Percy (Four) and What I Said at Her Service - September 18, 2010

I went to church.
I walked on the beach
And played with Percy.

I answered the phone
And paid the bills
I did the laundry.

I spoke her name
A hundred times.

I knelt in the dark
And said some holy words.

I went downstairs,
I watered the flowers.
I fed Percy.

What I Said at Her Service

When we pray to love God perfectly,
Surely we do not mean only.

(Lord, see how well I have done.)

With just a little bit of luck, and grace, overseen by our glancing intentions, we may discover that our imperfect lives are a prayer to God. For out of the love lost and relationships broken is the lived testament to a world that paradoxically broke our hearts so that we might love more. It is our very longing that is our healing. And so Mary goes through her days and prays and plays. A perfect life riddled with pain, torn asunder so that love expands ever more giving ever more space for her to commit her life to pen and paper, feeding us.

Spring - April 6, 2010

Somewhere

a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring

down the mountain.

All night

in the brisk and shallow restlessness

of early spring

I think of her..

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

I think of her

rising

like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

the silence

of the trees

Whatever else

my life is

with its poems

and its music

and its glass cities,

It is also this dazzling darkness

coming

down the mountain,

breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her-

her white teeth,

her wordlessness,

her perfect love.

Okay, Mary, you've nailed it down to one question, although just a few poems ago, your question was, what is a soul? Perhaps this comes out of the question, "how to love the world." The question is not how to be loved? Why me? Why not me? Or how shall I die and when? How shall I best meet my needs? In the asking, I feel empowerment. In the asking, we give ourselves a choice. Now, this moment, we choose how to love. Shall it be wordlessly like the bear? Watching like in so many of Mary's poems? Reading this poem?

How do you love the world?

Happiness – March 13, 2010

Happiness – March 13, 2010

In the afternoon I watched

The she-bear; she was looking

For the secret bin of sweetness-

Honey..

Maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe

A little drunk…

And began to hum and sway.

I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle

Into the leaves, and her thick arms,

As though she would fly-

An enormous bee

All sweetness and wings-

Down into the meadows, the perfection

Of honey suckle and roses and clover-

To float and sleep in the sheer nets

Swaying from flower to flower

Day after shining day.

The bear turns into a bee and floats in interconnected nets.

We turn into being and happiness in the web of existence-

Caught, floating, flying.

What causes you to be sleepy or intoxicated with life?

The Sea – March 12, 2010

Stroke by

Stroke my

Body remembers that life and cries for

The lost parts of itself-

Fins, gills

Opening like flowers into

The flesh…I swear I know

Just what the blue-gray scales

Shingling

The rest of me would

Feel like!

Paradise!

..the very bones! How

They long to give up the long trek inland, the brittle

Beauty of understanding,

And dive,

And simply

Become gain a flaming body

Of blind feeling…

Vanished like victory inside that

Insucking genesis, that

Roaring flamboyance, that

Perfect

Beginning and

Conclusion of our own.

In the last several poems Mary has written of the fire of union and here it is again. She is looking outside of being human, of her own body, to see the beauty without that lures her into melding into the great sea. She appears to look at being human as only a burden of love, of thinking as opposed to feeling and being. I am now on the lookout for any of her poems that are drawn to beauty from the existence of humanity, that surely has its own perfection beginning and conclusion of its own, because it is not separate from what we perceive as other, but which is ours to claim as ours. I want to be on the look out for human beauty in my own life, for it is my gift to see it, and my sin to not.

Do you resist accepting humans, either individually or as a whole, as perfect and belonging on this planet? What might you gain if you did accept and embody humans inherent worth and dignity?

Ghosts - March 1, 2010

1

Have you noticed?

2

Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts

lay down on the earth and died

it's hard to tell now

what's bone, and what merely

was once...

4

...In the book of the earth it is written:

nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:'

they have gone away into the earth to hide.

nothing will coax them out again

but the people dancing...

6

...Have you noticed? how the rain

falls soft as the fall

of moccasins. Have you noticed?..

...the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also

have you noticed? gone now.

7

...in a dream

I watched while, secretly

and with the tenderness of any caring woman,

a cow gave birth

to a red calf...

...in the fragrant grass

in the wild domains

of the prairie spring, and I asked them,

in my dream I knelt down and asked them

to make room for me.

Oh Mary, here you are always with questions and answers. You ask if there is room for yourself. Is there room on this planet for a species such as ours? Will there ever be enough room in the earth, in the grass, and in death? This leads me to another question: How can I make room for death and extinction, now this moment in my heart, for myself, for the buffalo, for the Passenger Pigeon, for the Carolina Parakeet, so that I may make room for life?

Where do you make room to ruminate over the losses of the past, which endure today?

Mushroom - February 25 2010

Rain, and then

the cool pursed

lips of the wind

draw them

out of the ground...

...some

balancing in the earth

on one hoof

packed with poison..

...looking innocent as sugar

but full of paralysis:

to eat

is to stagger down

fast as mushrooms themselves

when they are done being perfect

and overnight

slide back under the shining

fields of rain.

Out in the woods are plants that save and seduce, beckoning us to join them in the composting of leaves and lives. Mushrooms for example. Last week I went for a walk where mushrooms peppered the trails. They were such perfect things - and I wondered how it was I knew so little about them. I have no ideas which one would kill, and which would thrill with their hallucinogenic properties. Others would likely fill my gullet with savory delight. Mushrooms are one of my favorite foods, but I know them not. Maybe I stay away from them in the wild state because I do not trust myself to discern what is friend and what is foe. I grew up with my mother saying "don't pick and eat mushrooms except what you can get in the store." I wonder what other messages she and my cultures gave me that keep me away subconsciously from what might nourish me. In part, this too explains my reactions to some people, or even our species as a whole. If we could but discern who is with us, and who is not, we could awake in the day knowing whether to save or savor the day. Maybe I'm just dreaming. Perhaps, like mushrooms, we know there is beauty hidden in the wet rug that blankets wildness, and choose to admire from afar.

Do you eat any wild foods? What nourishes you that is wild and untamed?

Buck Moon - Form the Field Guide to Insects - February 14, 2010

Eighty-eight thousand six-hundred

different species in North America. In the trees, the grasses

around us. maybe more, maybe

several million on each acre of earth. This one

as well as any other...

...Where, resting, you feel

the perfection, the rising, the happiness

of their dark wings.

Yesterday Mary couldn't concentrate and the crows chased her away from the kingdom of the family of things. Today, in insects she sees perfection in every corner of the world where the insects sing of interconnection, or belonging, of possible happiness for us here, now. This sense of belonging seems so illusive, so hard won, and then sometimes a moment of grace descends and asks us to rise in joy with it. I am thinking of yesterday too, where I went with some 15 Unitarian Universalists from our congregation to La Chua Trail, Payne's Prairie. There we spent 2.5 hours sighting one kind of bird after other in the cold wind under a sharp gifting blue sky. They came to earth in their wings, one Red-shouldered Hawk eating a snake in front of us, a Sora limping through the reeds, a Bittern in solitary repose - all singing of the love flying within.

Where does perfection appear in your life?