i want to sit next to my sister - we do not have to say anything --- do I recognize her as a near 30 year old? - i want to stop and curl and curve my body like a little conch shell - i want to hum like the ocean - the songs of infants - the hands of grandparents - i want to laugh on my death bed - surrounded by bugs and bees digging deep into pollen cradles, clawing and rolling in dust, rocking wind.

i want to braid my sister's freshly washed, cool, clean turquoise green hair.  it feels like it has been years since i did something so simple, so caring.  i want to sit and weave it until there is almost nothing left, but the silk aqua rope i can run my fingers down like water.  i want to thread the pieces over and under my heart strings.  she is the earth, the sky, the moon - the altars of rocks - the shapes we see in them.

///
i dreamt of a woman sleeping - she was made of sand - she was off the shore of new york city --- before the sky scrapers, streets, pandemonium --- with purple kelp for hair.  she was so beautiful - a sand bar, as big as a dune, beneath a thin layer of sun-warmed translucent water as open as day.   she was silent, laying like a fetus on her side under the waves.  i swam to her, held in on the loose sand like an anemone. \\

i want to sit on a warm rock in the sun - overlooking the valley, the lake, the blue mountains.  i want to be the Appalachian air - i want to do nothing - but to live.  i want to listen and dance and run and flow - join a coven, scale a cliff.  i want to talk to the night, watch birds and find mushrooms - follow magical, mysterious things.  oxblood berry juice runs down my fingers.

filling the bath up to the overflow drain - i want to fix the faucet.  spaces became smaller, memories overlap and forage in Michigan forests.  the sprawl and creep - moss inches glacially over our backs.  the spine remains on the island, the bogs embalm.  i sit sweetly, cross legged, twisting my hair around my finger - thinking of pebbles as road systems, sycamore and sumac houses.  the quietest, mildest evening sunlit place you could imagine bathed in green and gold, grace - lit and heaven - struck.  a place of peace, calm, warm.

i am thinking about the sound of the stream through the house, how we always can choose simpler.  i want permeable walls to the sunrise - to rain sounds - to the crickets and cicadas and spiders - to the smoke, the fog, the mountain laurel.  wild raspberries are wisps of cadmium red on raw canvas.  ducks fade in and out of graphite and watercolor drawings against the sky // buoyant on the pond, hawthorn and mugwort dreaming.

i want to see the flickering rainbow lights, sit on a fairy's wing.  sway and jump and spread my arms wide - wide - wider - up - up - and up!  iridescent, shining, on a beam of light.  i am lighter than air, i am the essence of light.  the memory of time.

a copper suncatcher eye, a fragmentation through a lens.  i want to sit - i want to rest and run backwards in my mind - upside down and through the channels of plants - tracing each petal of a daisy.  the circulatory system of green canopies.  i want to turn off and on again, i want to be shocked and taken to the sea.

the patterns take me, the colors soar.  i sit and feel the love from everything.  it is tangible, weaving itself between my fingers like yarn.

uncover my soul, tell me it is real?  i want to make - i want to remember - i want to plant, eat, grow.  i sit and revel at it all - my motherhood, my sisterhood, their daughters.  the womb, the darkness to light to the peat.

to live in a spiral bound sketchbook, in my great grandmother margaret's wooden, hand-painted pencil box.  i would make the memory of her love my home.  the piano keys float through open kentucky windows to the garden.

i tighten the knot, the bread rises in the corner of the kitchen.  i live in a place where i am but i am not - the story is told, i put together the pieces differently.  the forest shatters, i'm holding a piece of the mirror from 3 years ago.  it shimmers, cuts, fades, dissipates the bass neon jungle throughout the night - i find it all incredibly comforting and dizzying, being made of love to love to be loved.

the moon phases - arcs - dips - dives - toward you - through you - glowing, resonant, alive  //\||

on his birthday, a trick of the eye
a chime, lime green glimmering dark
slowly, a harp being plucked.  another chord - a melody unfolds.
buoyant hum -- the first of seasons, the first of firsts.

