Newcomb Hollow
This big pond could heal me if I could figure out what’s wrong.
Some tangled emotions jangling up against each other in ways
that aren’t music. It’s like piano strings going on singing
even after you raise your hands. There’s just a certain amount
of noise that still has to be made. Grief, like pain,
opens. I’m just a big hollow box. Once,
a massage therapist put her hands above my chest
and I felt a mass in the air between us. It’s hard to explain.
She asked, What’s this here? and I said, That’s where I keep my sorrow.
It all made so much sense. But it didn’t solve anything.
This pond, lying low under a shroud of fog.
These pines doing their Japanese woodblock thing.
Nature doesn’t give a shit about me and that’s all right.
That’s perfect. I’m not sure there even is such a thing as healing.
Over time we just forget how bad it hurt. Other times,
like a knife coming at us, we remember.
There’s not a lot we can do about that.
Climb out of bed. Make a cup of coffee.
Wait for that moment when you realize all of a sudden
you’re laughing and you can’t remember why.
Fog Fills the Bowl of the Field Like a Gift
But when I walk out
into it,
it’s gone.
Leaves behind a sense of something
gone wrong.
Or,
about to.
The hawk is back.
Hunched on the top of the unfinished
hoop house.
The hoops outlining a space that never was.
Still, you can feel it–
in spite of the sky pushing through
—the curved enclosure.
The hawk moves just a few inches,
adjusting his claws. Just to let me know
he sees me.
I have lost
the capacity to be an animal.
Carry the burden of mind
into even this.
Meanwhile the hawk–
The Middle of Blue
I am trying to give up wanting.
I work on it so much that not wanting becomes, itself,
a desire.
O, big pile of sand strewn with shipwrecked roses,
giving way abruptly to the sea, I come here
not so you can teach me anything, but
to unlearn some things I know.
I’m tired of making mistakes
but not tired of living.
It seems so far back to the girl I once was, and yet
she’s the one who remembers these long days
almost weary with sun.
Feet in the sand, eyes to the horizon.
Some can’t feel this flat beauty,
need vertical stimulation.
But I like seeing farther
than I can see.
I like that white wave breaking
at the edge of the world,
beckoning.
There are still so many things I don’t know but,
again, that’s not why I come here.
I come to watch a barge make its stubborn passage.
To kneel in the sand and collect Cape May diamonds,
throw them into the sky. To feel lonely so long
I know it can’t hurt me.
To stand on the shore of the middle of blue.