DAYTIME NEGLIGEE

Look at you trumpeting

your transparency

to the sun. You have

nothing to hide.

Your beauty is sheer,

see-through.

Your every vein

is brazenly on display.

Everything about you

is open and opening,

voluptuous, audacious,

unabashedly vainglorious.

Though Nightshade

is your name,

no part of you

seems to know it.

Neither night nor shade

can hold a candle to

the way daylight dapples

and adorns you.

THE ENTITY

It’s a weather 

that got inside 

one day 

long ago

when a door 

was left open.

It’s a wind unseen

that moves

about the house

gathering like a storm.

It is an unwelcome guest

that mysteriously takes up

residence within you,

your body,

your thoughts, 

in the voice

that keeps the lie alive

in your mind. 

The lie that says:

Trust me and only me.

I will keep you safe.

No one else can do what I will do for you.

This is our little secret.

You must never tell anyone about me.

It’s an energy 

that's eating all the time

and never gets full. 

It feeds on shame, 

fear and loathing.

It pretends to be you

but is not you.

The only way to out-weather 

this storm is to starve it—

with a climate of connection,

love, and trust.

THE LAKE

Safety is a lake

we bring our canoes to.

You and I and the others

meet at the bank.

We wade into the water,

walk our boats

out and away 

from the shoreline,

push off, hop in,

and in time 

and slowly 

lay down.

This not an ocean.

It is a lake.

Intimate. Buzzing 

with life.

We are together 

and comfortably 

adrift

in community.

HAY*

Loping in a grief-soaked cloak
through what feels like

a century of tundra vigils,
dark forest initiatory fires,

and a thousand acres
of banished thought,

a lone pilgrim kisses
the dead along the way -

the ones that don't know 
they're dead yet.

He passes grave diggers
doing their moonlit digging

while screech owls hunt
to the sound of 

unsyncopated shovels.

This man's pilgrimage

is not to reach some
bejeweled mountain palace

but simply to find
a field of freshly cut hay

in the mind and sleep 

of a towheaded boy's

fevered, summer 

dreaming.

*Inspired by an essay by Martin Shaw entitled, The Hawk and the Otherworld

THE BELOVED

Let the body
be the clay,

the red earth.
Add water, then

spin it, knead it 
on the potter's wheel.

See it take shape

in the artist's strong

and supple hands.

See the vessel

swivel and sway,

rise up

under all 

the mindful touch, 

the lifting, the thinning,

the centering.

Inside, another

shape is forming.

In the stillness,

in the quiet,

a beloved 

is being traced

to rest

in the hollow

of a hidden

embrace.

FLIGHT

On its back 
on the ground,

wings pinned

beneath it,

a bird can't fly.

It needs the wind

in its feathers

to take flight.

Earth is not air.

Earth is not air.

LETTING GO

From the arch 

of an arbor

above me, 
from the weave 

of the climbing rose
all around, 

this little one
fell upon my knee.

Its whispered landing
took me

out of the book
I was reading

about the grief
of the Earth.

As I hung suspended
in my hammock-chair

inside this 
vined haven

I wondered:
was this tiny leaf,

this little 
letting go,

a reminder
that I could 

let some small
tightly held

part of myself,
twisting in spirit,

go, as easily as
the Earth sheds

its slender
green surrenderings?