climbing the rocky, root-laddered hill, Sylvia's blackberrying echoes on my breath.  she frames the bakery courtyard, the home hill (an old couple planted daffodils under them, every year we cut some for our mother), and the bushes next to our apartment.  my foot arches around the curve of a root, and an oriole beams last rays of sunset as he darts into the dark.  cinnamon, caramel, and chocolate waft off my clothes.  they dance with the open, earthy, and full scent of her, encompassing.

intertwined, woven in the basket that held my mother's ribbons, our gratitude, and the elementary playground (we climbed the fence behind the basketball hoops, stretching to reach and shake the pale purple, sweet berries).  coils of gold, glitter, silk, satin, the handprint leaves, the gradient of small white to full purple bumpy pockets of sun.  such of tangible happiness I could hold it - twist it in my hands... even braid it into my daughter's long blonde hair.

we watch the mother and her three fawns, so close.  I can be happy anywhere if I see my friends.  rabbits, deer, lightning bugs, blackberries, dawn redwoods, and birds at dusk.  If I close my eyes I feel the earth, the prickly grass, and ants' expedition across my legs.  I remember.  like the first time, being called home for dinner.  overturn a rock, mesmerized by the traffic of roots, bugs, the city underground.  every day is something to cherish, to fill, to love, to share, to learn, to explore.

we are reborn in art. where the forest swallows the city horizon, a cocoon of peace.  I am always transforming.  a cool stream carved the valleys of Pittsburgh, beyond the plateau of the meadow hill and through the winding trails.  sisyphus's stone is a pile sand; the rocks are smooth as I turn them over in my hands, no jagged edges in my pocket.  my footprints fossilize, collaged with clover, fern, daisy.  a resonance that opens your heart - bathing in belonging.  the sounds, textures, smells, colors, and creatures welcome you here.

the museum of outside.  it was one woman who wanted it.  now it is everything.  the pictures in the gallery sit still - i tell my children that we can play pretend.  jump in the painting.  take a deep breath.  what do you smell?  flowers, pine trees.  what do you hear?  rushing water, birds, wind, frogs ribbiting.  what can you feel?  splash the cold, clear water - woo!   can a museum be a place of joy, exuberance, noise?  can we see everyone represented in it - even the smallest of creatures?  why have we done so much to be 'industrialized', 'civilized', 'developed', if we have sterilized, destroyed, polluted, and erased culture - intrinsically related to land?  

I say thank you to all the beings.  I say it out loud.  Sometimes I whisper.  Sometimes I am too awestruck to do anything but gaze.
I wonder if my presence transforms them, too.  I teach in the museum the next day, waiting to surrender back to the blanket of green.  from marble floors, satin walls, glittering crystal, and hand-painted ceilings, to holding hands.  playing.  running.  being wild.  whispering I love you to all.

the lightning bugs love the tree - they almost seem to follow our path home.  

𓆣 · 𓆨 · 𓆤 · 𓆦 · 𓆑 · 𖦹 ·

wild blueberries sprout in houses I’ve never been -
dusty rose candles illuminate oak boards like cherry blossom spring -
childhood dogs nest into your side -
with a sister you’ve never met sleeping across -
so close your hands could touch.

dried babies breath spray the corners of collaged vases -
newspaper scraps of 1992 -
lives lived like perfect texts -
stories imbued in every tree ring from the wedding cake stand, the lace, the cotton, the wool and cashmere and canopies and love of orchids, living unapologetically, ferns clouding the periphery of the yard where earth worms and potato bugs and lilac and lily of the valley call native ground.  

it’s easier to write of them,
wanting nothing than to be had,
having nothing but to want,
wanting everything yet nothing at all.

the sunlight tilts, rabbits play at dusk.  follow the tunnel of ferns -
the scent of green lushness opens forest floor.  
crows gather, cicadas hum.  stars come out one by one by one.  rather - eyes adjust -
we tilt, sway under ceramic bowl sky -
the earth eclipses the sun
living in totality or utter absence

we are not alone :
life is - indeed - the exception.

is a poem

a collective cognitive

a love letter from being small and being on the floor: the space is warm and monumental and safe.  

who doesn't value floor time?  

