Holidays are boxes
built by plaited years
to hold what happens.
Your house is an open box
where costumes and pumpkin seeds,
masks and wigs and jack-o-lanterns,
giant spiders and tiny candy bars
still tumble into the world
fashioned by a crowd of busy children
into an enormous orange box decorated
with light sabers and false eyelashes
and labeled Halloween.
Build A Box Workshop
Grandmother Haiku
Four hundred years old,
Haiku spread its rules
in the shady spot at
the edge of the meadow
on a faded patchwork quilt
of sonnets and prose.
Here a square of roses,
next to Shakespeare’s dark lady
in gold, stitched to
paragraphs of pattern,
then a square of green.
Haiku stretches its cramped muscles
tied seventeen ways for so many years,
sighs with contentment
and here, amid the crumbs
of the feast
watches its many grandchildren
play in the meadow.
Leave A Message
Here, my new message:
Please
Do not
Hang up 5 times
And then
Complain later that
I’m never
Home, I never
Call, you are
So worried.
Put down the phone.
Listen to the world
At your window. Better,
Open your door and walk out into
The deep green world.
Life
Is
Short.
Ask
For
What you want.
And if you
Don’t know what you want,
At least
Leave a message.
Authority
Each author, an authority
on their own world—
Me, I am an authority on
sipping coffee by candlelight
while the cat purrs,
And I stretch out time like taffy—
Slow, slow hour—
The day pulls the blankets closer,
bunches up its pillow and
dozes for a few more minutes
while I sit with the last of the cosmos
blooming in their vase,
pollen and words drifting into my lap.
October 27: Happy Anniversary, PuffOfSmoke Poems
Happy anniversary to Puff of Smoke Poems, one year old today.
This is a chronicle of a year in my life, a year of getting through a divorce, recapturing possibility and lightness of spirit, and rededicating time to puttering around with words, giving them both the fun and the serious time they deserve.
Finding poetry in every day, writing it down, and posting it here has been a great gift this year. Many thanks are due to—
Samantha Bentley of bentlily.com : An apparently now-defunct, or at least on long hiatus daily poetry blog. You were my inspiration to begin, and checking in on your site often provides my inspiration to continue.
My Children: Supremely uninterested in poetry, thank you for being exactly who you are (which is someone who will never, ever want to read their mom’s poetry blog)
My Friends: Both those who know about, read, and offer encouragement here; and those who would be bored to tears by poetry, but keep me company on the road, always handing over the gift of someone to laugh and walk and eat with in this crazy life
My Followers: All few dozen of you, whoever you are. It is cheering beyond measure to know that some stranger out in the world read and responded, in feeling and in comments, to something I wrote. Astonishing and oh so gratifying. Thank you. May I and many other readers return the pleasure to you.
Here, to remind myself, is what I’ve learned from a year of writing and posting poems:
Poetry Saves You. Noticing the world around me, writing a poem every day, reading what I wrote, reading other poets, helped me re-imagine myself into a life, this life, where I write instead of yearning to write, where what I see and what I dream and what I learn simmer together into stories and poems. Where I’m reminded over and over that even the grayest, flattest, most ordinary day can be transformed by making your art. Given time and the respect of showing up when you say you will, more often than not, like loaves and fishes, attentiveness and faith transform your world and grant the gift of plenty —plenty of words, plenty of experience, plenty of joy, and plenty of gratitude.
Silence Sequence
Silence: III
What the tiny noise
of a flickering candle
breaks
Silence: II
Fragile vase, clear crystal
Any fidgety toddler
could tell you:
It was meant to fall
Silence: I
Cosmos cut to save them
from first frost
lift pink faces
to the ceiling
searching for the rain
Come See Me Before Class
School at five a.m.
Long halls where nothing echoes
Lockers closed as clam shells
Waiting for the ocean
Still Life With Prairie Dogs
Seize the Day is a sentiment thought up by a man.
Mostly, the day seizes me, and gives me a hard shake.
So I’ve decided on a new way to get through a day.
Picture prairie dogs.
Really.
Imagine the day as a field filled with prairie dogs,
always another head popping up.
Don’t seize a thing because that’s when they bite.
Instead, take off you shoes. Stretch your pinched toes,
whisper to your fingers that they can choose not to clench.
Remind your jaw, too.
Walk through the grass. Peek into the holes
where the prairie dogs, suddenly shy, have hidden.
Give them what they demand. It’s only time, after all,
the time a man with a pen would tell you to wrestle to your will.
Relax into the opposite of seize, and the pester of prairie dogs calms.
Later, together, you can watch the sun set over your shared field
while somewhere, some man writes advice in Latin.
Spinster
There’s a wool-suited spinster
Who lives in my head–
Thin hair in a bun
Pursed lips on her face
Saying, Stop that nonsense at once.
Sternly, of course.
Oh, don’t listen to her
Says the other voice, who looks like me–
The voice I name my true self.
She says the spinster isn’t cranky,
cranky takes too much spirit.
She isn’t even mean,
And come to think of it,
I don’t know her well enough to
Even be certain she is a spinster.
What she is, is disapproving
But colorless—-No heat behind her words
Just a certainty that she must warn me to Stop,
Before I make a Fool of Her.
So, I say thank you to that spinster—
Thank you for letting me be like an old, creased photo
carried in your sensible handbag:
A picture of dreams you abandoned
cut from a magazine, tucked away as a warning,
a reminder of the crazy way you once thought
Of running off to Paris.
Old paper now, limp with age and dank
But carried always, this reminder.
And thank you also, spinster,
for being the faded photo I carry.
Thank you for being my warning
of all I could become,
If I’m careful.
Two Hours And 42 Minutes
is the answer to:
How long can I wander
through a bookstore
drunk on words
if left to wander
as long as I like?
But the weekend held its
unanswered questions, too.
How long can I linger
over lunch with you, old friend?
Longer than the turbaned waiters
at the Indian buffet will tolerate.
They turned the lights off
while we still talked and laughed.
So the only answer is:
Longer than this time.
Which means we must plan
another lunch and keep eating
and talking, in search of answers.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 