As Mourning Doves Persist

Yoga in the library. Pyramid of managers. Some whose legs cross and sit flush to the floor. Others who need a straight back chair. I realize I can breathe the rapid breaths that energize. But it's holding my arms up in the air, fingers laced together like a hammock, that is the hard part. Writer's cramp. Arms used to resting on the edge of the desk. Wrists on the raft of computer keyboard. Who am I to expect these shoulders to have the stamina of a teen. Teen on the monkey bars. Pulling up. I am grateful for these older and well exercised eyes. Blue is the emotion underneath the meditation on white palms one atop the other, lightning bolts from the fingertips.

Along the road out of Monticello, NM It's eight minutes after midnight and I cannot sleep. I crawl out of bed, fumble for the light switch in the study. I expect the dozing dog underfoot but she isn't there. I anticipate my daughter's television might still be humming midnight advertisements, but there is no light from under her white door. It is the eleventh day of the new year and I am too absorbed with significant insignificance to rest. I stay too late at work typing pleas to agencies with money to give to the agency where I work that is running out. I think somehow if I conjugate the perfect 350 word explanation for each question then I can single-handedly right the imbalance. But as I place my ear to the lonely pillow I realize that tonight, instead, I am no longer the crusader. I am thinking instead of a poet I have known for more than thirty years. His wife has just died from breast cancer and his handwritten letter was waiting for me patiently when I arrived ho...

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 h...

Now I am in receipt of 62 pages of chicken scratch, brilliant interventions like ants on PDF scroll. Insert hair space. Begin new paragraph. Move right. Move left. It's a marching band of squiggles. But, really, I am grateful for the all-seeing eyes of a editor who knows too the music inside the lines, despite the marks of which there are many. He points out that it's the vases that never empty of water, not the roses. Although I must admit the image in my mind now of yellow roses with petals full of damp curiously conjures the springy touch of aloe vera broken from its home before you slice it open, releasing the balm to apply to a scrape.  I read the margin's menu carefully, a page at a time, remembering another language, that of the proofreader's marks. From The Shape of Caught Water : This morning the mourning dove's call, overridden  by far off traffic sounds, I walk the hallway with  fingertips on the walls, braille in surrender. What will arrive...

When I first began posting on this blog I was inspired by a weekly horoscope that offered the following: "...It's important that you do what you do best without any embellishment, pretentiousness, or self-consciousness. Don't you dare try to hard or think too much or twist yourself like a contortionist to meet ... expectations. Trust the thrust of your simple urges." For ten months I worked collaboratively on a manuscript of imaginary letters with a dear, longtime friend only to eventually scrap it, or, let's say temporarily set it aside to age. We felt we could no longer move forward due to constraints that were being placed on the work from the outside. It was our decision that we were in fact twisting and contorting, re-writing and subsequently producing something that began to no longer resemble the original work. This simply didn't feel right. We opted to hold true to the initial intention. I then began assembling a book-length manuscript of poems and...

Rising from the damp ditch of short sleep acequia lady picks up her traveling mandolin to accompany boom box bass on wheels passing on the wet street. Bus comes by. Push brake hiss at the rigid stop sign corner. Wistful 'o' in the mouth of the bronze mother in the artist's yard floats as if a piano in her esophagus is escaping.

Entire summer days, we run slick pavement. Hurl ourselves from a low board into cool water for shiny pennies tossed. Underwater tea parties and handstands. Skinny legs in the air ready to ignite. At night from a back bedroom window, I spy on the swimming pool. Light left on illuminates  the moving rectangle of blue. Hole my father dug to hold us there. My sister and brother asleep in the same room. Outside, bats like dark kites dare the night.