Jain

This morning I am
a Jain practicing ahimsa
weaving meticulously around
thousands of fog-kissed webs
a minute world visible to eyes
no longer willfully blind.

Each dwelling is self-contained
woven into surrounding crabgrass
trees to the tiny inhabitants
crouching cozy beneath
fluttering canopies sparking
rainbows in the lifting light.

Revisionist History

How easy to distill the past,
sifting out impurities
so a clean silky edge
will soothe another’s tongue.

Serve up what flatters,
spit out distasteful lapses; swallow
raw memories and let them sink
into our tender parts

deep into the silted
heart of gray.

The lies we
tell each other,
tell ourselves.

We are all revisionists
editing our histories, omissions
catered to the prevailing
whims of taste and culture

until intimacy unmasks us.

Poem From an Other

When my heart is hollow
and jagged synonyms
for grief, loss, pain
tumble from my eyes

when there is no comfort
in old routines
and everyday objects
become waiting landmines

when even simple kindness
disturbs the surface
I have worked
so hard to calm

I turn to you, favored poet
but find you busy
constructing verbal walls
to keep the rabble out.

With my finger I trace
book-jacket photo
lines of worry carved
on your bald head

to fear
your own voice
might not be heard
above the dissonance.

Have you forgotten?

Self-expression
is a lonely highway
traveled by many
owned by no one

where accolades
provide no fuel
but true words
freely given do.

Foreign Object

My soul is ancient metal, containing all the secrets of the universe, if it would only speak.

I orbit another; longing for my own gravitational pull, rate of rotation, my own elliptical relationship with the sun.

I am a verdant streak in the summer sky, a slash in the atmosphere of a larger body.

I wait at the edge of obscurity, while those who understand little about me decide if I am worth naming.

The truth is, I will never be known.
The truth is, I have always been known.

We are linked in ways beyond all knowing.

Intention

I wish I had
my daughter's forgiving heart
my son's radar sensitivity

the ability to start over
without remembering wounds
inflicted by barbed remarks
allegedly untainted with intent
to harm or inflame old arguments

but my heart believes intention
presages any interaction
words, the concrete bridge
to a truth from which
the soul cannot hide

Flame

I wake with tears
drying on my cheeks
Douglas firs lob cones
at the roof like shrapnel
rain needles impassive
window faces
storms attempt
to shatter.

To hold fast is never a given
wind can shift and knock you
from your complacent perch
shallow protection against
the inevitable creep of age
and treacherous doubt gnawing
at our ability to affect change
in ourselves, each other, the world.

And yet
these very words
spark faint rebellion
for without imagining
there can be no future
without love, no one
to cup a tender palm
around this wavering flame
not yet extinguished.

Rooftop Views

Meteors slash the black fabric
night, trailing green and gold
summer heat fading
drowsy children pillow
into shoulder creases
content beneath the universal roof

shingles grind into skin
like iron-justified habits
cool starlight in blue veins
what temptation holds sweet surrender
to shutter eyes with scales of forgetting
to blaze like a meteor into darkness.

Soot Birds

Fire-cloud soot bird
wings westward
blood red tail shadowing
ponderosa, lodge pole, aspen
helpless before the heat-driven beast.

Bronze-winged sisters circle low
over wheat fields where dust devils
vortex wildly, building speed until
they run out of dirt and disappear
like genies, back to the air

transmuted

the earth is the tree
is the fire is the smoke
destruction, the vortex
death, the rebirth.

Monk in Hiking Boots

He is
walking the white line
his arm a repetitious arc
sounding
a single tone
timed to the pace
of hiking-booted feet
treading the pavement.

Saffron robes have grayed
over long meditative miles
witnessed by curious commuters
riding the pendulum away
from his purposeful daily counterpoint
and the freedom held in rhythmic ritual;
how the mind stills and gathers
in the swinging blur of hand and stick.

I roll the window down
seeking precious solace
as I hurtle past, knowing
he walks for me too.
I want to stop the car
and fall in behind;
feel the timeless drum,
the stillness of salvation.

Cocoon

A fat, false-eyed caterpillar consumed Liberty
inexorably, leaf-by-leaf, stripped her bare
leaving a hardened chrysalis-nation spinning
hypnotically in a chill global wind.

Beneath layered fear and isolation
truth and freedom have been transformed
into a black, all-knowing moth
with wings wide enough
to obliterate dissention.

Driving

We think the past vapor, faded
ghosts unworthy of resurrection or introspection
dissipating behind us as we speed recklessly
into the future, heads out the window
hair afire, eyes streaming impotent tears of woe and joy.
It doesn’t seem worth the effort to pull over and reflect
far easier to squander our souls, to taste the black
drag of criticism, ridicule, stale fear, to believe the doubting
chorus singing monotonously in the background
until we arrive in the middle of nowhere, wondering
how we ended up so far from our own truth.
It is in this solitary place we remember
ourselves, unchanged and immutable
cradled delusions evaporate
burning possibility lingers
like sweet, unforgettable perfume.

Story Bracelet

Bone and walrus tusk
encircle my wrist
in memory of you,
on each square
a scrimshaw picture,
joined, they tell a story:

a hunter leaves home, alone
on the ice, he navigates
the tender under-skin of my arm,
tracks and shoots a seal,
attaches rope and hauls it back
to the polished beginning.

Your story does not circle
it ends in sea and tears;
that day, Grief
took up sharpened antler
and carved your life
into the curve of mine.

Curl

Each curl of conversation
stills my tongue, half-sentences
stranded in the mire
of biting reason

words silently form
protests, defenses
reasons and intentions

worthless to ears already fed
with the insistent conundrum
accompanying every attempt
at reconciliation.

Old Dog

He grows more beautiful every day
his wizened face, yellow coat
fading to white. He is both stately
and goofy in equal parts, a loving soul
who never had an enemy, human or beast.

Last fall it was hard to tell he wasn’t a puppy,
now he’s eleven, seventy-seven in dog years,
his hips stiffen during the night and into morning,
though after coffee, he’s still up and begging for a walk.

I put my hand on his chest; feel his heart, gently
rocking under my palm. I whisper in his ear, ask
him to stay with us a while longer -

he sighs, deeply, resonantly.

Cry

Tears
deemed too self-indulgent
discipline the set of my jaw

At the crosswalk, a teenage boy
scans both ways, nervously
waiting for cars to notice him

planted solidly on the other side,
she holds the tether of her love
as an invisible guide

eyes locked, he launches
off the curb and rapidly tastes
a hard-won sliver of freedom

he is taller than the woman,
a little boy in a man’s body, his arm
around her shoulder, his smile a blessing

joyful
reason enough
to cry.

Mourning Cloak

The thaw begins with a drip,
builds to a roar, subsides to sunlight
prisms playing over silver eddies

brushing still-wet velvet wings;
maroon and yellow, neon blue,
pseudo-bark underneath

in the clear-cut, pink fireweed
pierces a sky alive with souls
reveling in their last year on earth

sampling nectar with newly-curled
tongues while summer degrades
to fall, burrowing in the cool

damp cord of fir put up for winter,
awakening in spring, tasting early
summer before the reprieve

is over, time come to fold
worn and battered wings, to slip
free of this mourning cloak and rise.

Faith

Cormorants face east
to blood-rimmed clouds
holding the morning hostage

angled wings await
silver resonance humming
through weighted bone,
bound by eternally rising sun.

Azure Spring

sun dries pale
whorled wings

the breeze teases
elevating blue

spring rises
yellow and hazy

with sex, frantic
primal propagation

a brief flush
of perfect intensity

Myths, Lies and Instant Karma

In my son’s karate class, his Sensei warned a student
who had kicked his sparring partner a little too robustly
that it would soon be his partner’s turn and he just might
experience some rather painful instant karma.

The adults all laughed, but I’ve been thinking
about it since, how the older we get the more
we think we can control karma by delaying
or preventing its arrival, when in actuality
all we do is dull the impact or deny its existence,
ultimately making little difference in the outcome,
because another name for karma is cause and effect;
A occurs; B follows; it’s hard to avoid laws of nature.

As children, we learned our lessons the hard way;
if you licked the frost-chipped metal on the monkey
bars, it would rip your tender taste buds clean off
as you panicked and tried to reverse, when you fell
off the wooden swing and sat up just as it came sailing
back, a whole day’s worth of memories, erased in an instant
as the three-inch thick board cracked you upside the head.

When you kept poking your brother in the back seat
of the car while your mother yelled at you to quit it
or she was going to pull over, she really was, but you kept
going at it until she really did, making you get a switch
from a roadside tree yourself and bend over to take your instant
karmic punishment while your sisters and brothers snickered
at you from the rearview window of the beige VW wagon.

Those were the days, weren’t they? We understood full well
if we kept pushing it, something would eventually give
and we would pay for our lack of judgment, but lately it seems
we've forgotten. It’s all about sneaking by, cheating fate,
hoping we won’t be found out; but really, who are we fooling?

Certainly not our own souls and I bet God’s not buying our act either.

Marsha Hollingsworth