There's a time, somewhere between 12am and 6am,
When all artistic, damaged or insomniatic souls
Feel like they're completely alone
Even though we're all awake and feeling the same thing.
12am is still too loud, still too car engines and shouting,
And 6am is too light, too exposing and awake, aware.
It's blackness but for the starlight puncturing holes in the sky,
That's when the magic arises and enchants us.
The way the moon looks at us and begs us to untrouble our weary hearts,
So we do it, and we do it willingly.
She is the most unfaithful lover, and it is beautiful.
How she cherishes each whispered secret so deeply
That it leaves a crater on her being.
How she takes on our pain unflinchingly,
And only needs 28 days to feel whole again.
There's a time, somewhere between 12am and 6am,
When the most trapped souls can feel such freedom.

Walking home in the rain,
Carrying the groceries in one hand,
And a fallen leaf in the other.

Pulling up the hood of my mother's raincoat,
I take a minute to sit on a bench
While rain keeps pouring from above.

I stare at the leaf,
And then the sky,
And I realize,
This place isn't my home
Anymore.

I always thought
My home would be a familiar place,
But it's not.

I always thought
Home would be where my parents were,
Where my brothers and sisters were,
Where I've grown up,
And the place my friends live.

But I was wrong.

So just like how
Fall shows you that letting things go
Can be beautiful,
I need to let this place go
Too.

This just isn't my home
Anymore.

My home is a laugh,
A smile,
Warm arms around me
After tears and nightmares.

I care too much,
I get hurt too easily.
Fall too quickly.
This isn't my home anymore.

My home isn't a familiar place,
Rather a familiar face.

It's midnight and the silence is speaking,
The silence is full of words, words interruped
By thoughts. The words expose themselves
To the wind out of my open window.
(I am on the third floor) I float off my bed
And to the open of the city, there beneath is
An Ashe tree under the yellow of the moon,
It seems to slow dance with the subtle
Beats of the nocturnal, a streetlight
Pulses. In the distance all is an orchestral
Silence as the city breathes, suddenly
Within the abyss inside me I feel a welling
A passion deeper than the unexpected lover,
I am paralyzed with words dropping me
I to the foliage of the unwritten, threading
A song like the electrical humm of the power
Lines, a hymn forms, a nocturnal lament,
I am alone with everything.....

2. I refuse the lamp at my desk, my body craves
The dead man's sleep. The silence grows bold,
It rises like a full moon in me, it grows louder
Suddenly the meadow is alive under some deep
Horizon, the moment is an awakening
Of words, the need like an insatiable appetite,
A sweat sets upon means a cool breeze
Kisses it's lament flowing into my very
Being. It is passion, the unchained melody
under the maestro's sky. I fathom the world
Around me, I cannot remember walking
To my desk.

3. The lamp light shatters the fragments
Of the night, they turn Into words as if
From the fleece of my flesh. All is the silence, every
Word pouring like a sea of ink crashing waves
To paper. The silver of the city reflecting,
The poem is not a poem but a confession
In the dark exploding syllables like
Secrets in a prayer. My hand is guided to
Paper and I cannot form a single word-

4.The melody is gone, only the idea of the dream
Survives reaching for a thought, it slips
My grasp, my own vanishes, the words
Disappear, the inklings gone: love,
Lust, live, life, lend, loop, locked? A prison forms around the words, my thoughts hover like vultures, the carcass
Was a poet Saint, he died of the thirst floating
In an ocean of words he cannot drink,
Salt in the mind. A sacrifice he was to the
Depths of thought, silence creeps in again ,
The Enourmous Night, inward, deeper
Into the soul, penetrating.....

5. The nocturnal presence returns, a flattering
Sorrow in the silence, the thoughts disappear,
I cut off my mind from the world,
Reality is dead and I killed it with the
Gesture of my pen,"I am here"
The silence kisses my lips, the gathering  inside
Myself thwarting any thought, the scorn
Of the verses sets my hand on fire,
My pen is the heat of the sun writing
On a slab of Jade, I am no longer me,
But the perpetual silence that birthed a poem,
The syllables are born and I am
A prisoner of words.

A fig tree grows
in a back yard in West Seattle.
The splayed waxy leaves span the air.

A few green unripe figs are developing.
Hard to spot,
but there none the less
If we do have sun,
the fruit will ripen to a dark shoe polish brown.

Let's assume
birds do not pluck at the figs,
saving the crunchy seeds for us
to savor
and worry our tongue
some lazy afternoon.

I know how it was in that time
sixty years ago when roads seen
from above were little more than
two thin tracks through grass.

My mind has heard the noiseless roads
cutting unfenced fields, passing cherry groves,
skirting steepest hills and flat lakes,
making settled burgs where roads cross.

I know how it was in that time
when many-handed harvests,  
sweet smells and back breaking work
were wrenched away without referendum.

Wrenched away by Ford's cast iron.
Wrenched away without option of staying
to enjoy the scale of day-long trips
on foot, in wagon or buggy.  

Our innocent grandfathers too,
wrenched away, not unwillingly, from plowfields,
to be told by newspaper and newfangled radio  
of the one-day Atlantic crossing.

I know how it was in that time.
I've seen it from three or five hundred feet;
the quick shadow and lake-mirrored
image of fabric covered wood and wire.

I've gently flown, pocketa, pocketa,
in that time; in a ship as much a product
of those shifting decades as of its tinkerer/
designer, builder, pilot, Pietenpol.

I dreamed of my father
crossing the fields
on his one-eyed tractor
mowing acres of sadness
heading east of a moon
that'll be gone tomorrow
and I waded the creek
beneath a ridge
where my mother is shearing
dead roses and the smell
of those flowers floating
to the foot of the mountains
reminds me of her hair
and my father's laughter
disappearing across the hill.

as fragile
as a songbird -

her hands

knotted and spotted
from many winters


november came one last time -
i held her hands in mine - gently

- gently, she flew away
to where songbirds go
when it's cold in the mountains.

r ~ 11/18/14

we the daughters of sliced sunbeams
and those who chase gales in between
the pasture gates and barbed fences behind
the silo--

who think there's nothing softer than the way
honey sounds drizzled on toast or daisy petals at the supermarket
the women of ferocious silences, standing before
dozens with trimmed smiles and deafening inner beauty

squeezing our fingers down barley stalks and sewing
the roots into our dresses, we've tried six ways to sunday
the rules, the book on being wanted, before realizing that anything
born out of self-indulgence wilts away
all the work we did to grow and plait our hair with vanilla,
dipped in sweet almond oil we had no idea
that pretending
could only get us
so


far.

Morning will be here
soon enough says the moon,

only the night knows the truth
that lies dark in your heart

where love sleeps forever,
deep, and never dreaming.