that's mrs. mediocrity to you

Lately, I think about listening. How bad we are at it, how everything keeps getting louder, how we talk over each other, and even, ourselves.

We’ve forgotten how to be alone with silence.

We have so many things to do, so many places to be, so many lives to fit into life.

I spend time with my 89-year-old friend and everything slows down. She doesn’t hear so well, and our communication becomes a pantomime of gesture and shouting. I spend time with my 8-month-old granddaughter and see the world with fresh eyes. Everything is new and exciting and wondrous. Everything slows down further, because we have to take time to relish each new moment and every fresh discovery.

In both cases, I find myself listening in new ways.

At night I read, turn the ever-present television off, and fall into stories. My house whispers its own secrets and my mind takes off in new directions.

I try to think of the last time I did nothing, and can’t remember. I’m always looking for something: entertainment or enrichment or connection or experience.

I crave silence, but when I find it, I fill the air with sound.

I want to remember something, the feel of roots or earth or security. And promises.

I build fires to conquer the cold and my need for something primal.

Even the darkest of months offers sympathy.

A heartbeat is the sound of existence. A symphony of seduction. A sonata of solace.

I find myself straining to hear.

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Listen.

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on the quiet colors
of a cold grey sad day morning
.
the scent of winter
crisp and silent
creeping up behind me

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even the stars
were off kilter
last night
orion laying low
on the horizon
the southern cross
trying to kiss
cassiopeia
.
my feet were on the ground
but my heart kept floating
.
ursa major
poised to capture
every tear
.

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I stand on these acres of history, long fallow fields of tears forgotten and brittle reminders of years blown by, remembering how once we grew green shoots of conflict and the next spring plowed them under, making food for the forest of memory we drive through with broken blade, always turning earth, always searching for what we’ve buried. But the worm always works alone, adding air and rich casting to this hard-baked, clay-caked soil, choked with rock and seed and ancient bone. This is my home,  this place where dinner is served at noon and the sky is always hungry. I pose on one foot in the shade of a tree that neither of us ever mentions, a scarecrow of deliverance for the red cardinal who lands on my shoulder and feeds me the coldest hour. Our nests have become identical, and you laugh as you toss broken frame and bent missive in a fit of tidy redemption. There are no berries here, no reward for existing. There is only wind and the silence of everything, whistle warning us through each night.

my skin crackles with
growth and tick tocking question
unanswered roots entwine

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Joining in over at dVersePoets for Haibun Monday.

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Prepared to run, poised for flight, yet standing my ground. The sky grows dark with words that flit by with the silence of bats, words used, expelled, offered in place of all I cannot give. The earth rumbles with those I’ve yet to speak.

I want to remember tomorrow before it happens and dream of yesterday’s chance. I want to be the bird that lands last. I want to sing with the abandon of loss.

Instead, I reach my arms high and offer sanctuary, spreading branches like wings and roots like scrabbling claw feet. I am sharp-edged and hollow-toed. I am filled with echoes.

I dreamt of you again last night, fooled myself into seeing you again, but even my dream felt the need to remind me that you are gone. And even in sleep I wondered if this is the way it will always be, and I spent the rest of the night wandering lost from room to room in a house built from memories of places I’ve never been.

We were there, together, just for a moment. Before I remembered.

Mostly, I’ve come to understand that the questions will never be answered. Mostly, I’ve come to embrace the lack of knowing. I am content to wander through this field of grass and bird and flailing branch. The wind is a challenge to stay upright, my map has sailed high into clouds of disdain.

.

And we laughed again
at free falling bottles and
broken stars. We laughed.

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Joining in today over at dVersePoets with a Haibun, using Kahlil Gibran’s quote: “Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.” as inspiration.

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And happy to be there, settling in finally, after all these years.

You have to know your limitations and work them
into the fabric of your life.

Pick them apart and darn them back together.

You have to go in circles to get to the center.

All of life is only ever held together by a thread anyway,
no matter how much you want to think otherwise.

It’s a trap you construct to keep yourself alive,
even if you must begin anew each day.

You do it because survival is a never-ending puzzle,
a labyrinth, a fibonacci dream,
and you are always listening
for the sound beneath the sea.

You do it because everything beautiful
is woven of dark’s lightest threads and
every negative space holds eternity.

You do it because you’re thirsty,
and even dew on the edge of a crooked-silver web
will sustain you.

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and it’s always accidental, the discovery of light and hope and love in the midst of deep shadow. we want to be cooler than that, less trite, or at the very least, sharp-edged and angled, dressed in hard shells that cover our scars. we think that’s how to stay safe, how to survive, how to win. we think there’s an answer, when all the food is in the questions, hanging low and heavy with overripe nectar. if we’re lucky, one of them will drop just as we walk by, leaving splatters of wisdom on our long black cave of coat, and for a moment we’ll remember what it’s like to be alive (or at least we’ll forget what it’s like to be less than). the bloom is the destination and the growing is the map. have you ever seen what a tangle of thorn the rose tumbles from?

eventually it all falls down, rotten with seed and ancient mirror.

you must look
for the glimmer
of valor

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because even the light can trap you if morning
comes too soon and each tiny thread
is a miracle of meaning
drawn tight through the fabric
of pattern’s dedication
with all the patience of temporary

everything we build is false and
ruins prove nothing but existence
which is why the sky
is always the only witness
held captive in stuffy hotel rooms
and protected by a new name
every season

but i tell you
the earth keeps turning and we are all
just figments of gravity’s imagination
built of stone and empty vessel
carved raw in the likeness of star and spider
held together by shiny bits of belief

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fourteen years later
that’s what we call it

not nine eleven oh one
not September 11, 2001
just
nine eleven

two words

three digits

two towers

four planes

thousands

of

mothers
fathers
daughters
sons
sisters
brothers
wives
husbands
aunts
uncles
girlfriends
boyfriends

not statistics

falling

from

the

sky

not dates
or where were you’s

just whole hearts
in odd numbers

each one

the only necessary

evidence

of love

::

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I wrote this for the 10-year anniversary
of this tragic, horrid event.

I am re-posting it again today, in honor of all those hearts.

Never forget.

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the silent places you seek in the darkness
just before the sun comes up

on a summer night

spent

in the company of story

and all the words you wrote
were the echo of your sanity

falling from a perch on orion’s

back

onto pages thin as petal

and the whispers you carried
were your gravity

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