To find out that this life
is the one I want
– the one I long for and await –
is like dancing in puddles.
It is like standing in an empty room
anticipating more silence
and slowly being bathed in song
from voices in the corners.
Tipping over under a weighted pack,
the burden becomes the bolster
where I rest with arms spreadeagle to the sky.
So many of my thoughts
are familiar and slightly musty
– they smell like me, and show small rips
and stains
and signs of overuse.
It’s hard to let them go –
comforting warmth in the dark,
oversized protection to cover up my flaws,
gifts from those who love me.
And yet –
when I life them up to check out
belly underneath,
contours of who I am today
peek out
in vibrant shades of new,
and silky rivulets of exposure.
When will I have courage for new raiment?
As I sit
with this blank page,
the not-yet-breath
makes space
for the not-quite-word
that finds its movement in the pen,
splatters into shape,
and waits for an eye to find voice.
A sacred mess,
puddle of brilliance and wet dirt,
reflecting sun,
an inert invitation.
Created after rain,
it will dry up again as busy winds lick through.
Let it erode the rock beneath,
sinking deeper with each raging storm,
leaching out the acids and the bonds
until the rock is full of holes
to access the deep spring;
become an endless pond.
This constricted voice
is not entirely my own
– I have the small squeak of the divine
as she moves through this mid-life thaw.
I have the passionate tears of the dancer
who is carried through her shaking
by present and distant companions.
I am the Tlingit “Hoo-haa!”
in a firelit circle of bruised and compassionate faces.
I am the loving smile of Tia Jane,
leading children in prayer in a foreign language,
after soaking and wrapping their abscessed feet.
I am the voice on the radio,
and from the pulpit
and the front of the room.
I have swallowed my words
in my bedroom
and while cleaning the bedrooms of others.
I have stammered with loving intention,
and gathered up fragmented minds
to build brief, coherent visions.
I am she who helped navigate a room full of turbulence,
and she who sat alone in the dark, hoping to breathe again.
I am the body and the heart
that blended with her husband’s strong and broken soul
to birth and nurture two new lives
now wriggling on their incandescent journeys.
I am the radiant witch
who has burned her princess costume,
and thrown away the cackles and the warts
to stand revealed in her true power.
I am full and utterly empty.
I am she who is unforgettable and often invisible by choice.
No small life,
this collection of in-breaths and poems,
of washing dishes and invoking the Elders as we meet in new circles,
this beading together of cultures and geographies and loves.
I am a prism through which God shines his mottled light,
and a dust mote spinning briefly in a sunlit shaft,
one particle among millions that are falling to ground.