Recognition

Playing truth or dare an hour before daylight
among the bean trees, I encounter a stranger at the gate.
When I ask what she is doing, she replies,
“Composing a life.” She seeks to answer the question,
“Is there no place on earth for me?”

I ask how she will know the answer, and she says
she will track her progress in the stone diaries.
She has an amazing grace, this girl with a pearl earring
wearing borrowed finery, and I want to know more.
I ask with an open heart, open mind, what it is she seeks.

She wants to understand the savage inequalities,
to have a reckoning with the fact that she lives
in a world where the poisonwood bible increasingly
becomes the rule of law. She wants to help people
to stop running with scissors and enjoy the perfection
of the morning.

We are surrounded by landscapes of wonder, if we
would only make the effort to see differently.

She in turn asks what I seek. I reply that I want
the courage to be, to cast a slender thread
of hope into the sea, the sea of humanity.
I want to plant new seeds of contemplation,
embrace the grace in dying. I want to
know the mystery of tying rocks to clouds.

From her angle of repose under oleander,
jacaranda, the magnificent spinster listens.
I tell her she has a beautiful mind, that
I can see the molecules of emotion swirling in her.
She tells me that I am a succulent wild woman,
that I have zen under a wing. She reminds me
that art is a way of knowing and solitude
a return to the self.

Then we part, blessing each other with traveling
mercies, with a promise to meet again
at the healing circle in Gilead.

Room to Play

It sits on the nightstand, a
spiral-bound stack of deadwood
no larger
than a cassette tape, clad
in magenta,
offering
one hundred and sixty invitations to
commune with myself.

A black butterfly clip divides past
from present; faint blue lines
promise to
bring order out of chaos.
Paper bits,
notions
extracted from this moveable
brain, mingle with silver.

But it is too small for secrets, it
can only contain the mundane;
the lines
too orderly, too rigid. Muse
needs galactic
space,
demands borderless playgrounds
to spill the soul’s blood.

Minstrel

Words tumble from your mouth,
so many happy children rolling
down fields at play;
vibrant, sonorous, thrilling with energy
as they leap and chase each other.
Your voice a symphony,
a rich honey tenor pouring into me
inscribing life on my heart;
crescendoing in passionate explanation,
now resting, silence drawing me forth
into the next movement
and your heartbeat a metronome
beating a river of strength
beneath magnificent melodies.

Your breath whispers caresses to my soul,
tender wisp of touch here,
long circling stroke there,
wooing me to dance the delicate cadence of love.

Crucifixion

She wills him to leave.
He shred her with words and now
she is every slut who ever lived,
the Levite’s worthless concubine from Bethlehem
as she stands scrubbing under
stinging, steaming needles of water,
as she cooks him out from under
her flesh, now banana tender,
welting purple at the wrists, breasts, thighs.

He permeates her head, the
musky mushroom scent stubbornly
remains regardless how much
she retches and spits;
she bites the bar of soap as though
taking communion, seeking its promise
to trade cleanliness for evil.

She stands, trembling and heaving
from gut to fingertips
shaking bone deep cold,
and the blood,
the blood won’t stop,
evidence of a sacrifice
that was not his
to make.