Awake

I am watching rain drift down in the dark, and tonight here is no one here but me. At first the alone-ness was flashing like lightning on the walls of this heart; frightened and pale and thunderless, like a baby giant's tantrum. But now the night has fallen calm and I wish I was not stolen in all directions, or so aware of my feet; feet that were left standing on nothing but the road when all the newness fell through. And this is all to say I'm coming up empty, Lord. Maybe I should have listened.

The only good thing about broken hearts is the mending, and the hands that set and seal and sew; with kind fingers against our rough hearts, polishing away the blisters and with time healing the scar. And then we are not raggedy, or broken, or lost. We are just His. Sometimes I can remember the silhouette of my daddy's face against the headlights reflected in my seven year old sleepy brown eyes. More often than I deserve I can see Your face against these flashes of loneliness in a night where I thought there was no but me.

There is something else I meant to say. I love You. With all the love in my senseless heart which is a love that is so small and little and not enough. But even though it is not enough and it's small and it's little, it fills me up until I can't breathe through my tears sometimes. And I don't know why I kept falling in love with being in love with anything but You. And I don't know why I ran away, when I had no place else to go.

Tell me to go and I will go. Tell me to stay, I will stay. Tell me to live or die, to be whole or be broken. I don't care about anything but to say I'm listening, now. And I will wait until I hear; and I will wait until everyone else has left; and if it means I'm waiting forever, then I will stand waiting forever. And maybe sometime in that forever the little piece of love in my heart will have grown up, and maybe I will be so spellbound by it that I will barely notice it when You take back my hand and lead me to where I need to be. And even though now I feel nothing, I know You can hear me. I will always know that.


Because I believe in the sun even when it's not shining;

I believe in love even when I am alone;

And I believe in God, even when He is silent.


I am watching the rain, drifting down in the dark, and tonight there is no one but You.

Love comes through our wounds

In the summer that year I had a whole field of daisies. Daisies were always my favorite. They reminded me of innocence. My head would be clear and empty there and I could walk and let go of most of the memories, and fill my hands up with precious white flowers and hope instead. Yet those last words I remember you saying still echoed in my vacant heart.

"Love comes through our wounds."

*

You were my Preceptor then, and gave me Dylan, Yeats, and the oldest stories,
the poetry, the paintings, the prince of tides.
You taught me to love words, because words were all we had to give. So you gave me yours, and the new possibilities of language rang in my mind, in the voice of your poems
of harlequins, and maidens
and leather-clad heroes
riding the slipstream of the night.

I guess I learned even this from you... to bear things until I could write them, and write things until I could bear them. It makes sense that so much I write is about you. I could write a thousand pages from the days we had. About how in the beginning I corrected your southern mouth. You said I had a lot of pluck. I told you that you drank too much. You told me that you loved me.

And here we were like children, playing out our story through the characters we knew:
A star-crossed little girl, and a boy who wouldn't grow up;
stolen from our prams and bereft of a home, all for the silly sake of learning how to fly.

Whatever we were.... we were we.

In a world so precarious, that was all we knew.


*


“Love comes through our wounds.”

You said I might not understand what it meant yet. But I was up and smart and sensitive. You believed one day I would know.


*

You had lived your whole life with Carolina in your mind, unafraid of the sun in your marsh lands, by your islands on the coast. They say when most of us die our bodies will turn back into earth, but I always knew you would melt into water. Your eyes were a piece of the sea. But together at the end we were autumn trees, displaying our death in flagrant colors; hiding the truth we knew all along, that no part of us would last.

When the days became too much, and I would hold you while you cried because it hurt that everyone who loved you once had left. I always came to you, even when your hurt started to hurt me. You shook when you sobbed and I held you by my heart like a child. I cried too. Your hair had turned silver when you were a boy.

By then you were not the mentor, or the author, or the man. Life had caught you, with its rising and falling tide of memory. You grieved the loss of your father's love, and of your little brother who had died leaving you to never know why. You remembered that you died too in the kind of accidents little boys have with guns; but somehow, in a blur of morphine, hospitals, and healing you came back. Everyone had said that was because you were meant for some special purpose. You told me you had never figured out what it was. I said one day you would find it, because I didn't know what else to say. You smiled. And then you were gone.

I just wanted to say I know now.

Even though I can't find you to tell you, I see what I should have seen long ago. That all the while you must have known you were slipping away, and yet you let me fight. Even though we lost every battle, you told me there was hope so I would not forget there were things worth fighting for. Every time I cried for you made sure I would never forget how to feel love. And until now I have hated you for letting go, when that is the only thing that has caused me to know how precious it is to hold on.

I know now what you knew then, when you spoke those last words to me.

“Love comes through our wounds. “

It was the fighting to save you, that was saving me.

June 21

and should some why completely weep 
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry 
for he could feel the mountains grow

- e.e. cummings

If you haven't heard this at least once in your life already.... You're welcome.

practicing this today

Pianist: Israela Margalit

May 10

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one.  It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

            (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)



- e.e. cummings

Tomorrow is for mommas. Today I was thinking how my mother reminds me of Jesus, because she loves me more than I give in return, she helps when I think I don't need help, she makes me do stuff that is good for me like drink organic things and plant tomatoes, and she's beautiful. She's just beautiful.

one sweet day

today i made two kinds of cookies.
i danced around and Frank Sinatra sang Summer Wind.
creatures of all kinds watched through the windows.

waking up at 9:30am, i am prompted to share my thoughts on sleep after a year in college:

my thoughts on sleep after a year in college are that sleep is good.

so it's harder than it looks

coming back to anywhere, when you've been away for a while.

but, just in case it's worth anything:

i'm here. . .

~c

A new favorite poem for K

I had a little nut tree
And nothing would it bear
But I'm nuts enough for both of us
So I don't really care