I am the One

I am the one

Who took your hand

When you offered it to me.

I am the pledge of emptiness

That turned around.

Even the trees smiled.

Always I was the bird

That flew off through the branches.

Now

I am the cat

With feathers

Under its tongue

I invited your yesterday to open your arms with me to offer our hands to all of life.  Well, of course this means to offer our hand to all of death.  I keep forgetting this, and Mary keeps reminding me.

 I have a plan to start offering the chickadees and nuthatches seeds from my hand so that I could touch their beauty.  I imagine myself holding my hands up to the sky so that love may alight in my soul.  Then another voice says, you do that, and the tame birds will come to harm at someone else’s hands.  Your desire will kill them.

I am not saying that I will go ahead with this project – I want to study the possible harm that might come.  I tell you this more as a metaphor for the struggle.  How much time do we spend studying our actions and in the meantime the bird flies off to sing somewhere else? 

Harm is the price of doing business in this world.  It’s not a nice taste in my mouth these feathers of my beloved.

What do you taste this morning?

Forty Years

for forty years

the sheets of white paper have

passed under my hands and I have tried

to improve their peaceful

emptiness putting down

little curls little shafts

of letters words

little flames leaping..

forty years

and again this morning as always

I am stopped as the world comes back

wet and beautiful I am thinking

that language

is not even a river

is not a tree is not a green field

is not even a black ant traveling

briskly modestly

from day to day from one

golden page to another.

Yesterday Mary spoke of her 40 years of listening and how a few words of prose and poetry come to her as gifts. Yet the words seem to stand in the way of her total melding with life. She listens and flows with all that is, and then when she writes, she becomes human, separate. In the very act of sharing her heart's entwinement with animals, plants, and the earth, she must unravel what it means to be human, and become alone. Is her experience so different than my experience in writing this morning? In you reading these words? What are we doing not out in the beautiful wet morning?

I am just back from the wet morning - a thunderstorms evidence sparkling about and my shirt soaked through with summer's humidity. Along my path I encountered a still living armadillo on the side of the road. She suffered a crushing blow, but was still somewhat conscious. I must write, I must share, I must witness, this next typed letter no more precious than the ants swarming around her. I use words to feed my human colony to know of my heart ache over her suffering, and of my appreciation that Alachua County Animal Services will send someone out to help her. Words serve us, though the calling to serve means we step back and let our heart and mind focus on tasks and know the pain of separation from the beloved earth.

How do words serve you? How do you use words to serve?

Stars

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?...

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent-

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and wiling, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I'm forever saying.

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit-

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now

Even as the darkness has remains the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

Mary, the great translator. She takes the lives of animals and puts them into words. Even the dead bear and otter speak to us in that we are to listen to life while we live, and not to death. So now, in the Gulf of Mexico, the dying animals are fleeing from the outer waters to die in the marshes, alone. Or so says the morning paper. Why is it that we as a people are waking up to life by listening to death? What if we listened, really listened, and put into words the beauty of the non-oiled habitats and splashed them all over our media, and not just in isolated books of prayers and poetry? What if every word spoken or written was a prayer of hope that we might listen and love while we may, and be grateful for this gift.

What words come to you when you look up at the stars?