a ritual to start the work week
anchored well below
her power casts me
forward my shadow
ripples on ghastly
waves left murmuring
net stretched and billows
jaw oped to catch free
streaming notes that float
teem unnaturally
swallowed and circling
fuel sickens unfroze
ice worlds drop crackly
returning screen snows
fizzle to wracked sea
soar on fertile wings
With the moon at our backs we can voyage triumphantly through
dangerous and cold waters for the sun.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Restacking discs strewn about by some
not-quite-four-year-old’s temper tantrum
that toppled their tower and spread them
disordered across the playroom floor,
carefully placing these wooden coins,
stained red and blue, green and yellow — toys
cut and smoothed to tune small hands and spoils
to earn and lose, cherish and trade — for
now, at least, one atop another:
we realign what may fall over
again into rainbows, forever
arching fleetingly to something more.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Loops completing, now set right in the sky,
their recrossings, our regressions,
just a trick of the eye
Frozen vapor-bits join with leaves, all dry,
and spiral back to earth, return
to warmth, settle and sigh
Cycles renew us, reroot us, revive;
when autumn reveals us, our bones
regrow from tears once cried
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Two eyes flicker between disparate suns,
drawn away by the gravity of days.
Fluttering lashes wipe clean double guns,
aimed and re-aimed by my fiery gaze.
Stretched beyond peripheral bounds, I won-
der how each route loops into the same maze.
Behind stone facings, stitching never done,
the mind weaves old threads into a new phase:
Strands twisted infinitely into one;
the curl of smoke emitted by two flames.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
As the night rises in the valley,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When the howls itch at your spine,
Feel its weight return you.
As the fire lights up the mountains,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When the smoke tears up your eyes,
Feel its weight return you.
As the streets tremor in the city,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When injustice crumples your skin,
Feel its weight return you.
As the bedsheets dampen with fever,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When your hand can’t comfort and grasp,
Feel its weight return you.
As the dawn whispers of new life,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When it drips and streams and rushes,
Feel its weight return you.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Our center crowded out by clouds,
I carried my own sun with me,
a small flame to focus on and
find within me, tethered below
the surface, reaching up and out.
Driving through rain past weary heads,
I chose to laugh and not to weep,
lightness in my chest to carry
me onward to a grind that can
not shatter, simply reshape or
refract it into a fine mist.
I take and remake it with each
breath, press its resilience into
letter after letter, spaces
to hold our hope, recentered here.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Warrior: one whose depth hides her strength and
readiness inside a broad brush-stroke, ink
lifted up skyward by thin bristles while
deep-rooted. Warrior to her troops: set
on your prize, hold steady, invisible
behind the foci of your aura’s wide
ellipse, taut bow-string. Warrior, three
points guide you: holding you one-footed in
the lead-up, reaching your fingertips far
into the future’s fog, yet rooted, still.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Whether or not you can muster the wherewithal
to plug up the rain, blow back the stampede of clouds
and hook your extended arm ’round the sun, dragging
it back to bask under and to share in its warmth,
find your own smoldering log first. Feed it with breath,
guard it with resolve, learn its heat and its dampness,
where it ashes and flakes and when it catches in flame.
Focus its light. Let it lead you through your feats,
however Herculean, and let it reveal
your follies, too: firework and many-hued balloon.
And if more simple tasks await,
still find and feed, inflame, inflate.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
When we say “love wins,” we mean it will.
We speak some ultimate truth,
with eyes that reach past the horizon
over the dense treetops that
crowd out light from the forest floor,
follow the sun as it floods
far-off hillsides, imagining its splashy
yellow and juicy orange as it clings
to rain-soaked meadows, and
feel its warmth at our backs
as it rises to end another night,
many mornings from now,slowly warming the chill and
urging us forward: a spell
cast in open hearts, that much
easier to entrance. To share.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
The breeze swipes my cheek and brow
nudgingly: time to begin,
it sighs, a gentle demand.
Shimmying leaves fuzz around
my eardrums, fizzle my gaze
and frazzle my synapses.
Like snow meeting flames. Like tears
evaporating on hot
blacktop. Like gasping. Like Mars.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Can it be, when faced with walls
of thick fog rising and falling,
sliding into each other and all around
us, that we rise with them, billowing?
That we slide underneath, equally
uncontainable and swirling?
Can we use our pace — each frenetic
and rushing, yet slowly expanding
as one — as our power, eke through
cracks to widen, expose, and glow,
beckoning? Can we plume like smoke?
Hiss and slip, reach through pinholes
and pour, forever slipping over each other
to fill new expanses, do we dare?
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
