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Light Works Productions
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Waking Up
Last night my heart beat fast inside my chest as if it had just remembered it could or that it was possible to take off my shoes by the bed and feel the blood rushing through my toes. Robin, I've been sleeping again. The garden's fallen to sticks jutting among the rocks. Just five minutes ago, it was spring and the tide rolled in green like a song. Please forgive me these lapses. Is it enough to say that I'm pumping ahead now, that my hand's on the rail, that this stairway spans the sky, with windows to touch the sun? Is it enough to say I'm back, that someone somewhere is playing a flute, that the fields have turned to winter grass and I'm everywhere now, barefoot, wing-tipped tasting every heart beat bubbling up from the sleeping ground.
Imaginary Walls
Today we broke through the wall. This time it only took a thimble and a fountain pen. These days, most anything will do. I know the walls are not really here. I know I can step through them anytime, but my poor mind is holding fast to this last refuge, this last safe place. I am being kind. We've traveled this long road together. I've learned to love this beast with its small, silly ways, and it's accepted I'm here to stay like a guest that takes over the house. Finally, because it's just the two of us, we've made a sweet, uneasy peace, tapping gently on imaginary walls, sitting together under a cloud, imagining it's the sun.
Alchemy
I am here again walking half a world to tomorrow, braving the cold and the silence between rocks. This time not fooled by the wind. I stop and think a little. Some piece of the past filters through the trees, edgy as broken glass. I sit with it on the log beside the lake, warm sun pressing between clouds. I say bring it on, deliver up the past, set it here inside this light where we are, all of us smiling into darkness, letting it dance.
First There Were Fish
This was a morning in 1979 when the tide of one moment parted and something dropped through. I noticed a fish floating past, suspended by air as if water had forgotten its essence. I explained it away, but over the years fish would show up now and again to raise the question. Now I've come to see I'm an ocean. Everywhere there are fish and I'm out along the horizon where tides dawn the slow morning up above and down below where every fish carries the memory of its own sky as I float past.
The Front Porch of One Afternoon
Here is a moment I hold inside my heart as if it were a lifetime and seconds were days to walk around in. A hummingbird buzzes red petunias and lands in a strand of vines. Silence penetrates the leaves. Windchimes tone the distance. Plants sway beside a garden of stone angels. Rosemary drifts between slats of light. Grasshoppers pulse the grass. This is where I am on the front porch of one afternoon.
Underneath the Dream
The truth of who I am startles fish from the middle of the stream. I try to cross water the way I always have but my feet are too big for the rocks. Finally I balance air for the first time remembering I can.
What If
What if I told you I am here now what if now were an eternity and we're just learning to taste the shape of it. What if it's more than we've imagined moving out past trees past the two of us, wild and alive, a thing that can't be stopped.
In the Time of Gray Days
In the time of gray days, I put on my coat and go outside. As captain of this ship, I stand on the deck facing clouds head-on. I am unshaken by the gray. I am fearless by night. I take it all inside my heart and tend it with careful fire until it's strong and bright, forged with the heat of this peculiar light that burns inside me.
The Eagle's Gift
There are moments with power to change the world. Like this morning, driving into an elegant sky, leaves swirling the windshield and suddenly an eagle circling overhead, head and tail feathers glistening white against the blue air. I know what it means: light of the sun, illumination, gods of strength and power. Messenger from above signaling coming times of soaring freedom and the world seen from new heights. But this is not the place for words. I stand on the side of the road, car door open. I want to organize a parade. I want to sing a song. I want to see how high I can jump. I do all of it, standing there, looking up, mouth open, drinking in the wonder of this moment.
The Heart Seed Chronicles
These were the journals I kept in the slow slog of years. A blizzard of words frothing the air with despair and loss. But even the smallest word carried a seed of my heart like an apple trapped inside its core, waiting for spring. It is a long season come. It hurts now to read these words. They feel like birds held tight in small cages. These cramp-winged ways pierce me. I speak no judgment but I see even as I am seen, and this confusion at who has seen and who has done settles like a scene shifting point of view. I am every character, each speaking a different language I know. I tell them it's okay. We are just one, all of us, with our sad eyes and our smiles We are a field of miles and the footsteps walked between. We are a day, a moment, a particle of heaven.
Box of Heart-shaped Rocks
Sometimes walking along the path that winds between trees a door opens before me and cool light rushes in. Colors dance the air still. Every particle awakens to love's symbols: heart-shaped rocks scattered along the path. With every stone the Earth speaks love from the ground. These hearts are crude, misshapen, perfectly imperfect hearts with rounded points, chipped centers, rough-chiseled edges. I gather them into a box and send them to you, giving wings to this song of the Earth sent to remind us of what we are.
