Birch Island Books

My friend needed to heal her brain after injury,
and I’m so very grateful for the miracles of modern medicine —
and by miracles, I mean people who studied and researched and put in massive hours, who imagined and hypothesized and collaborated —
which allowed her to use bio-feedback for this task.

She worked hard. Training parts of the body not under conscious control is very hard work. She pushed and tried and made incremental progress to get back to who she knew she had been: a mom, wife, activist, daughter, artist, wonderful multi-dimensional mind.

Her technician brought her tea.

She dropped the focus on the task and reached out to this tech, her heart and mind completely full of gratitude for this kindness and connection.

Her biofeedback boards lit up.

Elegance of feather-light forms in swirling fluid
cowlicks of wind do-si-do
and the magic falls so thickly that the world beyond the meadow is only ghosts of trees that I cannot hear.

Hush, hush, hush.
Drift away from the world of worries.

Be here and now
in the dance.

Where did the notion come from that there’s a correct way to sleep?
“Awake in the middle and then second sleep”
Has been true since the savannah, since the trees.

I am awake in the middle.
But, consarn it, we’ve stopped saving daylight
Which makes this too early to be too late to go back to bed,
but Second Sleep does not call me. Yet.

scattered on the forest floor,
hooting from deep within the canopy,
encoded in the jumble of color on my daughter’s bed.

Poetry in the scent of my wife and the taste of mangoes in my granola and the dance of eager paws.

Within and without,
created and found,

Sights and words and heartbeats.

by months of Other Things
and summer days and long twilights
and deep sleep and deep loves and complex stories.

All wonderful, chosen things,
but they were not stars and I had lost the thread of the story above me.

I looked up just now, just this morning,
an autumn morning when the Night lingers and the dawnlight keeps its own counsel yet.
I looked up.

There he is.

I don’t want the plates to spin:
I want to admire their porcelain filigree’d edges
and exquisite painted details.

Some are very old with gold leaf highlighting the lacework
and dark pink roses just before the rim.

Some are entirely made by me,
made with silver
and the figures are white on white on white
and I can see them perfectly.

We move, learning.

We flow, moving.

We dance, flowing into patterns which are both organic and new.

And so I invite collaboration and we co-create a new music which none could have achieved separately

The deck responds to waves, tides, currents — changing under my attempts to balance.

and this is how I learn to love the sea.

is more journal than skill,
more inward than blog,
and it’s nice to have a record.

The days on which I do not poem, fine, very well, it didn’t happen today;
but if I go a month, that is a poem as well.

Maybe it is the despair of all the words, tasks, responsibilities, obligations, must, should, ought, could, would, will, expectation, deliberation piling on me in fast-paced attack on my sensibilities and sleep —

Or it is the despair of silence. No words, not even self.

Well, gosh.
Look at that.

I was in the safekeeping of stars.

Thank you.

Begin again.