To Rosalie Brooke, a poem

This is the babe born of thunder and spiders,

A rose with hidden thorns.

She’ll sing like a brook as she conquers her dreams,

No vase can keep our rose, it seems,

A babe unafraid of the storms.

And when we need a hero sweet,

We’ll call for the rose with the monkey feet

And she’ll bare her thorns ‘til the world is beat,

The babe of thunder and spiders.

Then she’ll settle back in her ebony hair,

The rose without a vase.

And she’ll laugh and she’ll smile while time grows old,

While her spirit is ever gilt with gold,

While the rest of us give chase.

"Some Herons" by Mary Oliver

Source

A blue preacher flew
toward the swamp,
in slow motion.

On the leafy banks,
an old Chinese poet,
hunched in the white gown of his wings,

was waiting.
The water
was the kind of dark silk

that has silver lines
shot through it
when it is touched by the wind

or is splashed upward,
in a small, quick flower,
by the life beneath it.

The preacher
made his difficult landing,
his skirts up around his knees.

The poet's eyes
flared, just as a poet's eyes
are said to do

when the poet is awakened
from the forest of meditation.
It was summer.

It was only a few moment's past the sun's rising,
which meant that the whole long sweet day
lay before them.

They greeted each other,
rumpling their gowns for an instant,
and then smoothing them.

They entered the water,
and instantly two more herons--
equally as beautiful--

joined them and stood just beneath them
in the black, polished water
where they fished, all day.

Stumps

My life is like an overgrown orchard.

I try to curate my friendships

To find like-minded spirits

To find bosom friends

To find people like me.

But the trees grow when and where they may,

As people step into my sphere, my orbit,

And the fruit of friends ripens when I least expect it

And it is delicious.

I don’t control my overgrown orchard, but

I do take care of the trees.

But the stumps.

But the stumps.

Where a life was cut short

Before I was ready to let the tree go

Before I was done eating the fruit

And now there are shadows on the orchard floor

Where fruit never ripens and falls

And it’s in those deserts between the trees

That I watch the orchard blossom or rot

That I watch the seasons come and go

And the sun shine through the leaves

In warm golds and cold silvers,

All while I sit on the stump of a friend.

Anger Management Problems

The Flame by Jackson Pollock

My mother has a bookshelf of villains.
Tiny, plastic hands and hooks and tentacles
Extending from wily reds and angry purples,
        And billowing blacks,
The primary colors of being the bad guy.

I suppose that is why I came to her,
Flushed and bruised and screaming,
Just in time for lunch on a Wednesday,
In the middle of the story of that week,
And I raised my head right there in the hospital
To see if the world had heroes to pick on.