I Remember
I remember the way I used to tremble in snow, how I dreamed waves of ice, and the slow thaw of my hands and feet. I remember leaves flying through autumn air and crows in the trees. I remember sand on the beach, how the water swirled around my feet. I remember spring budding green. Fields swept with hope. I remember falling, the long slide to nothing. Then waking up.
Ecstasy
A moment catches fire inside pulsing starburst explosion into fountains cascading radiant cool heart light horizons red-hot eternal sandalwood-scented halo electric river of love passioned union embrace into golden shattering of everything. Light.
Lessons in Dying
This morning I found a woodpecker on the ground; stone cold, head tucked under one wing. His polka-dot frill and swish of red plumed the barren landscape. Just once in your life it will happen this way: after a thousand night journeys, a thousand safe landings, darkness falls on a shore too distant. The world settles into a silence as your star falls from the frozen sky. You seek the one last shelter left to you; burrow deep into the warmth of your own wing as hours tick toward a dawn that never comes.
Where the Earth Meets the Sky
When the soul files free, we are not lost but found. I walk these last miles with you to the place where the earth meets the sky. I stand in the green shade of the oak and watch you travel on ahead. Years fall away as you pass through the window inside the sun. At night in my dreams I travel to the place where your fields stretch wide around me. This time I'm the one left to search out new footsteps alone, but time into time, my rivers will run back to the place where all water flows to one. Look for me. I will meet you there.
After a Death
The ground has fallen. Leaves dance the empty air. You are five days gone and I am night passing endless through hallways that still echo the music of your song.
We All Die on These Battlefields
We all die on these battlefields. Standing tall or lying down, solid or broken, watching from a distance or standing close. For some, the news arrives quickly, searing down a vapored sky, like meteors at a shattered rainbow's end. For the rest of us, it arrives weeks later, when turning a corner, we find losses stacked row upon row - gravestones paying tribute to generations lost in war. And the rest of us, with them.
War
I imagine it as a sound like thunder and lightning from the shattered bones of the fallen ground. I imagine it as a place where dark dreams pierce the skin of night; where a hot wind sweeps the moon from the sky and eats the flame of every light.
Midnight Carnival
If I could paint you a picture of anything, it'd be this: the full moon rising in my rearview mirror as visions headlight dirt roads spiraling past fields of dusty trailers, past canyons of night winging through a green that stretches for miles and leafs like the words of a prayer. Not a place by anything I've known, not named on any map, this campground under stars where the sky gives rise to the midnight carnival of my dreams. Here, planets part to reveal a lunar eclipse. Colors deep as forests pass through my mind in flavors, frequencies and desires. Butterflies swarm like points of fire. My characters populate the big top: the cats and the clowns, the sirens and the sleepwalkers. The madwoman wearing necklaces strung from the teeth of her soul - shell and bone and magic stones, moonflowers and winged things - herons and crows. There are witches, poets, cowboys and concubines. The bright fool in green tights hawking neon colanders from a beehive booth. Behind an orange tent, hot girls prowl back alleys of love and desire. The illustrated woman strips to unveil the map of her becoming. In games of skill and illusion, all my slots spin fruit. I am the name of every forgotten thing I've known veering toward the fun house where I climb a ladder to see God but find only a mirror with my eyes staring back at me.
Roses for the Revolution
In France we ate cake and stormed the streets. Sometimes I think I remember standing at the edge of the surging crowd watching light fall copper and golden across the face of a woman calling out for freedom as she hands each person a rose.
Lake Dazzling First Light
Freelancing across morning's new haze soft upon the lake, I wade through drifts of dawn, saluting the shore at high watermark. Further out, trees unfold summer's green, fresh after the rain. The rising sun reflected in waves startles a heron at the edge. Head arched, he plumes and crests then plunges into the disappearing blue of a watercolor sky.
June 2002, Time of the Full Moon
Moonlight pools the porch and spills soft across my summer lawn. I want to stay here for a long time, following shadows in my mind.
A Restless Poem Written in Times of Drought
Two weeks without rain and pastures sizzle. The air is crystallized to dust. I want to row out to the middle of the lake, forget there is land ever; watch the Milky Way dance across the surface of the water while my boat glides through patches of fallen sky.
June Morning
Somewhere up high birds warble among leaves, continuous, unseen.
Red Sunflowers
It's a summer morning. The signposts are strung with fog and dust. I start the day reaching up like earth seeking sun, waving to the pale ghost of a half moon still whispering among tree tops of the night that's fled. Birds shed darkness to sail blue air ornamented with the crimson petals of red sunflowers.
