As Mourning Doves Persist

 Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo, TX Last night I attended a practice concert by the high school choir. My daughter sings with the choir and this morning they were bound for an out of town competition performing the songs that they aired for us last night. While we were waiting for the show to begin, a mother whose daughter has been friends with our daughter for five or six years, leaned in toward me where we sat on our gray folding chairs and said these daunting words to me: " Is Delaney going to college? "  I responded with an almost too high pitched " I hope so! " Now I don't know about you, but when I was approaching my senior year of high school I had these aspirations of leaving my funny farm of a family in the dust as I ventured into the easy sunset. Responsibilities were the least of what I considered for my potentially carefree future, and yet I knew enough to picture some hard work ahead. And work hard I did as I had a job simultaneous w...

Wild Swans by  Edna St. Vincent Millay I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. And what did I see I had not seen before? Only a question less or a question more; Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying. Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, House without air, I leave you and lock your door. Wild swans, come over the town, come over The town again, trailing your legs and crying ! (for my daughter)

Still coloring childlike inside the lines until madness takes over or lack of sleep and then the angel appears on the wall, blonde reincarnate with charcoal eyes that holler scribble whisper poems, whisper sanity scrawl perfectly imperfect art

Sometimes you hardly notice the car in front of you. At other instants, you might notice that the driver's foot's on the brake pedal making his tail lights smolder red, or that the Honda or Ford is sliding ever so slowly backwards toward the front end of your car (or so you think; or is it an illusion, and it's actually you that's slipping — there's that sensation too). You adjust your position accordingly.  Then there are those minutes when, idling, you might glance to your right just as the driver in the car to your right looks to his or her left and there you are staring at one another, momentary awkwardness of a temporary neighbor in the morning, face of someone you have never seen before — and may just never see again. Do you smile at them? I almost always notice the license plates — certainly the personalized ones. And I see the bumper stickers which are a numerous and revealing. Who will you be voting for next election? Who won't you? Where do your ...

This morning I am thinking of friends I've not seen for more than twenty years — a man whom I met protesting at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant who held the keys to the cars of those of us in our group when we chose to be arrested and while we "did our time" and who became a fast friend from that point forward, and a woman with  whom I read poetry and drank boiler makers in North Beach  and the Mission district of San Francisco, dressed as two of the singing Supremes for Halloween, watched comets in a morning rising sky, a woman who now lives in Prague, or did, the last time we spoke and she was in New York visiting her family. I think of how people say " we talked after all this time and it was as if no time had passed ", and I wish I could bring these old companions into my rooms today, introduce them to my husband, my teenage daughter, and my dog. Thanks to the wizardry of modern day technology I could, if the connections came together, "skype...

My heart in a case. The case on the wall. Seven stations of the cross have nothing on me. Prayer comes in many configurations. Light glinting off glass. My daughter sitting next to me on the sofa. (photograph taken in Lamy's chapel, Bishop's Lodge, north of Santa Fe)

This morning I awake to just a hint of sound. A whirring and a whisper rising carries me back some fifty years, every time. The sound is the sound of birds. Purring sounds found even in the center of a sliding car pound punctuated/workman interrupted town. The fugue fleshes out with the pour and stir of mourning doves in the backyard. I don't know how near or far they are, but I know that they only visit sometimes. Or perhaps I only rise slowly enough on rare occasion to recognize the sound. Their melancholy brings perfectly to mind the recall of childhood naps. Naps in the cozy homes of grandparents who babysat, respites in eastern New Mexico, where the air was so dry that when rainfall did pitch the night, we scoured the gutters for the morning's treasures swept up and left there. Little could we have known that our world was coming undone as our parents grew up and outgrew each other. Still, their parents maintained a calm that was unflappable. Short naps in single beds und...

(if they had corresponded: from Georgia O'Keeffe to Emily Dickinson) Oh Emily, I danced again last night, and this morning there are bruises on my knees! Like black eyes just coming to the surface. Do you remember you once told me that you rolled the rug back and invited friends inside? and danced and flirted with the strict boys? Your parents were away. Today, I am my own stiff form again, but the jasmine of that new stretch lingers. G