Skip to main content

Heart Awaiting

My teenage daughter has had her heart broken. There is a journey ahead now. We have all been here too more than once, most likely, in our lives, but that is no consolation as she holds her face against the soft inside of her forearm, crying that she does and does not know what to do.

 This afternoon is the first public reading from my poetry collection, The Shape of Caught Water. Though the book will not officially launch until Spring, I will stand up and bare my heart in a room of strangers and friends as winter light stripes the air in the museum where history hangs on the walls. As I was looking at the table of contents to select poems for the reading, I realized how many of the poems were written for or about my daughter. She is a "chip off of my heart", I typed to someone I'd not seen in thirty years earlier today, describing the awe-inspiring child I gave birth to. She is blistering hot and cold like lemonade and iced tea; she carries the rain in her precious hands and brings hurricane spells that seem as though they will not break for the tension of running ahead with no clear direction. She is Paul Revere. She is Emily Dickinson. The muse has visited her house and mine. 

 This day, for those that observe, is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent is a season observed as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for celebration. I press my fingers lightly against my eyelids and await the quiet quickening of the heart that rises and falls washing over an anxious soul. I wish for snow and fresh pinon burning in the fireplace. The gifts ahead will surely be many.


Comments

  1. Art GoodtimesDecember 3, 2012 at 2:43 AM

    ah, yes. the blessings of our children. and of a new book -- break an iamb at the reading, dear muse of the inner sunset

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 fr...
Post a Comment
Read more

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   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...
Post a Comment
Read more