Morning after an Emergency
Visit to the All Night Animal Hospital
Today mimosa blooms arch like pink fists, grim and urgent as hospital emergency rooms where the hollow echo of my footsteps still haunt hallways flecked with blood and fear.
Fourth of July
Whiney streamers push light up through trees. They explode and sparkle, a fake glitter, forced and bright. The crowd at the lake cheers. A bugle sounds the charge as another streamer rises. Closer in, shadows move silent across the lawn where a lone lightning bug pulses nature's celebration of night.
July Fifth
Pools of early light linger in dappled lawns littered with the remains of fallen rockets. Squirrels foraging for fresh nuts pause on hind feet to ponder tufts of tattered paper on sticks.
Quan-Yin
Morning sun slants across the concrete Quan-Yin in my deck garden. Hungry petunias and marigolds inch toward her light.
The Truth
The truth isn't dead on, hammer to nail. It's a crimson butterfly drifting sideways into an unexplainable sky.
An Ozark Witch Remembers Fire
I still remember fire. We were witches then. Now we don't use words. Once you conjure a thing by its name, you own the consequences. Long ago, we cleansed the earth with our ashes. We stood far away, laughing as the flames leapt high. These days we've learned to be liquid; to travel in motes of light. I wear my secrets around my neck, bone by stone. My stories are coded. I imagine a place and I'm there. I dream the future and wake up tomorrow. I see the dawn and light breaks through veils of night. If you smell smoke on the wind, know there's bound to be flames nearby, for I know fire when I think it.
Wisdom
In Wisdom Arizona, dawn flies over a dream held so long it is nearly dust. Here I am small as possible. Thoughts quickly become the things they're about against the backdrop of chanting from a revival tent. The believers are handling snakes - rattlers brought up from the desert to prove God exists because he protects us from ourselves. The town square lingers like a sweltering afternoon. Women busy with their brooms are reluctant to sweep the remnants away.
Ballerina in Reverse
I learned the worst first - how it is when you can't move right and nothing flows. The ballerinas I grew up with dipped and swirled like swallows with earthbound wings. But there was no hope of that for years. I trudged and plodded. The ballerinas I knew grew old. Their arches fell, their dreams spun out. My best took years to make. First I planted roses and dreamed buds opening. Then years of practice. One toe, then the other. Then the arch, the bridge, the circle. I reached, touched air, and the room around me said grace. That's how I became a ballerina in reverse.
Hearts Wide as the Sky
I stand inside rooms of stillness
where the moments of a countdown stretch long
into the hour of your leaving.
The drip of a faucet triggers memories of countries lost
to ancient armies of regret and despair.
But this time I'm not armored,
not taking up the cause,
not brandishing the steel wand of my will
to dam rivers against flow and change.
This time I'm listening for seconds to tell me their names,
watching them spin around me
like dust motes sparking inside a window
where a prism bends light,
scattering rainbows across the floor.
In time they move board by board
blending color into shadow.
We're getting down to the last now -
so close I can watch you step out of the shower
and let myself really see you this time.
I follow you up the stairs and lie beside you on the bed,
letting all the easy ways I've come to know you
claim their own gravity.
Then at the station, nothing hangs right inside me.
I am two people who can't agree:
the one who loves you
and the one who's letting you go.
In the end your leaving is as simple
as the movement of a single breath:
hold tight then release.
In the past I'd kick the ground.
I'd curse the wind and hurl my losses at the sky.
But now I go into places
where the green around me speaks.
It says what's real stays,
even if changed to something else, it stays,
moving always out and around me
like an afternoon weaving shadows through trees,
their branches bending in a breeze
that shuffles and rearranges leaves,
opening channels for worlds to flow through.
The way we stand together
a little apart
- hearts wide as the sky -
letting sunlight fill the spaces between us.
Questionnaire for a Suicidal Poet
Did you give them rainbows
when what they really wanted
was the blood of your secret heart?
Did you pour words into a cloud
when no one wanted rain?
Did they want tangerines
when you had only grapefruit?
Did you give them balloons
to sail over treetops
when they wanted anchors
holding them in place?
Did you walk on your knees
a thousand miles to bring them,
the music of your song
only to watch it fall deaf along the muted streets?
When crows settled three deep
in your tree
did you call to them
wishing you could fly?
Did you laugh at the wrong times?
Did they say you were
a little off?
Did they take away
your green breeze,
give you black and white?
Did you put out the light
from your stars
so they could pave your part
of the sky,
then walk sadly into the place
where apples sleep
trailing behind you words
that scattered like ocean mists
in sunlight?
Remembering Who I Am
The days were shorter then.
The nights one long descent into a winter
when everything good inside me fled.
Love was measured in degrees of ice
and wind roared through a silence
that weighted the sky,
I went walking across the wasteland one frozen moon night,
searching for a winter muse to waltz across desolate places,
reciting sonnets to melt the ice.
On a slope I slipped, lost footing,
spun a half-pirouette, landed on the ground and stayed there,
sinking long into the darkness of the deep freeze,
hope slipping out around me.
Then I felt the brush of a feather soft as down.
Sister past and future,
I woke to the sound of your light sweeping past.
Out along the lane a cloud took shape,
mists formed a vision.
Woman lit with knowing
pulls down healing to the waiting world
walks fearless nights to stand in fields
where grass whispers its secrets to the moon.
Midwife to dreams, bringing form to what sleeps
on the other side, waiting to be born.
Solid as trees through time,
tap roots tunneling deep to underground streams.
A feeling passed over me as alive as the rush of air
when a field of birds has taken flight.
I pulled myself up by wire of will, by threads of air,
and walked solid, feet firm, across the ice,
the vision still playing behind my eyes.
Dance
When your lover leaves, wish him acres of happiness. Wish him light-speed dreams. See him sacred under the ancient sun advancing, receding, the tide of inner oceans carrying him to a deeper homeland where music plays constant along the bright streets and his best thoughts sprout wings and fly like birds toward distant trees, their magical fruit ripening at his touch. Believe everything that leaves rearranges itself to a different return. Stand in the circle of your former footsteps chanting the stillness of your deep nights. Open the roof to pull in the sky, then go inside your secret heart and dance.
A Dangerous Woman Responds to a Letter
From a Man Who Sees Her as Harmless
You speak of my harmlessness, my gentle nature but I think tiger, fangs. I know how my breath draws hot in my throat, how I stalk the edges of places unseen like a beast once wounded, now poised to defend, to fight with a fierceness that trembles at the heart. I know this way is not best. What's best is to stand, feet firm, to let moonlight pour through me, even arrows if need be. I'm not ready to go quiet and harmless with the dignity of the dispossessed. But I like the way you see me harmless, no longer stalking darkness but standing fearless inside it.
The Body Ecstatic
Who can say what miracle the night will cast? We travel together in these spaces at a distance further than time while the moon climbs the ladder of the sky and speaks to us in cloud tones. It is a language of words forgotten in the hot hour of a magic wind when a lover is everywhere inside me, a spark loosed beneath my skin in moments that touch me like fire, like candlelight flamed by breeze dancing high along a wall, licking shadows across our faces, waxing sideways, dripping, puddling to floor. I have been to these places before. - Close your eyes if you know - First by accident. It was like parachuting into a field of light and waking up in heaven. Every cell in the body ecstatic knows the way there. My veins are road mapped to the embers of ancient fires blazing toward this homeland forgotten.
Numerology
I met a man at the Kroger Deli who knew me by name before I spoke though we had never met. In summer, he wears full safari gear - desert-colored kakis, a solar-powered pith helmet and boots that have known the hot distance of dry times. He mails me letters from across town. He says write and tell me your dreams. Tell me what you see when you open your eyes. Write and tell me everything. He likes starfish and numerology. He cuts hearts out of ads in magazines and pastes them onto a sheet of paper he is saving for the future. He says we are more than we know. He sends me a reading based on the letters in my name. It says the power of desire will propel me down unknown hallways, that I will probably spend the last years of my life on a cruise ship circling the world. Often now, I dream of summer hotels in Paris, of French countrysides I have never seen. Some nights before falling asleep, I listen for a long time to the wind roaring over the lake, imagining it's the ocean and I am a cloud passing over the moon.
Jackie and the Fire Suicides of Buddhist Monks
The gift arrived boxed with its mysteries still intact,
that set of Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedias
my mother after four decades decided I should have.
I stood trembling a little in awe
at that great, green sea of vast knowledge,
bindings snapping the sweet must of childhood mysteries
- and those photographs -
Jackie and JFK walking together,
smiling at some secret the rest of the world can only guess at.
All these years of insight and knowing
have taught me to wonder if they were really thinking
about Marilyn Monroe and Greek tycoons.
But back in 62, I took the world at face value.
This was before that fateful ride in Dallas,
that Texas afternoon that simmered past days and years,
shattering some dream of America,
and in the doing, so much undone.
My mother so upset by the news
she forgot to make supper and bring in the wash.
For two days, sheets flapped in the November breeze
like flags signaling her personal surrender,
as if she already knew there'd never be much
left to believe in the rest of her life.
The pictures slide from there
to the next frame, where someone is handing Jackie
the flag freshly removed from the dead president's coffin,
and she's accepting as if it's enough
to walk away with a flag instead of a husband.
But that was only one thread of the dark tapestry
spun inside the pages of my encyclopedic yearbooks,
images flipping to fast forward as I once again ponder
the fire suicides of Buddhist monks -
in pictures progressing from the match being struck
to bodies fully engulfed, sitting cross legged.
A mystery only half-explained years later
when I read the words of Madame Nhu:
"They only burn themselves to reach paradise."
Already I'm thinking to return these books.
It's like possessing the shin bone of some long-dead uncle.
The images they contain appear again and again
like imaginary walls I must walk through.
But my mother doesn't want them back.
She stands now, solidly united against time,
cloaked in routines that help her remember
when it's time to make supper or water her flowers.
I wonder how it came to her - plucking a beetle from a rose bush
or pouring ingredients into a bowl - to send me these books.
It's as if she's passed these questions on to me,
as if it's my turn now to ponder the mysteries of life.
Or was she just helping me remember how it looked
when the world was new?
As if these books could magically transport me
to that time when I was four years old
and seeing Jackie and the whole world for the first time.
But already I know that was a paradise
even Camelot and the fire suicides of Buddhist monks
cannot return me to.
For the Bird that just Flew into My Bedroom Window
It's true there are moments that change everything - seconds when the slow motion impact, the crack, the crunch alters forever. If you're lucky you will bend and give, or some turn of fate will soften the blow. And you will walk or limp away, changed, altered, broken. But knowing enough to be done with windows and things not what they appear to be.
Brazil, or A Theory of the Universe
Today in the check-out line I heard a man say Brazil is the center of the universe. People nodded behind secret smiles, but he may be right. These days I hold onto nothing. With every door I open, the past slips out behind me. Threads of truth are obscured within the tapestry of days. When I look with eyes closed, the universe appears like feathered dancers twirling on a stage of colored light. It seems to me the earth from up above must surely look like all of Brazil, or some other fledgling world winging toward the waking light in a dance presided over by birds with wing spans greater than our own.
Remembering the Butterfly
In 1994, I travel a thousand miles to hear Henry Hatch, the butterfly man of Belize, explain theories of insect breeding and evolution. In that afternoon thick with the hot breath of an approaching tropical storm, my mind flips back three decades to a time when I am seven years old putting a black worm into a jar, watching it spin a cocoon. But the magic of the butterfly took months to make. The jar was lost in a shed. The butterfly hatched unseen, a stillborn transformation. Too late I learned the magic lost in forgetting. But having once forgotten, I can't stop remembering. Through the window of the butterfly room, I watch wind whip palm trees. Henry Hatch casually plucks the head off a butterfly with a deformed wing. He raises rooms full of Blue Morphos butterflies, which he ships to undisclosed locations around the world. I imagine parcels of butterflies circling the globe, arriving UPS. Eight years later, dusk trails a summer afternoon that smells like rain. I turn a corner to Cooper Clothiers, and pause before a door with 48 Blue Morphos butterflies pressed between layers of glass. I walk quickly into fading light as thunder shakes the first drops of rain from the sky.
Crows
The sound was the first hint of something wrong.
The air suddenly shrill with the screams of crows,
one unified ascending torrent of outrage.
I saw crows flying from all directions;
layers of crows in the trees
dropping from limb to limb.
Then something caught my eye on the hill above,
something ragged and black hanging from a stem.
When I got close, I saw it was a crow
that had been shot.
Falling from its last flight
it snagged on a sapling
head erect, facing forward into light.
Today I heard crows in my yard at dawn.
It struck me how even after a death,
crows still make their morning rounds.
As if by keeping on,
the lost is somehow found.
The Journey of a Dozen Moons
This is how it began. He tore down the sky, packed everything that mattered into a suitcase and stood by the door. Over his shoulder I glimpsed winter trees through glass, then watched him walk through the dead brown yard into the rest of his life - a place I would never visit. When he did not return I began the journey of a dozen moons, at first just this moving inside myself, letting wind whip through the spaces. Then further out, stalking the moon across the lawn, I listened to shadows pulsing drum beats drawing me to the deeper outskirts of the village where my questions lived waiting for me to ask; the place where my lost selves chanted the poetry of mystic tongues. Striped with the forgotten dreams of my ancestors I danced the naked flames faster and faster deep spinning silence surrender to woods and something wild whispering half human half animal drifting like a spark, like a firefly down.
Driftwood
All summer the ducks swam the lake.
There were six of them,
moving closer in, further out and along the shore,
like cool liquid
gliding between channels of green.
Then a freeze iced the lake.
Grounded to shore,
the ducks were easy prey for coyotes and dogs.
Later I found feathers among the rocks.
The lake fell into a silent lament
that spanned into spring,
when rains washed to shore
proof that nature returns
that which it takes.
Driftwood arrived.
First the shapes of duck heads,
then wings and webbed feet.
Then driftwood the shapes of entire ducks.
Some essence had lived on in the lake
shaped by time and water,
now delivered to shore,
as if to say everything lost returns sooner or later
- reshaped, reformed -
but returning always,
as certain as the next breath.
Drawing Lost
In dreams I dove a thousand feet beneath the sea of knowing to read words carved on a tablet of stone. These were my words written in a time future past when all the meanings had revealed themselves. This was the poem I'd waited all my life to write, every line like lightning from the center of my being. Moved there in the watery depths by these words so far down, I knew if I could bring them back I would finally be set free, as if there are magic words for each of us and if we manage to hear them, we are summed so perfectly there's never need for anything more. Rising to surface, I let the words slip away but their essence stayed. It said knowing is illusion, truth is letting go, love is found in sparks of light that brush the outskirts of dreams and forests where I wander, listening for the way that comes to me as whispers, as notes of music when I draw lost long enough to listen.
During a Fast
On the third day, I count my ribs. God speaks to me from the bathroom mirror. The air bends, the light gets bright. People talk in plumes of color. Words linger in rooms and rearrange themselves to lines of music.
The Illustrated Woman
She wanted to erase the script
of years,
the imprint of careless hands
on her skin.
She wanted landmarks.
She wanted gardens
with green things growing.
She wanted stars to orbit
the moon of her seventh house.
She etched colors
across the watermark
of her thighs,
converted stretch marks
to lightning bolts;
handily transformed nipples
to sunbursts.
Her belly button
became the center of the universe.
On her shoulders
daylilies bloomed.
Vines coiled up her legs.
A small yellow bird
perched on her chin.
On her back, an eagle
with the crest of the moon
in its eyes
rose like a phoenix
from the embers of her former life.
When she was done,
she drew a picture
of her new life on the garden wall
and stepped into it.
In the picture
she stands at the helm
of a Viking ship.
She sails the sparkling waters
of her imagination
tasting salt sea air.
In the picture,
she is captain of islands, palm trees
blue sky,
and fast sea birds
disappearing one by one
into the sun.
Lovers Never Leave
Lovers never leave but are transformed to shapes and textures and tastes. Like the moon angling from a familiar place in the sky. Like a spring lawn etched with the wind-swayed shadows of trees. Like stones smoothed by water and time, washed up on every summer beach in my mind. Like mementos of forgotten times left in the pockets of old coats - lost bracelet charms, stray subway tokens. Or the way an orange sometimes tastes like a moment. Or these entire rooms unfolding inside me the way a rose filmed in fast-motion sequence springs full-blown to sudden light.
Some Mornings
Some mornings I am seven years old again waking up as if it's the first time banging the screen door behind me rushing out to meet the new air dancing between lines of fresh-hung wash burying my face in the folds of clean, white sheets imagining I'm falling into the sun, or heaven.
Letter to My Past Self
In times of transformation, the butterfly never truly forgets the worm. The worm reborn, dreams the flowers of another time. Under the sun, nothing is ever lost, but only rearranged. I will remember you this way.
When We Knew the Sky
This was when we knew the sky so well that when words were not enough, we'd shrug and look up at the moon. We both knew what it meant, seeking the shelter of cool summer lawns, measuring with our hearts what passes between stars, certain we knew the secret.
Sleepwalk
Out along the shore of the sleeping lake where darkness swallows things unseen, a boat cuts loose like a dream drifting at the edges of a sleepless night. Things unborn float in an ether of possibility. Sleepwalkers leave their beds on nights like this. They traipse in night clothes across restless meridians of sky. They only fall when they open their eyes and forget they are dreaming.
Socks
It's an old story, coming to the end of things. One morning you are brushing your teeth same as always, leaving little clumps of toothpaste in the sink. Then drinking coffee from the same chipped mug. Jotting grocery lists on the green pad beside the refrigerator. Glimpsing your neighbor through the kitchen window, same as always, flapping out to the mailbox in her flowered housecoat. Getting dressed for work, you sit on the edge of the bed, slip on one sock, then reach for the other. But this time something is different. This other sock has developed a mind of its own. It says, "You can't put me on." So you sit on the edge of the bed holding this defiant sock and staring for a long time into a space you never noticed was there.
