Category: Greatest Hits

Dear restless, wandering mind, sometimes
you really must try to chisel your focus—

Try to listen to the soft-spoken woman
who leads us through downward-facing dogs,

warrior poses and planks, steeple
mudras, salutations, lunges—

instead of to the growing industrial whine
of your belly, where no other breakfast

but the half-cup of soy latte now sloshes
around, a whirlpool of acids and worry. Keep

count of the breaths as they come through
the branches in the upside-down trees

of your lungs. Keep count as they exit:
the thing to do is turn them into things

with wings— cicadas, perhaps. Or tiny
fireflies throwing their low-wattage beams

at the dark. Effortless effort, the teacher
intones. So don’t let the ten year old’s

giggling distract you as you try and fail
to maintain your balance, coming out

of the dancer’s pose. Are you still with me?
I know you’re tired, and you want to press

your cheek on the mat or stay supine as a corpse.
But the voice nudges you back to the shore, saying

Open your arms and legs like a starfish, open
the cage of your heart; look at the unblinking sun.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Zealous at long rehearsals, tenacious at audition— the brushed
yellow-olive, drab-coated vireo hangs upside down then
exits the tree with a prize: red berry or dun kernel, blur of
winged insect disappearing down the hatch of its throat.
Valediction isn’t its song: not a saying farewell, not the
up-swelling notes of a soprano— just the same
tremulous question and answer all through the day.
Sound shivers like a string when plucked. I learned
rote-singing, then followed the pencil across the staff:
quarter-notes, eighths, sixteenths; the rests like little
puffs of breath propelling onward. And yes it’s work,
opening the chest to let the air of longing out for that
nimbus of release, though brief and incommensurate.
My audible heart wants a nest like a cup in the fork of a tree.
Lit up at night, in that forest of softened trills, who
knows how the air might shear its stuttering refrains,
join the failed parts of songs as leitmotif?
I practice and practice though nobody hears.
Hoarse from effort and nearly at empty, I
gloss sometimes over difficult parts that
find a way of coming back, sliding into another
edge of passage. Nothing ever stays still:
do you see how the moon shimmers, then
clears a path for the screech owl’s call?
Bright, brassy, or somber rounding in the mouth—
answer that burns salt shapes on the tongue.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

[ Also a partly found poem after Brian Doyle’s Joyas Voladoras; with thanks to Lina Sagaral Reyes for the link ]

I don’t know whose translucent wings those are
twitching, disappearing into a knothole in the ceiling;

but in the throes of great uncertainty I am
asked to consider the miniature:

– A heart the size of a pencil eraser, beating ten
times a second, hammering faster than we could hear.

– A heart that fuels flights more than five
hundred miles without stopping to rest.

– Hot heart that kisses at least a thousand flowers a day
but cold, slides into a torpor from which it might no longer rouse.

– Oh my constellation of fears, shamed by a wingstroke
smaller than a baby’s fingernail, thunderous as the world’s wild waterfalls.

– Heart like a race car engined by color, buffered
by wind, stripped for nothing but flight.

– Chant of bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails,
violet-tailed sylphs and crimson topazes.

– Rosary of charismatic names: amethyst woodstars and
rainbow-bearded thornbills, pufflegs and spatuletails.

– You’ve found me out: I have a bag of tortoise coins. I’ve spent them
like a miser, hoarding each little bit of copper against that one stupendous day.

– I’ve lived mostly alone in the bricked-up house of my heart,
but a wind teeters at the door, smelling of skin and apple breath.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

[ With thanks, too, to Nic S. and Dave Bonta for this… ]

How long does hunger hold? Or joy
forestalled? I know that hunger climbs

the trunk of the tree, persistent at its task.
If only each open cup, each well

of blossom had drink enough to douse
that flame— If only the moth that scrolled

its richly tattered cape across
the bark had a mouth; if only its four

half-moons were radiant feast,
enough to settle my restless songs.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.