pompom hat

the closet cleaning clothes boxing of your discards
meant to make me feel
lighter; the sadness not in the clothes
themselves nor even in this evidence of time
passing, sizes changing, personalities tried on and rejected
perhaps
a sense of failure in restraining consumption
in training care and appreciation
though the hat is not even the best emblem but merely one
of the last in the pile, the pompom salvaged for when
you decide to wear hats again
rather than this handful of ravaged spangled spandex
that was for one brilliant night a prom dress

the world tells you again

in this fountaining the flutter
wing-dust and scattered
seed, greening

why should you not return
to heartening beneath
your one-note lament

and need for salt don’t say
it’s always the same
for when have you ever noticed

roses blown open to rain
robins food-screeching
in your window-tree?

pneuma

what is the spirit? how you felt
exhilarated in the rain and wind
that one time, you were ten
and traveling, you knew
actual magic
*
you must bring it
the yoga teacher says
no one else can
find those places
of either hurt or release
*
in ancient Greek, I’m told
pneuma, verily only
the stuff of life
which blows
over all our heads
*
true dark skies last summer
Milky Way and eclipsed sun

beyond earth’s wind
beyond need for meaning

quick daily faith crisis

where is that seed of simple
belief that now, now

life is full of beauty? or is it

time to accept the preaching
of payments coming due

mostly cloudy

when will I be    available to this sun
wanting to warm    cloth skin sense
that kernel    last lick of faith
in ground that must prove
again and again    its fertility
to leaf stem root    worm

Prairie Burn, iii.

you say burned out and it means loss
unbelonging here or there, certain
withdrawal root by root, shriveled

another fire set to renew
ensure survival, this smoke
sinks low on black field

gutted clean to bare soil—
when comes the flush of green
growth? will it

Prairie Burn, ii.

your heart, you think, must
by now be something
like that Hill Country scrub—

even your outside prickly
inside hard and harder
dry white

when? there were years
of next-to-no rain
and still the flowers bloomed

filling the book

with what I don’t know about
trees, their loves and losses
intimacies with beetle and worm
higher math. how to curtsey in

and bow out, gracefully
to say no and graciously
yes, these distances between
and how to bridge them. why

a lover fades before your eyes
or changes, or you change. how
to get up every day, new
in the eyes of dog or child

to prevent disappointment.
why words come thick
(fast in your youth, in dreams)
then vanish like the bees

though all the scented flowers
lead like a jeweled trail
to or from your heart—
and all the silent waiting

contemplation 9: you stumble

in one glimmer of nothing, and how easy
—you see—to vanish, to sink in the same
darkness, illogic, as generations before.
no one knows you in your shadowing:
not devil nor demons nor angels nor men
(who wrote you off, and how long ago?)
—but will it be now, at mud’s deep
that you instinctively reach an arm out
to swim, that the air takes your lungs
with all the force of forgiveness?

Resonating with today’s Hafiz read, “To Make You Perfect,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky

contemplations 7&8: your wholehearted servant

Pick the object of your devotion—stomach,
brain—and call it your garden, say it is
for the sake of others; that the fluttering
leaves are your heart; that those twist-reach-
scramble vines growing heavy on themselves
(leaning, leaning) will someday feed thousands.

*

Life, I am your wholehearted servant. Or—
as much of a heart as I have left, is yours devoted
to shutting out tight these misgivings, which lean
toward a belief that my heart is, in fact,
a dropped glass screen. One minute safe
in your hand, the next face-down on pavement.
You know that sound: sudden, small, stifled apology
for becoming useless. How then the fragments
ingrain themselves, how eyes grow used
to a fractured view.

Inspired by Hafiz, “Pray to Your Hand,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky