The Dance of Sisters (from the journal)

  

Pink fire on the sharon.

Bee feast.  7-2-13

As quiet as a cricket,

baby redbird speaks, quivers

in the crab apple.

Two busy parents.  7-2-13

The gray air moving

through dry leaves is caught

in sharon’s rosy trumpets.  7-4-13

Too hot to breathe.

Cicadas manage,

one or two.  7-6-13

From the far tulip tree—

summer shakers

fill the warm morning.  7-7-13

Hands down

sassafras’ other self 

helps  herself  to myrtle’s

light and shade.  7-7-13 

  

Lightened and darkened

by last night’s rain,

wood garden warming up.  7-8-13

The ring of pink is complete.

Baby lady redbird

takes her rosy seat.  7-8-13

Folded up like umbrellas,

yesterday’s sharons are

purple whorls meditating

on tomorrow’s seeds.  7-10-13

You only think you know it

until you come out and

sit in it, breathe, feel the air,   

hear blue jay’s noisy call.  7-11-13

An edge to it, it has,

this morning full of

of gray catbirds

talking in the gray air.  7-13-13

That wonderful sound

comes from only one thing—

redbird’s fluttering wings.  7-13-13

Sharon’s lavender cigars

litter the rose colored

flagstones.  7-13-13

Taking the uptake

of summer—

one cicada,

two.  7-18-13

The juniper crater is empty.

Last year it was full to the brim

with pokeweed.  7-21-13

Paler now, wood poppy,

as summer wanes.  7-21-13

Fish crow is telling knock-

knock jokes.

All the catbirds are laughing.  7-21-13

In her web off the blue bubble jug,

the only thing spider has captured

is a withered myrtle leaf.  7-22-13

Waiting for a poem

is better than writing a poem.

Anything can happen in a spot

of telescoped time.  9-23-13

Black and yellow wings open

in a spot that should have

sun this morning.

Swallowtail.  7-24-13

Here and there

shaking summer off,

paced cicadas,

taking it up.  7-27-13

Holding her own in the wind,

swallowtail over the open sharon.  7-27-13



Old Letters (for Rudolf Kiesslinger)

Reading Rudi’s old letters.

He copied my poem and sent it back to me:

            The human face of God

             is nothing to depend on.

             A crow, a stone, the

             touch of silence in the forest—

             these are the anchors.

“We are of one mind,” he writes,

his voice still real after all these years,

“I am myself a revelation.”  7-28-13

The dance of sisters—

karate kicks that don’t connect.

Only one piece of pink chalk

at the playground.  7-31-13