swirl, twirl, twist
- can anything be straight?

they say God does not lay down parallel lines

lines in the sand
when you are the particle

particles within particles

within particles

its no wonder we know very little

love songs wake us up

wake us to ourselves

how short we fall

every time.

every heart longs to love

but not every heart

knows what it is to love.

to love
yes
to love

to lay your life down

that so

others may fully live.

the wind sings

and I

shelter.

cry into my nothingness

curl into foetal.

regress

look deep

into black.

She was born in December
Outside
In the snow

She read one thousand pages
before her seventh birthday

She climbed forty trees in a fortnight

She quieted the unruly children with one look
all three hundred of them

She ran the fastest mile
She'd run over ten thousand miles before she died

Ate a whole cow once,
slept with 500 men

Never satisfied,
never satisfied.

She cured heartache,
She played the violin
Cello
Harpsichord
each note spun like Vivaldi

Always playing,
never satisfied.

She climbed Everest
"Not enough!"
she sighed

She raised three daughters
Fierce as hell, all three

And they raised seven daughters,
the fiercest of them all

She did it in stride
Never faltered
Never celebrated

She sung in the opera
in her spare time

Never satisfied,
never satisfied.

I hope you understand
when my lips seal shut
and my touch,
empty and cold.

I hope you understand
when my words are hardly
voiced and my silence
grow thick and bold.

I hope you understand
when I appear disconcerted
and this skin just rubs me irate.

I hope you understand
that I am in battle
and the demons
are at the gate.

It's Sunday
past Saturday,
past Friday,
past another night,
a sigh,
my father up
in the sky,
the cold,
the question, the who,
the why,
the human blood,
that heavy load
and cold again,
and heaven
in full size,
the cross, the nails,
take care, first
take care
of your crave
and decorate
your room
like a tomb
with low light,
a spoon,
and a stone
with your name.

I kneel in a field of wheat grass
catching grasshoppers.

I scoop underhand into my jar, another
at the height of its jump, a third.

I put my jar by the stream, pull one
out and I grab it, force my barbed steel
hook through the belly still trembling.

I cast long loops of line into the drift
below rocks where current
froths and whirls.

I stand mechanically slightly ashamed, uncomfortable on that shaded bank
where trout strike hard.

I let them swim, then hold fast, reeling one, exhausting him, wrenching him
into air, his tail drumming against the sky.

Hanging  from the line
his fat belly flinches.

All his life of riding rapids, hiding
in flats embraced by waters’ fast flow,
by red rainbows in his scales.

I didn’t expect that open mouth,
that whiteness, the gills stop twitching,
the eyes caught in that open stare.