pine box creaks with raindrop footfalls, warping windfall feeds deer amidst haunting gardens like chipped ancient acrylic beads muddled with dirt, dusty glitter, stories playing make believe planted below thick tangled roots of suburban grass.  
grow older, shade expands.  mosses reclaim urban forest floor, the ground is delightful like down.  the children can run around like intended, no white lace sunday stockings folded down.  the kitchen is finally cool, 30 years after pregnancy.
wait for spring.  take caution with entanglement outside of yourself.  
the next dinner where i am not utterly alone yet surrounded by everyone I love.  gratitude is a basic human need.  the sky and earth hold us delicately, the mountains and forests, animals and plants are ancestors whom we have been silenced from teaching.

hold me close but not too; from the floor I see it - the oven light in the old gas stove that's broken more times than we can fix, leather car seats time entombed and petrified mildew, sedimentary factory line notes bitten by grease and rust.  the memory of every first, everlasting moments.  the narrow claustrophobic essence of spirits ooze from the wall, thread the building like a needle.  a large circulatory system forged in steel and fire.  they crack and sizzle, smudging the newly buffed floor.  all I smell is fresh white globular paint, all I want is to talk to my mother.  really talk.  not watch the news, the monitor, the phone.  start good habits, maintain and flourish.  how do I say how beautiful she is?

I fold amaryllis arms around me, a ****** bud retracting from early snap frost, ghosted, blind and blanketed in frozen crusts of half-melted snow.  a numb burn.  they circle around, a bed with no tenant.  a child surrounded by ladybugs, an open sky, a happy sun and warm foothills with anthurium-red tomatoes that dad loves so much to plant for the summer.  

closing my eyes.  repeating leaven hands spin in circles around clay, lavender buds and poppy seeds
piloting rabbit shelters, mustard leaves and paper airplanes, laundry fairies and scout who never left her side.
rose and violet lace the edges of knives, piercing light entering fingers like egg whites escaping a nuclear yolk.  sinewy and embryonic, baths of sound and light.  I've always loved baby's breath, so why does it petrify me?  Putting on my pack and not looking back, feeling the acidic rejection in my legs with the altitude, yet the mental bliss of absolute newfound joy in out-and-backtrails.  I will carry all of it, do not worry.  i've been taught to leave no trace.

I step on her forgiving body, like room temperature butter.  she is sand, curled inward, shifting and shimmering seaweed undulates in shallow water like lyrics.  my footprints erase with the swiftness of etch-a-sketch indecisiveness.
We remark how warm, how beautiful, how strange it is to be here, but have no mark whatsoever.  occupy residency in a mind, one mind only.  to colonize a mind?  co-tenant a mind.  a tidal portal into whatever the ******* want, the coral, the anemones, the iridescent shells who pause and breathe "oooooh".  press fingerprints in the clay, dig in your nails, make the ocean yourself.  we have never been so utterly disconnected that the answer has always been intrinsic.  in the silt, the peat, the loam.  the roots take hold of mica, ore, the return of bridges and steel.  the calcified skeleton of ancient fish pressed in limestone.

shallow water, warmest on the surface, honeyed sand smooth like suede under toes and fingertips. sand crystals resist pressure of fists, clouds of nebulae, and dissolves to the ocean floor stardust.  my hand passes through hourglass Ophelia ashes, unyielding in a buoyant world.  every cell in my body sings home.

hair becomes slick and warm, not soft like seaweed.  the ocean inundates my mind, my mind is the ocean.  the sand is white cotton sheets.  

reaching the sand bar, the woman sleeping.  the tide approaches and recedes.  dizzying and safe in sunlight, photosynthesizing, breathing,

creating in a dream, slowly (or quickly) eroding away.

I thank the moon
sensuality and scrying in black clear pool
what veils keep
full disk brightens sheer membrane
lilies open
snowdrops retrace delicate steps
pull back fresh white sheets
morning arrival stretching growing resonating closing
departure shrinking suffocating apology
taken off in navy blue clouds
outline rainbow hallows
midnight clouds lift
sunset pollen constellations scatter
golden handmade paper
cut and torn seams
repurposed cloth covering
calm enough to fall asleep with
curled against her sweet face
I’ve never dreamt until a deer
casts a shadow on my shadow in dim blue light

I thank the moon