Riding the Last Passenger Train in Arkansas
The price of a ticket is goodbye to asphalt horizons of city skies that recede at the steps of the station. Close your eyes. Let yourself fall into the rhythm of the rails. Open the window. Listen to the tango of trees and scrub brush, the song of sumac, chigger berry and kudzu swooshing through long stretches of green silence hurtling past. The conductor announces the name of each dot on the map - Friendship, Romance, Rose Bud, Paradise, Heart, Delight - as the train chugs through a blur of backwater towns, past hills and houses where people wave from front porches and possibilities spin like roulette wheels, carrying you deeper into spaces with breathing room where you can sit until you've had your stay then ride out further still, past the city limits of Happiness where the conductor announces you have arrived again and again.
Traveling
Today I am traveling and nothing matters but my hand on the steering wheel and this windshield full of sky. The clock on the dash has stopped ticking as if to say that time, if it is to be understood at all, must be read backwards the way we move sometimes at the beginning of a long journey that takes us first into the heartland of the past, sweeping us through the wheat fields of lost love and family dinners and summers on the front porch, then moving us swiftly through endless horizons of picture postcard highways slicing through scenic hills and valleys of dreams and desires to the outskirts of frontier towns whose lights appear through reams of night like new galaxies sparkling with the layers of everything that comes after.
The Dogs Penned in My Neighbor's Yard
The dogs penned in my neighbor's yard
dream of moon-swept fields without fences.
They dream of green hillsides and songs of the night -
wild places where bars and fences can't reach.
The dogs penned in my neighbor's yard
howl and whimper as cars drive past.
Yet one dark-moon night
when I crept to their fence and threw open the gate,
they wouldn't cross over.
I know both sides of the wire.
Each night I dream myself past the fences;
each morning they reappear,
reminding me that freedom is just
the other side of the wire.
What You've Been Looking For
For years you stood frozen and waiting while hours ticked through days of silence. Pilgrim, your life is waiting. Take your resolve from cold storage. Find your heart where you buried it years ago, in the field under the big stone. Find your spirit walking wild in the woods. The truth drops like a golden caterpillar from a tree: You are what you've been looking for.
Dream Time
Ain't it funny, the dreams that a year can speak?
Since last we met, I have dreamed and destroyed entire worlds
I have killed and been killed at least a dozen times.
I killed Shirley Maclaine's housekeeper.
They are still collecting evidence against me.
I worked in a greasy spoon cafe flipping slabs of meat,
then skipped town with the guy who washed dishes in the back room.
I climbed a tall mountain to meet the giant talking spider;
I drove my car into a restaurant, then casually ordered the lunch special.
I cooked potatoes at a Buddhist meditation camp.
I wandered aimlessly for years in nondescript parking lots,
searching for my car.
I danced with Mick Jagger in a rainbow colored ballroom
in an outpost along the Astral Plane.
And last night, passing through the crystal cathedrals of a cosmic bus station,
our paths crossed with that hot-flicker recognition of lovers
who have not quite forgotten past lifetimes.
We spoke to each other from the distance inside our hearts
before boarding spaceships headed in opposite directions.
To get yourself free
you must be willing to fling yourself,
willing to risk what comes before
a fall,
willing to risk what comes at the end
of a fall.
You have to make love to the consequences
that keep you straining
at your leash.
Galveston Beach, Morning of the Winter Solstice
With a great rolling sound,
the ocean rushes away from the horizon;
the sun burns through layers of morning.
Seagulls stand watch at the waters edge.
They scutter forward as each receding wave
reveals another layer of swirled, brown sand
pocked with the imprint of bird feet.
We fill our pockets
with the sounds of ocean waves
before heading home.
At the Beginning of a Mad Winter
This winter will see the death of everything.
Today I saw a crow shot through
fallen from sky, its wing snagged on a limb
like a phoenix that could not rise.
Nightly the melting ice freezes thick sculptures,
a gentle art for the seasonally affected
who must daily
burn down their brains to stay alive.
Sometimes we arrive in a place no-one understands.
In the Valley of the Kingdom of adness
I learn to love the insane,
their easy language of unbridled misery
their solemn exchange of empty phrases -
Phrases like elephant turds
and buzzards sprung from flies
Here, amid the terrible drip of vacant ice,
the magic hell of what has passed for love
ticks like a time bomb
that daily threatens to rearrange the sky.
There will not be another time like this.
You can only die like this once and still come back
I hold onto a leaf, a thorn, a cone of light -
the last good thing I can find -
and pray for happiness to take me
Roughly, with its hot mindless hope.
