As Mourning Doves Persist

Forest of thin trees not so thin to not hide her. Dips  in the walk needles, soft, Light through feather arms,  likely no more than a man-made block but for this girl, it was Sherwood Forest. Long scream of hawk, wingspan broad. Pausing first at the pond with its pollywogs. Then entering. This limitless place -  not lost, no one  need  find her.  Caps of moss. Hooves far off . Honeysuckle  and her dull duplex  left longing with its barbie dolls  in small  travel cases with  pink  shoes,  always lost.  What grows  here is edible if you can identify. Patches and squares of timeless scruff. Missing  reference, she  names names - shirtless tree, paint can, pokey man, little sister's tease, her mother's favorite  poetry: Dickinson's slant of light.

How to describe the distance I walked for those six days. How I reached inside. What exactly transpired, meeting women who could tune the entire orchestra or craft a snake wrapped around a boy's ankles standing on a precipice, sweating. How to tell that one scholar had dyed a portion of her wispy hair electric blue and that another joined me in the farthest room in the library (always open) and that before she began writing, she laid out her utensils including a chocolate colored fan folded on the flat table. I typed with two fingers on the pad of an iPad inherited from my college bound daughter, evoking sixteen brothers and sisters as if they had just, after 59 years, been handed to me anew as a whole to hold up to the light. Desert light which under my green umbrella on the path brought less unsettling glint to gradually reveal the most frightening parts. Home now, I walk through the house shirtless and with knowledge. Recalling how on free Friday we paused only long enough t

Having just spent an exceptional week of study and sturdy walks from one end of northern New Mexico's Ghost Ranch property to the next, in the company of more than one hundred women writers at A Room of Her Own (AROHO) retreat, I was introduced to the concept of the hero/heroine's journey with its setting off from a safe, if not full color, home - think Dorothy in Kansas not yet Technicolor; crossing the threshold; dipping into battle or exploration - yellow brick road; witch on a bicycle with monkeys; and rising back up again in the companionship of your posse, then...having prevailed, returning. This is, mind you, an enormously over simplified version of the equation. We struggled, the ten of us in this Master Class, with just what weapons, wounds, and accolades the woman receives in her trek. Given a writing prompt to record my version of the heroine's journey, the poem below is what was generated: (amniocentesis: voyage of perfect delay) Root cellar here or bomb

Patsy Cline is singing in the living room while I wash the morning's dishes. My husband is at the computer refashioning his novel. Last night I sat at the table with two other poets, thoughtful women with whom I will read tomorrow in a local bookstore on the acequia in Santa Fe. We practiced tentatively at first with one another. Barbara pretending to look up and out over her glasses at the imaginary. I closing my eyes to gauge the distance between the reader and the song spun out to the songs inside of others. Tania brings her elegant, old world surname which we mark into syllables for proper introduction though, under the influence of two dark beers at that lesson-taking, I am not even entirely sure where I scribbled the phonetic cheat sheet.  Not to worry. We will forget certain things and remember others as we stand to clear our throats and aim to remain calm projecting the humor, our compact stories, and favorite music to those present.  When the cowgirl's nostalgic a