Skip to main content

Made Visible

The yard is swathed in blossoms.
Ornamental plum come full circle,
its leaves like paper revisions
discarded

to this season with pale burgundy
droplets falling. As if to sound
breath’s arterial thread
through the body’s old canals.

This honey powder hint. Responsive in breeze.
Transparent feeder empty against the tree
where holiday lights remain in sunlight.
Spark of what comes next. 

Crab apple or apricot. Promise of patient
daughter. Her pockets.   

Yet as I watch this morning there is
no one out there and no picking yet
except to spy the subtler pigments –
pink and white and hint of tan

peering from the tips of tributaries.
One branch you’ve tied together at a bend as if
we know something of grafting. Or, simply,

set out to repair what’s gone absent with
brittle memory. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent                                                 mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes     from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew   She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow     (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender)   (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present     (anyone’s mother)    aging    when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin                         captures the sunrise light like   anticipation’s shower      blood underneath all        humming bird or spores from her heart and in her mouth   inhale (frightened) breath     exhale grit inhale (certain) breath           exhale grit  
Post a Comment
Read more

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the frame down to contain what we came to hear I have applied lipstick
Post a Comment
Read more

A Matter of Travel

Solstice, 2019, for Tracy 1. And cross borders we do often without leaving our houses. Our bodies dream of gardens. Our hands flutter as feeling exits as we press hard against the solid entry door.  I type the names of cities. My search reveals rivers,  airfares, temperatures  in July. 2.  Seeking sleep, I am transported through music piped into  tiny earbuds. While on an island my father has two seizures  in the night. His ten children fly to one another with cautionary fright, typing. Time zones vary from each cell phone exclamation. Two sisters, you and I, raise questions that barely touch down  for others  but I witness you. 3. By morning we’re assured was merely fainting, and I reconsider change of plans. No emergency to rush to his quiet side. I walk no farther instead to this table for eggs, an English muffin. Arrive inside my individual conclusions. Concern that happiness, once again, is quickly stymied.
7 comments
Read more