Spring Returns After the Mad Winter
Dirt daubers buzz the eaves. I hit the decks looking for some sun. It's early spring or a warm winter day. I've stopped keeping track. My neighbor mows the brown sticks in his yard. It's a good sound, progress and work. It keeps the brain from rattling too loose in its cage. Who used to say that? I can't remember. Last year's flowers are dead. For weeks I covered them at night with tarps to save them from the frost. That was my lesson, you see. Letting things go even if it means watching them die. Most days, I don't think of it anymore. The way I tried to hold too much, then let it all spill onto the ground. How bit by bit, the birds, the squirrels, carried most of it away. Except the part that rotted into the earth for next time.
Prayer
Help me to walk with feet that forget the way the road sometimes crumbles leaving them to navigate falling air.
Poem for Claude
I believed in you from the moment you first spoke to me with parts of your heart tucked inside the folds of each word. Inside me doors flew open and the breezes of a strange new ocean filled every room with notes ripening to songs from mysterious yet familiar places. Now here is my heart tucked into the handsewn pockets of words newly awakened to the music of yours.
Frozen Lake
The summer houses are empty.
I am the lonely keeper of this winter sky,
daily visiting the ice, solid across the lake.
My old tracks meet my new
and merge with small footprints
leading nowhere across the ice.
The glassy clink of icicles stirs the silence,
a frozen xylophone strung from trees.
Today there are signs of life.
Across the lake, a man in a hooded coat
trudges to a dock, punches a hole in the ice
and drops in a fishing line.
A plane flies over.
For a brief moment, the sun
burns through clouds to reveal
the whisper of a half-rainbow
above the snow-capped bluffs.
Toward a better understanding of light
The night is like a field of restless bones chattering in a wind that won't sleep. I am up at midnight, at one a m listening to the darkness explain itself again and again.
Driving across Blue Springs Bridge, August Full Moon
Light sweeps the night. Sudden moon on still water.
Tuesday morning
Sometimes Tuesday morning arrives in a most unexpected day. Sunlight dazzling window sills, sliding off plants green and jigging in the breeze of a ceiling fan. I throw open the windows and dance to the Best of Van Morrison, my bare feet finding slats of light on hardwood floors, and Van singing, "I'm in heaven, baby, when you smile."
Dreaming the Giant Butterfly
The sun has pierced the sky with a flaming arrow. Cicadas' songs drill deep into the parched woods. Tall trees bathe my dusty road in shade. On my deck, a golden worm has eaten the last of the moonflowers and spun his cocoon amid the browning stalks. I wade barefoot through summer grass, waiting for the giant butterfly to appear.
Dream
The last string holding me to you broke last night in a dream where I stood on a beach watching a man ride a white horse into the ocean. When he disappeared into the crest of a wave, I felt the spray of salt on my face, and knew I was finally free.
After a Break-Up
I dream of shark's teeth and keep one eye on the moon.
Deborah Robinson - Artist Statement
As a poet I explore, ponder and attempt to capture in words that which holds us mysterious. By this I mean the question of life itself - why we are here and what holds meaning for us. I believe these questions are more relevant than ever as we enter this time of the new millennium, when old answers no longer seem to fit, and old ideas we hold about who we are as individuals and as a society must be reexamined if we are to meet the challenges of the future. To me this means focusing on the inner landscape of our deeper selves more than ever before, connecting with the vast ocean of possibility that lies within each of us. As we come into greater self-awareness and recognition of our potential, we are better able to share that with others and assume greater responsibility for the future.
My own past sheds light on how my artistic vision has developed. First, as a lifelong resident of Arkansas, I have explored my own inner landscape in the context of the outer landscape of the hills and valleys and vast green spaces of my home state. The lush, natural world I live in has nurtured my creative life and instilled in me an appreciation of that which is timeless against a backdrop of modern life and its complexities. As a former newspaper reporter, I find myself still delving into questions and bringing back my observations and experiences, only in a different way.
The messages I bring back from my explorations center on transformation and possibility. In my poetry, every experience is transformed into a tool for greater understanding of myself and the world I live in. In this context, I consider myself a poet of possibility, finding threads of magic in the everyday and offering glimpses into my own inner regions, creating awareness of the common threads we all share.
And perhaps the most important message of all is that, in this fast-paced world we live in, it is possible to slow down, to connect with the deeper part of ourselves and bring back the voices of our dreams to help guide us into the new millennium.
All Rights Reserved • ©2005 Light Works Productions • Deborah Robinson
Please email your comments or inquiries to deborah@intuitart.com.
22637 Zane Drive - Springdale, AR 72764 - 479.756.9631