every Color all part of all unity upon Unity breath After breath sun Rising sun moon setting mooN high in the Wide Blue bowl of the Sky star birthing star miracle joins miracle death Brings death life gives Life bathed In every Color
Timpanogos, through the window. November 2024. Image, my own.
In Memoriam: November
While the geese continue to fly south Crying, cawing in the early white billows And pillars of sky, the snow comes in Little promises, licking the ground like a prayer The branches in the woods become More bare by day, raw and line-worked Wiring out against the frozen landscape In stands and thickets tromped and tread By silent, fervent feet, over and over again Now the waiting for winter to truly take Hold, for snow to come and bind up Scattered grasses, still the scratching leaves. A memory of Novembers, a palace of dying, Nostalgia of hearths and firesides of Rooting, resting and acceptance
Neighborhood walk. Image, my own.
Palace
tides, ever shifting ever flowing, ocean wave upon wave turning over universes places of refuge
Midway Mercantile. November 2024. Image, my own.
She Burns
No one seems to like it, they claim her strength is admirable that it’s a protection to her and to them, she’s not sure she burns, like a kiln stoked into an inferno, she burns like molten earth just exited from a magma chamber, bright she burns, a dragon girl who never wanted to hurt anyone, seventeen hundred degree flames hiss at who she is near, causing a tremble, a stir, she burns because she knows that women, for centuries, have had to grow small, small and insignificant, accessory and accompaniment, to receive life, she can’t ever let on that she wants learning, love, expression, voice, power no those gifts are reserved for others. She burns like the forge meant to melt metal, meant to make paper towel racks and weapons, she can choose wedding colors and a matching fascinator she can choose rugs, mugs, décor, clothing. She can choose the height of her heels and the blaze of her eyes as long as she stays thin, “nice,” and modest she complies, and writes it in a poem where will she go with this fire?
November windows. 2024. Image, my own.
Refuge
From the moment everything broke we wished for a place of peace and refuge. Another person is never a home, only your own skin and bones can hold you. Another person is never a place except for you are your own place inside your sinews and blood streams and heartbeats. A house can be so much more than a home—a refuge, a covering, a landing, a carrying, a place, a palace. But it would be nothing without you and the warm, bright, dark burdened and unburdening beautiful people who surround you—in sorrow and joy, in tears and laughter, in silence and singing. What is a place? A person is always a place– a place for the heart, body, and mind to attend—a place of love and horror, a place of welcome and displacement, a place of empathy and disgust, a place to be thoughtfully alive, in, inside. The heart of the house is the person who beats inside, who braves the storm to return, who lies down on the floor to pray and bless the space because it is all that holds back the outside, all that protects from life.
Scrub Oak in Transition, September 2024. Image, my own.
Autumn Equinox
there is this balance, this even-keeled consciousness, an equanimity of the breath in the air this time of year, the night and the day coming into equilibrium, living and dying reflected in the vegetation, the need for both action and rest, moving and pause, all things in their time and space
Rubber Rabbitbrush, September 2024. Image, my own.
Evolve -for the elders who’ve shone a light along the way
I’ve been watching the course of Life more closely as I’ve neared ‘halfway’
I’m totally clear, I may die tomorrow of a fungal infection brought on by an errant hang nail
This year, I started to see and understand some parts about this journey called life,
Facets that had never been open to me before, that had never been revealed
In youth. I began to witness the power of personal human evolution.
I’m sure I’ve seen it displayed previously, but now, it seemed closer, more raw and real
The strength, the peace, the solidarity, and grounding that some humans
Offer themselves and others when they choose to live with their arms stretched
Up to the divine, when they’re moving forward in purpose while trusting the
Siren song of the universe to guide them to good ends, and over hard roads, too, don’t
Mistake. I don’t think that living this evolution is simple in any way. To allow the
Lessons that life has offered you to be inculcated into your core, this isn’t a flat
Path, rather peaks and valleys, I see my mother who pursues her passions like watercolor and arts
Grant writing without prompting or celebration, and steadily understands
what she loves, what she holds dear and then lifts up those elements of her
Life, tending to her own garden of desire, she invests her best self in her and us.
All I’m saying is that for a very long time I felt completely perplexed with the recipe of this
thing I was witnessing– evolution– my septuagenarian friends, were practicing this
Art of living with purpose, too, with love and with a fair dose of spicy ironic interjection
Swimming every day, hiking all over the hills and valleys of our home
They were another of my sign-posts. And my uncle, who spoke the eulogy at
My aunt’s celebration of life, a woman who also lived and gave her life over to joy,
He has also chosen to live in the miracle of the era of man, to let life
Be the ocean, the teacher, and he became the student, he’s allowed those learnings
To become part of him in the way he loves his children, the way he acts
In community, the way he carries the knowing that life will always be a question, a universal
Query that we can only answer by living more truly, more soundly, more surely in verity
To that Flame that was lit within us at our birth, the miracle of existence realized, we evolve
Lights. September 2024. Image, my own.
On Being
be who you are and who you can be, and meet those two verities inside yourself with loving kindness and compassion and let it be enough to experience the joy of living as you see fit as you love yourself
Andrew Wyeth Grasses, September, 2024. Image, my own.
Steady in the Fall
the sun and moon move into equilibrium waxing crescent to quarter
peloton of geese ride high in the wide blue sky, calling and answering back, headed south
flowers still bloom, delicate violet saturated yellow, vibrant magenta, as grass fades, sepia to umber
fully bronze dragon fly the size of a silver dollar flickers past in the sun chased by a saxe blue fly the same size
grasshoppers bunch on mustard rabbitbrush in the sway of breeze next to dark-chocolate velvet cattails, stalks steeped in pond-water
cooper’s hawk cries from the brush high and free like an alter ego finding the next rodent in the undergrowth
the air takes on the rush and pulse of crisp wind as the sun’s rays angle longer, cooling field, flower, and fly
Refined + Rugged 