Unstable Sushi

[Note: My daughters' school is running a Clay for Adults class every other week. In the first class, I hand built a square "sushi plate" and soy sauce dish. When I returned for the second class, I discovered that I had neglected to make certain that the base of the plate was level, and so the plate wobbles. "Great," I thought, "unstable sushi." And really, how can you not make a haiku out of that?]

Unstable sushi
upon a wobbling surface
still tastes just as good.

A Haiku

Shiny black cricket
Hiding under gravel in
My greenhouse: please, sing.

October 17, 2011

Pedestrian Club

Distances are deceptive.
In Cambridge, thirty minutes' drive
into Harvard Square
translates to forty-five minutes
of walking (an hour if I'm in
no rush.)

In Beverly, nothing is more
than fifteen minutes away by car,
but that time encompasses
more distance.
Ten minutes to my daughter's school
turns out to be more than three miles,
an hour's brisk walk.
Repeatedly, I am deceived
by easy drives along the Bass
or Danvers Rivers. Everything
takes far longer to walk to
than I expect, leaving me footsore.

It's a lonely pursuit. Excepting
downtown, sidewalks are generally empty,
unused, clean, devoid of the small marks
of the surrounding human population.
Not having to concentrate
on weaving through human traffic,
I notice things along my path:
a perfectly manicured lawn,
a collection of cigarette butts,
the gnarled bark of an enormous,
ancient locust tree, a stack of
spectacular mushrooms, lining a stump.

Roughly once each mile,
I pass a fellow foot-traveler,
and every one I pass greets me,
smiling, wishes me a good morning,
as though we are old friends
or members of some secret society.
I smile back, nod, give greetings,
happy to be counted among them.

October 13, 2011

First Draft: Given

Here's another yoga poem. I haven't done yoga alone, in a natural setting, in a long time, and I was astonished by the fine details I became aware of when my mind was quiet and meditative.

Given
May 29, 2011

I remove shoes, socks,
step gingerly onto
clover-strewn grass.
My thirsty soles drink.

I stand in tadasana,
shoulder blades back,
palms at my heart,
begin the sun salute.

I have no grips or blocks.
To preserve my wrists,
I perform downward dog
on my knuckles, awkwardly.

Looking down into the clover,
I spy something rare.
I choose to ignore it,
move into upward dog.

Shifting stance, spreading feet,
I do triangle, warrior two,
warrior one, side-angle pose,
then let my head dangle, rest.

And there's another,
right between my palms,
three fat teardrops clustered
around a smaller fourth.

How can I refuse a gift?
I pick it and tuck it
behind my right ear,
beneath the arm of my glasses.

After fierce pose and tree pose,
another downward dog
reveals two more to me,
perfectly proportioned.

These, I tuck behind my left ear.
I settle, cross-legged,
stare out at the grass,
let go of my mind.

A speck falls to earth: insect?
Then another, and another.
I am watching the birth of rain,
feel it dance upon my skin.

When I can no longer see
just one drop at a time,
I begin to stir, slowly,
returning to my mind.

I look down, and there,
at the cross of my ankles,
a fourth four-leaf clover,
fourth stanza, fourth line.

I give this, and the first,
to a friend, woken by rain,
to give to his lover's daughters,
when they return from their hike.

We gather our picnic blankets,
baskets and half-eaten sandwiches,
and bring them to shelter
beneath a play structure.

Minutes later, our families
emerge from the woods,
drenched, dismayed, and delighted,
and wanting their towels.

Each of my daughters
receives their gift with wonder.
The memory of raindrops
I keep for myself.

Note: After posting this, I realized that, quite by accident, everything had fallen into four-line stanzas except the third stanza. So I added two lines after the first two and broke it into two stanzas. By another happy coincidence, this makes the poem exactly sixteen (four x four) stanzas. Technically, I suppose this is now a second draft, but it seems silly to repost it so soon after the initial posting.

Silence

In shavasana,
my body's response to
every pose that I have just held
slowly leaches out of me
into the warm bamboo floor:
the ache in the once-fractured
bone in my foot, the tremor
in my right hip, slowly easing,
the throb of my shoulders
from the seesaw
of downward dog/upward dog/down,
the screech of hamstrings and
hyperextended knees and
inflexible wrists

and behind all these physical howls.
the low cacophony of daily crises -
bills to pay, taxes to finish,
lunchboxes, birthday parties, permission slips,
bedbugs/laundry/dishes/bathtime/
pottytraining/schooladmissions/
midlifeangst/almostburiedgrief
that were encapsulated
in clenched muscle, now
like bubbles at the surface
dissipate as my body softens.

My mind empties.
For some uncountable time,
I am free of the burden
of language.

Perilous Spring

March 28, 2011

I can taste spring in my mouth.
The crocuses bud and blossom
and somehow do not freeze
when the night's chill falls
and frost still forms on
the old fall leaves.
Still, there is sun, and more
of it each day, warm afternoons,
bright skies, fog rising
from snow subliming in shadow.

In this knife's-edge time,
I can taste my future
away beneath my tongue, behind
my teeth, and rising up
into sinus and tear duct.
It sings of fresh paint
and wood floors and turned earth,
a new home full of space and light,
potential realized,
a wide yard with oaks, pines, maple
already rampant with sap, maybe
a fruit tree or two,
and still space for a garden,
neat rows waiting for seedlings,
perhaps a henhouse - fresh eggs -
perhaps a pasture - goat's milk, cheese -
but most of all, oh yes,
mostly the taste of completion,
of having found the house, the school,
the new life we crave in our bones
like thaw, like water, like sleep.

All these tastes
that linger like ghosts in my mouth
terrify me.
I cannot breathe out
for fear they will scatter
like new snow.