This was one of the foggiest mornings anyone here in north-central Kansas could remember. But today, I travelled 20+ years back in time to when I would drive almost by touch morning upon morning in rural Michigan’s autumn trek to high school. I tune back in and hear the radio telling me this will be one of the coldest winters they expect to have here; I can feel the truth of that, at least, in my bones.
09/20/14
this expanding self,
yeast bubbled and foaming,
gives itself away
09/21/14
setting sun’s brined reach
spangles golden leaves, scrubs
tinsel from summer
09/23/14
grown comfortable
with prickly self-worth doubts,
she acted, at last
09/24/14
we stalked upright to
walk like tree trunks instead of
scampering branches
roots in earth, not air
stalwart stewards, we ignored
our joy for leaping
09/25/14
seaweed spirals lure
currents, unravelling
colonies of hope
And so, I went and visited my daughter. I sat in earshot of her barista-ing at the coffee shop waiting for her to get done with her shift and wrote like I’d been humming the words all along…
09/27/14
doodling ladders with
firstborn and her fauna mates,
schlepping for donuts
her boyfriend echoes
her father were he ever
content or hipster
her colleged misfit
making-do-ness feels like home
to this rag-tag heart
09/27/14
erasure poems
this morning I made
found object fragments from lists
of past weeks’ haiku:
from 09/06/14-09/19/14
moldy scattered cells
glitter feral sagas of
sunlit emptiness
geysered dormance lifts
with tangerine eagerness
breath orbiting shifts
from 08/29/14-09/05/14
mild ruseful truths,
snug kernels, tinted sky trills;
silk stitches inward
I wrote these haiku in the days following, while waiting for the big poem that’s knocking on my brain to come out, the one that answers how we’re supposed to be, the one that I’ve been searching everywhere else for, the one that lives tethered within and is so easily spooked…
09/28/14
circles from above
ladders from the side: helixed
wisdom ascending
09/29/14
if
we’d intuited
elliptical wanderings
not egocentric
orbits; if we’d seen
more spectrum in the night skies…
hearts would beat with tides
10/01/14
when I told you there
was nothing, I was speaking
in code – hiding loss
monstersofourowndestiny 