Let it go, Buddha
keeps saying, still so attached
to detachment that veins
I imagine at his temples
are throbbing like the chanting
of ancestors on a CD
I bought cheap for $7.97.
For once again I’ve had
the wrong idea, Calvitholicism
an indissoluble oil slick floating
on Buddha’s smooth sea
of equanimity.
Jesus lay between my breasts on my 18ct cross. My future husband fell in love with Jesus before he fell in love with me, but I married him, anyway.
I always wanted to marry a man like my father. Someone who would protect me when screen doors unhinged from their wooden frame and flew across our farm. A man who ran toward flames in January and February and returned home with singed hair and face covered in soot. A man who sat still, silent, letting my voice take center stage when I needed to be heard.
Read more "Crosses"I don’t know what to expect
because I never died before.
Maybe I will be greeted by
A pair of blue unicorns or
a rainbow and a waterfall
or colorful birds singing my
favorite tunes or I might see
a night sky filled with stars
I once saw on a summer night,
only now I will finally get to see
the man in the moon releasing
all those silvery shooting stars.
As a single bird fixed in motion pins the sky to itself
remorse grows freely along the wetlands where compromised waters
breed few and far between flowers of great beauty and the human brain
spews soft gray clouds cloudy with truth
I am that river that cleanses—
the invention of a self set apart in ignorance of its own choosing
to be the not music and the not poison
a fluid dynamic of ceaseless production forsaking the concerned landscape
and a bitter end
Read more "In Praise of Windmills"The rainbow wheel spinning
I curse at waiting for the folder to open
looks exactly like it feels
when I’m trying to finish one quick thing
and my husband is calling me to dinner.
If you’re spinning the wheel God
I should not be cursing
at the revelation appearing on my screen
praising the colors throwing off light
a personal prayer wheel
chanting Om mane padme hum
every time it appears
heralding what’s in the machine
I doubt your existence
not your suffering
In your tall houses I have seen you
the site of execution
your electric throne
and lofty stone arches exquisitely formed
echoing your screams
Walking this morning barefoot in the garden
I watched your handiwork
a green bottle fly
resting its metallic halo
on a leaf of my beloved apple tree
I am lying, arms helpless at my side and sunk into the tiny gravity wells
Formed by ribs and hip bones, framed in this comfortable chair.
It’s only a nap, in a chair that is not my mother, its arms not my mother’s arms,
Yet I sense that I am upheld by love, and a poem runs through my sleepy thoughts.
I am aware of my hands cupped without care or purpose, at full useless repose,
And I think of marble, of a sculpted body eternally at rest, perhaps the Christ
Released from the agony of crucifixion, the artist carving his ahistorical palm
Wounds like lovers’ openings in a waiting corpse, tender lips traced through the Shadows of holy
A coterie of chick-a-dees
communes
in my maple tree.
A tribe of constellations
self-distances
in the rising night.
Brown-robed monastics
bow
before broken bread.
Circles of poets
zoom
from inspiration rooms.
Fellowships
connect
black/brown/yellow/white/red.
This is to let you know I’m newly funemployed.
I’ve grown weary of the restless noise
of earth, so I plan to gadabout the universe
in search of alternatives to humanoids.
Perhaps I’ll terraform an asteroid
and confirm the latest scientific claims
it contains quintillions in gold.
I’ll appoint myself its CEO
and send you a prospectus once
I’ve penciled out investment strategies.
The sunset is made of gold. It is
made of gold, the sunset, this sunset.
It is made of gold—pure gold spills down the mountainside
and I kneel before the mountainside’s golden
spread
Kneel on the stone and burn this image into my forsaken
brain, sear gold onto my retinas, behind its sackcloth
consciousness (made of gold, it is made
of pure gold—this sunset—made of, made of, made of the quintessent
stuff)
Visitant 