rambling mind, and thereby filled with such intricacies and changes.  There is a certain comfort in choosing the same approach, as it becomes meditative.  My mind can relinquish to the grace of breath and movement and being.  Today the air was winter-thick,—damp and warm—,and here it smelled richly of evergreen.  I thought of how many times I’ve arrived at the same place, and how many times I’ve arrived alone.  I thought of how many times I’ve looked into that distance, through these trees, between those mountain silhouettes, and felt a sense of awe.  Yet today, 22 weeks pregnant, I could feel the slight movement of another body within me, and had such a clear realization that I was sharing this heart’s experience of night and light and rock and mountains and breath so intimately with another.  It was the first time in my pregnancy I was able to feel as though I wasn’t just a replica of my own mother, bound to repeat a cycle.  I wanted you, there at sea, to see me as I experienced this.  I wanted to look at you and tell you what I felt as I looked into tonight’s night sky, and I suppose I did, because this love does have a way of drawing something so distant, so close, so as to be so beautifully enclosed within.

---

Under this Sky

Under this Sky

Under this sky

you’re so far away

and I can’t tell you how it reminds me of the sea

deep blue, and the moon, a wispy white half in the afternoon

I can’t tell you how

I cut white hydrangeas 

arranged them in a copper vase from Mexico

with the delicateness of mallow, so expansive, so pink, so soft

your daughter’s color,

and this, these petals  

made me think of her, you, there on the ocean

under a different sky, so far away from her, me, these flowers  

I can’t tell you how

there is a garden

of gifts on the wooden counter from a friend

who, perhaps, thought of me when he dug his hands into the dirt

how I want to see you

there on the metal stool

as I cut these vegetables, sing familiar things

as we share stories, expressions,  live in each other’s presence

I can’t tell you how

I have grown tired

how I’ve filled my head with dreams of yellow roses

and nasturtiums and eating oatmeal under the sun next to the sea

and how I love you  

how I’ll keep telling you

though you’re so far away and can’t hear these words

how I’m left to hold them without the feeling of holding you

I can’t tell you how

hydrangeas are silence

my silent company, how their beauty is what holds me

in a space we’ve shared together, now this, these white flowers

and how everything is

offering and opening

how I want you to see these hues in my brown eyes

share with me twice in this home’s slow and subtle awakenings

I can’t tell you how

late August air feels

how the coffee tastes richer in this weather, wearing this jacket

how it feels to have this warmth in the purple vibrancy of phlox

how it means "flame"

under the intensity

of time in the mind, passing without the proximity of love, how

there’s no languid hour in the act of missing, constant thinking of

I can’t tell you how

it feels to be here

alone and with thoughts of Brooklyn and risotto and a carousel

of going endlessly around and around in the company of love

and how I want

to have that here

that rhythmic pattern with you, here, under this temporal sky

to reminisce how blue it was, once, that day in late August

---

Absence, despite my endless missing, yields a slipping into dream spaces, a subconscious drawing forth of past vigor that held so much life and color.  It is strange to me that the act of missing can’t sustain me, keep me from fragments of past that are not so much idealized, but rather produce within me such a heightened sense that I can, again, find peace in the present.  These are little strings of things: eating oatmeal, a yellow rose, risotto, a carousel, all playing a love story that seems closer than my present one, perhaps because that is, though closer in time, just as distant as those memories.  It’s strange how it all becomes when two people can’t move through a daily life together, look at each other, feel each other, go through a day doing more than remembering each other.  The more time we spend apart, the more I have come to realize how significant it is to be in a present together, to share things in the physical presence of, under the same temporal sky.  Perhaps we look out and look up and see different things, think of different things, but being there with each other seems to distill time in a way that allows for love to speak so presently and peacefully, so that I do not need a story of oatmeal, a yellow rose, risotto, or a carousel, to remind me of what it once felt like to touch love. 

---

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.  

---

I Want to Tell You How

I want to tell you how

I want to tell you how

orange emerged from grey-blue clouds and how

the darkened ridge became your cheek at night

                    and the glow, the unspoken safeness of your skin 

I want to tell you how

this orange span of light is the sadness of distance, is

absence stretched across the sky, lined reminder of

                    looking up and looking out without each other

I want to tell you how

this orange is my thankfulness for you, your presence

for memory offering the past in this present

                    to walk through my days with only these distilled fragments

I want to tell you how

this orange is seeing summer in your blue eyes

mercurial sky, and I, held there in iris, in water

                    where I never knew I could feel such solidity in love

I want to tell you how

this orange holds a depth of connectedness

one that was, no longer is, absent under the grey of our winter

                    and so now I see you on the surface of every flower

I want to tell you how

this orange is my love for you, this love is as color

constant pulse of absorption, a phenomenal reflection  

                    a gift so overwhelming, so encompassing, so drawing   

---

It was a dusk of enrapturing light and wind.  I was held by grey-blue clouds to the west, by burning orange to the north, by a sherbet streaked sky to the east, and by a rising moon slightly south.  The orange in particular compelled me to think about the first nasturtium I saw this summer.  When I saw it, he was out to sea, and we hadn't yet had the chance to behold a flower dabbled space together.  And so though I felt love for him, I did not see him within this, and so my mind traveled elsewhere and to a familiar line about a circular orange flower.  But now, having spent these warm months together, having cut flowers for the dinner table, having made crowns and worn them in our hair, having them as a backdrop to home, I see him in every nasturtium, in every flower.  This proximity in absence allowed by seeing someone in all things seems like quite a gift, a painfully beautiful gift, one we can choose to keep unraveling and unraveling as deeply as we dare to know.  

---

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.      

---

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.       

---