Full

Beauty stretches itself over me.
A thin membrane
Translucent.
All of life quickens under it
The sun rays streaking through it,
Magnified.

Such a fullness of heart
I have not held for many nights now.
Full of restless dreams, 
The anxious mind
May find rest under
The wing of a thankful Spirit.

All of this, mine now
To have and to share
Joy and Gladness,
Following along on winged feet.

Border Line

Pain is
The line.
Pain is the tension.
Between life and death.

We take our blows, and our bows
In the space between.

Wards and Words

A pooling of tears
A drip of blood,
Someone's pleural fluid on my shoe

A haze, a daze
Of faces gone by
In this tangled mess of days.

With their heart murmurs, abdominal wounds,
positive blood cultures, hypertensive medications,
referrals to nursing homes.

We feel the weight of their sicknesses
The strain on life and heart and brain
On muscle, sinew, bone.

And their families, lives, selves,
Somehow mingling with mine
In this incessant dash
Between computer key strokes
and constant nursing pages
ringing in my ears.

We are our bodies, in them we bear our sorrows.
We are defined by their suffering
And the responses of our souls
Coupled with the winding, winded scientific replies
We make, with whatever we can find to patch the holes.

One Day Wilderness

Do you remember, My Love
The woods in which we walked?
The paths leading to the door that opened
For your soul to wander free
with the deer, to turn/sprint away
At first hints of danger.

Do you remember, My Dear
the Rain that made your tears
Commonplace? That washed mud/sweat/blood
off, away to nourish some Wild tree.

Do you remember, My Soul, The River
That rose from its banks to find you?
To swallow all the parts of you
You had lost and had not yet found.

To allow you a jump into its depths,
A cold/dark/delighting beauty
giving way to breath, air, light.

Love is.

Love
Is a soft thing
That creeps in quietly
On feathered feet

And suddenly
Is there at your most requiring moment
A tenderness, a stillness
Covers you.
Silent tears now sweet
Bitterness beaten back
With honeyed hands

A realization of trust
And content steals away
Your dark thoughts and night terrors
Blinds flung open
Walls painted brightly
To reflect the summer sun

You are warm and
Your thoughts are green
with promise. 
What you need
was planted deeply in
A well-watered bed
Of faith and trust
Now bearing a vital fruit

Born in
A pair of understanding eyes
watching you across the room
A pair of strong arms
At your side
Or around your side
When you start to crumble

You are held together
Resurrected of sorts
So in the morning
You put on your shoes
And leave your house
With a little of you left behind
In the gentle wrap of love.

New Ocean

Grief comes in waves
Like so many oceans
Swallowing you and spitting you back out
Forever a miserable Jonah,
Whitewashed skin but black inside.

Like sandpaper on wood
Or so much skin
wearing you away and thin
Till you have no face left to show
Until you begin to loose memory of who you were
And are replaced by the torrent and bleed of loss 

This terrific jungle
A brave new territory
You had never imagined in your worst
Nightmare
and had dreampt of antithesizing
In your wildest imaginings.

Left only with the buzz of a million insects,
The mosquitos of your soul
Feeding off the pool of what is left inside
Propagating

Until your sorrow is
So perfectly complete
Every nerve fiber on end
Agitated, restless in your exhaustion
Waiting for night
And larger beasts.

Thoughts on Grief (C.S. Lewis- A Grief Observed)

"I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on though habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them.  But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it.  So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.

How often- will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again."

Fallow Field

Day, you are
Heavy-lidded.
Dissolute.
Thinned.
You have spent yourself
With no prize in hand at sun's end.

Arms, they are
Heavy.
Bruised.
Burned. 
We drop silent exhausted bitterness
To the ground
Unnoticed by you
In your frenetic death knell.

We lay down
On thread-bare cots 
Dissolute. 
Holding a seed of Hope
For tomorrow, and tomorrow's morrow.

Praying the field birds
Will not swoop down,
Open-beaked, and carry it away.

J. A. Essbaum- Would Land (excerpt)

And life is thirst,
at best. 

So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.

I'm flammable
as birch bark, even damp.

Ash Wednesday

Gray as Gray.
Black as Black.
Tattered as my soul,
An empty, a hollow rock

Deep, holy, true
Running clean.
My soul, swallowed up in yours

Sinful greedy eyes, in your sockets
"Bore our sorrow" they say
A sickness unto sin

Red as Red
Red as Blood
Coursing through your veins
Now, a fatal donation,
To give the scornful: life

Letter to a Friend

You are not forgotten by God.
I keep you in my prayers
You have been dog-eared for the Divine.
Salvation is returning to your page
That you might taste the Spirit
And recognize his face.
That you would meet me
On Jordan's peaceful shore
When these sorrows and this dimness
Have passed away.

Unexpected Guest

She finds Regret at her table,
An unexpected guest.
She realizes she let the word slip
On the street
He must have overheard
And invited himself for dinner.

Now he sits, undenied
Indefatigable.
With once and future kin.
Strange company
In a setting so intimate.

Wrinkles

Our Wrinkles are the Remains
Of a thousand Days gone by
The wear of Handshakes
Sunshakes
The days spent on
Beaches, highways
More exposed for our times with the moon
We bear our recollections with honor.

Synapse

Pain perceived can persist only for so long
Then it stretches, bends, breaks.
Thus lacerated it wilts,
Flutters down
Numbness following in pain's place
Welcome release,
More lack than presence
And I feel no more.

Untitled

The paper is hard
The pen is cold
Trouble is
I'm never alive with you.

I would never love you if I had to
I only love you because
You are who and what I chose
And now you are all I have

Beauty

A geometric plane
Hill, rock, tree, blade
Working on memory
It purveys me
Large, looming
I'm unaware
It's looking at me
Preying on me
Drawing me in
Distracting me
Keeping me from work
And pulling me to play

Inevitable Spring

It had been a long winter
Now it was breaking,
Spring-breathing
With the sounds of bird-song
And daffodil scent on the air
Melting piles of snow
Slowly reducing to grass and mud.
An inevitable feeling of spring
Is upon us.

Dripping Identity

Words, words and more words
Dripping down out of an unfiltered sky
Composed of everything I was and am and think I will be

Large puddles forming on these city blocks
Nonabsorbent, they turn me away
To wash hope and dream into gutter

There are no trees here to nourish,
No grasses or wild flowers to reach root down
Or petal upward to receive a reviving drop

Just one large, subsuming lake
Diluting me, polluting a one-time purity
Washing me out to sea.

On Chicago

Oh Chicago
City of bright lights
Big Shoulders
Irascible drivers
Impossible parking
You have been many faces to me
You were there when I stood
Facing the icy wind, and cried
Remember when we stood at the shores of your lake
And spoke of the deaths of our fathers
And I threw my green hopes into its depths.

You've bitten me with your bitter winds
You've watched me grow and age
From the inside out
Crumbling as I go
Against your sidewalks and skyscrapers

Leaving traces of myself everywhere
While you, invading my memories
Plant yourself firmly within
With a hundred summer concerts
Patio dinners, final exams
Snowstorms, floods, Sunday services
The music of your soul,
The background to my life in its messy meandering paths
Singing me from life to death and back.

Ghosts

Today
I walk down the aisle
With the little ghosts of things forgotten. Pearing at me behind my back.
They snort, giggle, chide me.
"Maybe I will be the one!"
Or maybe me, a purple, oozing one points out,
To bring your disappointment and despair.