Salt

A radical acoustics of truth
rises in innocent clarity.
The delicious gate of desire
reveals an apophatic weather
of unexpected peace.
At last, I learn
the visceral work
of exquisite silence.

The moon is made of salt,
not sugar.

©Laura Sorrells 2011
some rights reserved

This latest found poem, such as it is, came together from the pages of Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence.

Foxfire

God is my secret; he knows I'm his girl. You don't
know what he's like. Sometimes he licks my face
like a cat lapping cream. I almost caught him once,
but he disappeared down the bole of an oak.
I know he loves me because he gives me presents.
I found a bottle cap once, Red Fox Root Beer,
on the path I take through the aspens. You've never
seen it in a store, have you? A sign clear as candy.
And a bar of soap by a bend in the river, scented
with Rome apples and never used. I bathed with it
for a month, my evening prayer, till it was gone:
God wants his gifts used. The suds down my leg
like apple blossoms on a branch in the dark.
You say he's not real? As soon tell a mother
the child's not real that suckles at her breast.
I stayed with him all night when he had a fever,
fed him shards of ice to keep him alive, and when
I had no water, I cooled him with my own spit
till I couldn't swallow. Who are you to judge?
Come out and you might see something--foxfire
from the root of a fallen cedar--he's mine.

--Robert Thomas

smoke's brother

Bring home

the animal grace

your spirit needs,

the brilliant thread

of smoke’s warm red brother.

lks 10/11/11

Something quick from the haiku magnets. I keep coming back to that koan about the red thread.

A Turning

This rich and hungry silence is what I have instead of what I had. The peak of the mountain wants to be more to me than it has been. It doesn’t seem so much a peak as part of something’s body, the body of God perhaps. I keep thinking I want to investigate this thinness that feels thrust upon me, this pruning, this narrowing down and paring away. Of course in some ways it is a richness too. It has spaces where things happen that don’t have a name yet. I will doubtless give them names, probably compound words like webtime or portalhunger or twilightsight.  Poplarsoul. Bearsong. As October begins I feel a turning. It always seems the most liminal of months to me, though I know months are a construct, like time. Its crepuscular denouement moves me and whispers to me. But now it’s just gotten started and the edge of fall is still warm. Its shoulder is just covered with a limning of leafshawl. It smells like loamy earth just turning cold at night. A little bit like rosemary drying into winter, crisp and full of itself but ready to be quiet and still soon. Mixing it up with thyme and fading sage next to the fallen bluebird house by the road.

Saturday’s winds were high and frisky. My mother disliked wind and sometimes I don’t like walking in it but mostly it comforts me when it gets together with the trees. My old gray cat used to play with the wind when it blew across the deck. It took me a couple of times seeing it to get that that’s what he was doing. He’d twirl and dance, trying to catch it in his paws like yarn or thread. I feel a little more alive in strong fall winds. A little more aware of the edge of things, of the delicacy of them and of how they sing when they break, like glass or the creaking throat of a bent branch.

Crickets have long since replaced the cicadas of summer. They’re shyer with their song. Last month a cicada got stuck in the glass door and clacked and buzzed much of the night. I tried to find it to set it free but I never could. The color of cicada song is a brassy goldenrod and that of crickets is auburn. I hear my own thoughts in how the crickets move their legs and wings. I hope to do that still when they stop, or maybe what I hear will lead me into some other way of knowing. Some other lingua franca, not sound but something else, like signing or the raised tininess of Braille. Just as tricky to learn perhaps. It will take me awhile to get it. Maybe I never really will; maybe my gestures and how I see the tug of shapes will always need refining. That threshold place is not new to me and I am comfortable with it. Its iterations shift shape like the colors of the horse in the Wizard of Oz but its soul is somehow familiar ground, a gentle pocosin of soft wet earth and hidden birds that fly up suddenly into sky, miraculous, wild, and free. 

©Laura Sorrells 2011

all rights reserved

The Hidden Field

Some nameless sweetness
thumps into the palette
of my reverent heart.
Everything abides
in an extravagant,
strange apotheosis
of wonder, courting
the solitary, affirming the
heady purity
of starwort and whippoorwhill,
of sphagnum moss
and spider body.
Listen again:
a chorus of nothing
saturates the hidden field
where clouds invent breezes
and thundercolor births
its mysterious stories.

© Laura Sorrells 2011
all rights reserved

This is another found poem culled from words in the text of Hannah Hinchman's book on nature journaling, A Trail Through Leaves: Journal as a Path to Place. 

a poem by Margaret Gibson

Fox Fire at the Changing Tree

The burning that must
have been coming from me--

these are lines I'm stealing
from someone else's poem, just after

I've resolved not to lie, not to steal
to live in my evergreen

integrity as long as I can manage it
I'm much like these foxes

gathered on a night whose stars
might be flakes of snow

They have their burning torches
to lift and bear

down the road, fully camouflaged
once they've put on the stolen forms

of pious pilgrims
The bare, spreading tree above them

is fit for owls to inhabit
when a savory hunger makes them take

deadly aim
on any small rustle in the dry leaves

That's their true nature
however haunting their melancholy cries

But the foxes--for the love of me
(and it's exactly that)

I can't see why
I shouldn't want to to touch them, stroke them

I might just rub the ruddy silk
of their coats against my cheek

And often have, you tell me bluntly
That friction, however

slight, sufficient to make me
spit fire, gnash my teeth

and lunge for the soft parts of your body

lifting my chin moments after

to say hotly I didn't mean to
I didn't sense it coming

As if I were the innocent one
blindsided, bloodied

--Margaret Gibson

blue wingbeats

The alphabet of the unfathomable
spells out its blue
wingbeats of grace,
a tapestry of yes
inside the healing
persistence
of foxglove, the unassailable
remembrance
of rosemary.
A ladder of yes
spreads across
the ponderous deep
Aldebaran sky.

--©L.K. Sorrells 2011

This is another found poem, this one culled from the pages of Hannah Hinchman's amazing book A Trail Through Leaves: Journaling as a Path to Place.