Reflections

To each, the other: the infinite interplayful

Written for my best friend's wedding...

What dawning rouses us alive
Lightwashes open our eyes and
Throws our heads back to blinding-bright clouds
That does not defer to enfolding darkness?

Show me an ocean
Throwing foamy peaks
Who meet in mad crash
That does not dissolve to calm shore?

Who would shiver to the marrow
Through banks of bone-cold snow
Without the promise of flame to heat, thaw and dry us
Back to the bare naked warmcooling skin in which we were born?

Day to night
Sea to land
Ice to fire

So is your time to shoot a tendril heavenward
And in turn is yours to witness, whisper and hold

Shawn and Beth; Beth and Shawn
To each, the other, in turn

Because you have chosen
To circle your life with mine
Do I relax into the curve of us, the supple
Dance of yin and yang, yang and yin

Day to night
Sea to land
Ice to fire

And around shall we go
In the perpetual motion
Of the infinite interplayful

You curled around me curled around you, rolling
Like the wheel of the seasons
Always with the color of the other
In our hearts

Miiu*

After all these years
Trying to master where I end and others begin
To discover
That we are all One
And somehow know
That these are not in contradiction

That while all the tsuris
I go through
Truly is between me and me
To watching you reveal razorslices of your pain
Among the ocean of wild beauty that marinates you

And know that you and I are the same
Sure, my soul recognizes yours, Namaste, and all
But more than that
I feel you me, bringing it round again
As the fingers of one hand
Touch those
of the other

*Shalom in Tongva/Ajachmen

Yes, this is for you

Illusionate

How we look back and impose where we are
On the lush green expanse of what would be!
And how lack of light
Can slice through a body    knifeshadows

Fragmenting our flesh
From the wholeness we touch
But do not always see

Do not trust light
Nor dark
They will cut you from yourself into illusions
Feed you back in pieces
You may love, rebuff, hate, desire

Trust where breath comes from.
Ruach ha'olam
Believe what skin knows
And muscles hold
And bone makes
Possible.

Sliding Into the Curious

It’s a leap
From the manhole vertical
To a long tunnel that curves around

Spits you out
Or perhaps
Nestles you
In its embrace.

It ends your sentences
With rising inflections
Opens doors and windows
Becomes a portal
An invitation

To live in the Curious
Bent around Maybe
To stand in the Dark Point of
Now
I
Begin

Watch how I slide again and again
And how sometimes I take that curve so fast I fly off into space
See how other times I break my own fall
And still other times
Nothing will

For A Boy Having A Hard Day

Did they send you peace today? 

A package on
Your doorstep, easily missed or maybe a spare
Shoe among your perfectly matched
Ones (two's)

Or maybe particles clinging to the top of the painting that hangs
in your living room, or stubbornly rubbing the walls
as you pass

Could it be in your perfume, hiding in your pores, its source
In a green glass bottle you thought the girls might like
(Well I do)

Or is it all irritants in your undones today
The bricks outside next to the raw mud
The devils of details snapping from inside your computer
The undeposited funds humming on your desk

I'd help them get it straight to you, boycake.
Slide it off their wingtips to slip around your neck toward rest
Or moisten your cheeks as you weep toward sleep.

Let those angels of peace bring it straight to your feet
So you can always find it
Between your toes
Just rub

When?

It isn't cheating to dig up an old poem, is it?

When does she become The Beloved?

When you feel the stillness
between beats of her heart
through flesh, bone, muscle   and     empty space?

When you taste her breath moments
before flesh first meets?

When you feel the weight of her pain
In tiny fingers reaching out
through an armored car driving away,
warm in yours, for the briefest moment
so heavy to hold, you remember for
days, with cupped hands, empty?

When her laugh shocks your senses alive
Like an unexpected fruit, wild with sweet mockery
Of your ordinary life
Now stained with her, purple berries?

When you wake curled around the shape of her
Made of warm air, knowing
The difference
But loving her
Just the same.

If the Ocean Knew Our Names

If the ocean knew our names

Driftwood would splinter our flesh

And the sand

Would know our blood

A cloud enters our lungs like that

Without a thought

And a seagull casts a wink of a shadow

Like an eyelash batting

At an open body

Washing its own belly

The waters were happy today

Laughing again and again

Not angry and crashing like most oceans

Nor placid

Nor explosive

Misty in the distance

We the people just shadows

Move black against white fog

Without names

GreenhouseBeam

Your eyes locked onto me just as I was leaving

We didn’t release

But I kept moving

Because I knew if I stopped

You’d look away

(Or I'd incinerate on the spot)

Pure sunlight shining

On a part of me never seen

Never smiled at in that way

A little seed sent a tiny tendril

Smiled back

Said I never knew

I never knew roots to move in here

Never felt so moist and fertile

Now life unfurls in this place you shone into.

Thank you

Native Tongues

Who stood here, when things grew?

What did she say, and how did the wind carry it

So far, through time

When a white Jewish woman in 2006 picks up the phone and says “mii”

Skipping sons and daughters

Like stones on the water

Picking up syllables through thin air

New blood carries and record in brain matter

Ancestors live in our ears, our mouths

When we learn who we are

How our mouths might have moved

If not for the fear of tribes gone wild

Like white yeast infections over the planet

Blood flows anew

Eyes see the peeled-back underbelly

Hearts open like fire

It’s time to dance

It’s time to sing

This time with

Original

Words

This just sorta came out of me, thinking about the Native languages conference coming up this weekend, put on by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.  Check them out with a click or so.