Ether: Poetry Collection

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Suaimhneas  

 A longing from Elysium Swell’d

How sweet the rousal from the sleep!

To forests fain with wanderings deep

And in the Heart’s fair meadows dwell’d

Infinity aspiring!

 It clamps its jaws on troubled dawns

And sonders in the empty fields

To this my Soul will always yield

And swim Serenely as the swans

 I Am the Universe

 I am the sparks that assembled the Stars

Love turning its purse inside out in the Dark

I am the Light that first revealed

The quarks (odd ducks) quacking in quantum fields

I am the first grains of carbon and sand

Fresh-eyed and Pre-Cambrian

I am the voice that makes storms subside

The Seeker, Master, and the Guide

I am Orion

Arcing an arrow over the bridge of my nose

I am the Forest

The leaf, the thorn, the rose

I am at Home

In the empty spaces between prayers

Leaning deep, trusting their four solid legs

I am at Peace

When my footsteps

Are worlds apart with wide tread

I am a Resident

With many Friends

I am a Visitor

From distant lands

I am the bombshells in Nature's plans

The forger, the wielder, the sword in hand.

I am, I am!

I am the Universe bursting at fleshly seams.

I am the Weaver, Receiver, and the Dream.

 The Ferry

 Carriage has arrived

Steel Stallion snorts restlessly

Impatient ferry

Justice sheds Her bronzy scales

Dressing in smokey feathers

Lightning is striking

Like arrows in the night sky

Candles flickering

Fear sheaths His corroded sword

Finding Brumal trees blooming

 Cosmic Chronicles

 Our love made stars into beating hearts

That opened their Homes to me

Weaving their galactic arms

Into my favorite tapestry

Our love built the ground under my feet

Fed me from its vines, with wine, Rich and red

Made my mind into a golden firmament

And the Present moment our cozy bed…

At night I tuck myself in

Under the hooded eyes of an almond tree

And read our cosmic chronicles

Flipping through the branches like a diary.

 Have I Seen a Ghost?

 I don't know....

I think I sat on the stump of one once

Letting my thoughts wander

Through some Douglass-fir lumber

Like wild forests across an empty field.

I was 25 when I heard another reef died

Or was I 85?

Crossing names off my guest list

Wondering who else would be underground

By the end of the year.

I might have seen one

In the cigarette smoke

Floating above the end of October

In the white-winter eyes

of a truck driver from El Paso

How old is old?

And how do I know if I'm a ghost?

Crossing off names

And playing bridge games

In tropical jungles?

I heard Bone Woman

Speak from her cave

Saying something about

Panamanian frogs

or wooly rhino graves

And when I looked into a well

Wishing for the Phoenix heat to dissipate

I thought I heard her voice

Rising and whispering my name

While my husband checked our tire gauge.

I mean... I haven't brushed arms

With the 17th century

Or seen strange lights in a cemetery

But I’ve stepped on the last pawprint

Of a grey wolf on my way to the Yellowstone Airport.

*Bone woman: In mythology, bone woman, or La Loba, is a woman made of bones. She also collects bones and resurrects their lost spirits in the Underworld. La Loba (luminous wolf) can be seen in many places... one of them being a well just outside of Phoenix.

Liminal

She flickered in fluorescent lights

Howled the night on bathroom floors

Nurtured curling verdant fronds

On desks with keyboards and monitors

Her paws padded past decorated offices

Manicured with milky white tips

Clicking on linoleum prairies

Next to secretaries and executives

Her ship drifted between the waves

Of hungry wolf pups and politics

She drew sequoias in her heart

And lived in them like pencil skirts

She paid the tolls for trolls under bridges

With scripted words and brazilian coffee cups

Her breath traced the flowers near the sidewalks

Naming them like folds in accordion files

And when the lioness crinkled her muzzle in a snarl

She smiled with her russet lips and rouged cheeks

Piling gazelles on the pyre of dirty dinner plates

She was frosted flakes and folklore

Coiled fangs and elevators

Sophic skies and helicopters

She was both there and here

Governess of charges, high-heeled with spears

Wandering the leaking fountains

Between wild thighs and ink pens

Today’s Shaman

 It finds itself in luxury hotels

Passing out essential oils

And planting wings between its clients’ shoulder blades

It finds itself in a lion’s mouth

Between the ivory teeth of merging worlds

With whiskered herbs sprouting from the dream-fields

It finds itself as a flock of birds

Drifting through emerald hours over the sea

And sculpting medicine from the Alaskan journeys of salmon

It finds itself mapping the spine of Inanna’s lineage

Cradling a new civilization against the crescents of its breasts

Drinking beer and eating fresh barley off the tablets

It finds itself straddling the symmetry of justice

Standing on the plastic chair at PTA meetings, stretching the canvas over the drum

Raising its voice to protect the student’s long, braided hair from shearing

It finds itself beating eggs in the community kitchen

Invoking fire with cayenne pepper and Peruvian ginger

And singing compassion into the breadbox

It finds itself living at the heart of a long-winded cave

Spreading out its prayer mat next to Siberian radio waves

Then waking up at 6 a.m. to drive the kids to school

It finds itself sculpting Venus from skeletal clay

Chipping away at the skull of an Ice Age

Listening to pawprints stamping wisdom on the Heart’s Forest floor

It finds itself at the tantric Synapse of spirit and bone

Weaving flesh across Gregorian Calendars

And breathing jaguars into human form.

Recursion 

 I mashed it into the potatoes

With a wide-toothed fork

I don’t really know why

The designs just made me happy

I argued with it

Half my brain a fundamentalist

The other half Pentecostal

Two dogs barking over the fence at each other

I spent a little money on it at Barnes and Noble

My brain a flat pancake

Under the three thick books

Explaining it all differently

Then I let it perch on my thumb

Like a thimble

While the needle

Pricked my forefinger instead

Useless.

Like the closet door

Just hanging on its hinges

While I cross the hall like always

To look out the same window

 Extinction: Reworked

 We let old hats hang on the racks

Sent indifference to its death

Built compassion in the cracks

Where blue whales took their last breaths

We fostered the roses

But didn't make them our glasses

Became friends with the earth

And not her assassins

Stopped drilling the oceans

Whose teeth were all broken

Healed all the cavities

We'd caused with erosion

We put down our androids

And didn't become them

Did everything we could

To save the last penguins

Left the bears in the woods

Instead of filling the zoos

Didn't squeeze furry feet

Into Goldilocks's shoes

We danced to the beat

Of much humbler drums

Not owners of the earth

Just equal parts of One

We let go of the small things

And became great erasers

Of the unconscious choices

That ossified nature.

And when six generations of hands

Ticked long past our time

They slept with peaceful faces

Of Acacias and the pines.

*Note: Acacia symbolizes immortality and resurrection

May My Death Plant Banana Trees

 Completed cycle

Finds a soft bed in the ground

Decomposing me

I am not sad to

Go deep into the next world

Sleeping Hekate

Marrow in my bones

Evokes a crystalline note

From my soft ending

Giving hope to the

Bonobos and planting Love

Like banana trees