nights

there are nights
when i can think
when i can write the words
he never loved me.
if it is written
it must be true
if it is true, there can be
no argument
and i am weary of argument.
there are nights when i remember
in the silence
how you opened my chest
and my heart
fell apart
like the seeds of a
pomegranate.
you never loved me.
its written in books
in my poems.
i write the words.
i write the words
for the nights i can think.

lost poem

I wrote you a poem

but I left it on the car seat

I folded it in half

then folded it again

negligently

I placed it here

then there

until it was lost

and I wonder what type of life

it must have

apart from me

without my hands

without my books to read

or pages to be

pressed between

I can remember the words

some phrases really

when I think on you these days

I think mainly of your voice

though I cannot recall

a single word

you said to me

not even goodbye

in moments of stillness

of quiet and calm

I collect myself

and I think to write it down

again

but it stays just that

an unfinished task

time and again

I only think on it

too often

too often we long

for the things that consume us

only to hold them at bay

-as if there were virtue in restraint

as if the river invented the dam

or the tree the saw

i know you

i know who you are

as if you were Jacob arriving at the well

and i

i had just drawn down my jar

what good

you asked me what I had done with your letters

-if I had even opened them-

if I had read them

I might have known then that you left her;

that you were coming in the spring.

and what can I say but that I might have?

I might have but, there were so many other things

-the sky in April seemed endless, cloudless

and I couldn’t stop searching it.

in May I hung the laundry out to dry in the still cool air.

when I made my bed it smelled of wind, of dew.

in June the strawberries bloomed and ripened

just like always in the shelter near the door.

what can I say – your letters

I might have read them, but what good would it have done?

what good would it have done

without you here to speak the words?

lines

I heard that you left her today

and I remembered that she always called you Blue.

I never did.

I remembered your mother standing in our yard

-          June,

June,

                June,

my mother would say, shaking her head

as if the world were falling apart

over apples and picket fences.

I heard you left her today

and I remembered our first day of school.

you called my name

-          over and

over

                and over.

you were in one line

and I was in another.

I never answered.

it seemed the thing to do.

winter love

your kisses were so gentle

that I mistook them

for the snow falling softly,

decorating the branches.

I mistook your touch for the wind

moving through the bare trees.

you were the winter itself

stealing upon me.

how restful it is,

to be in your arms.

how calm it is

like stone.

your heart

is a pale moon.

you aren’t afraid

of the night pressing

on our skin

of silent fields.

you brought me the love

that makes spring possible.

let me confess

let me confess

my humble love

grown of earth

no flower

more practical sustenance

a spear of corn

no red color

(except at the root)

pale yellow

like butter

kernels pressed

tight together, like

baby’s toes

slender body

wrapped in

translucent silk

paper husk

let me confess

my humble love

let me nourish you

like all good things

born green

born of earth

the flight

I made my bed beside the railroad tracks

laying down as the deer

in their wild and grassy places

and folded my hands

as if in prayer.

I made my bed beside the white clay road

banished from your call

as lost as any dog.

who can count the ways

I was unmade that night?

still the wheels of the road

rumbled close

always turning

like mother to child.

the train cried.

I felt its vibration in the earth.

it was no more than

the nighthawks passing over me,

like smoke rising.

the lights of the cars on the highway

to my drowning eyes

seemed globes – spirits

rising to heaven

wait, I cried - wait

can you blame me?

there was nothing left of me but tears

but words whispered in prayer.

the price

others may write about eyes

about glances

what would I know of this?

-my sight extinguished at his touch

his hair running though my hand like water,

his lips like currents

pulling me deeper

drowning me in his breath.

in the morning – departing

buttoning clothes

like children gathering slippery stones

from the riverbank,

shoving sandy, never clean feet into shoes,

trembling, suddenly cold.

 I thought I knew what this would cost me

- I should have known what this would cost me.

I should have known

love isn’t a price you pay only once.

radiant star

they say we are made of earth.

this must be true, because I crumble at your touch.

like dust I scatter on your breath.

they say we are made in the same vein as the stars.

they are our ancestors perched above us,

each in its own silver chair.

this too must be true.

when you hold me close

our hearts together feel composed entirely of light

radiating from your body to mine.

we are nothing more than atoms transmitted

-the sound of a chord being struck.

they say we are immortal beings

each of us possessed of a soul.

how could we not?

the universe is infinite

-that truest note escaping us-

how could we ever stop traveling across it?

the kiss

your kiss is like a torn cloth

it fits against the sky like a church spire

alone in a prairie of winter.

your touch runs like a furrowed field,

line beside line, unbroken

if there had been a moment

for breathing,

for asking,

I would have told you, love

that I’d pay any price

-my heart knows its color

my blood, my being

knows its name.

the return

kiss me, love, and then return
-while you are gone my heart will be
like a furrowed field in winter
dusted in snow
lines of black
lines of white.
kiss me, love, and then return
-until you do, everything will be
as if only in passing,
flocks of birds alighting on a shorn field
for a moment a seed,
a drink, rest
then a cloud ever changing, ever migrating
bird by bird a whole, falling apart.
a kiss my love
-then while you are gone
I’ll imagine only your sweet return.

the compass

they tell me there are directions
– north, west up,
down and left.
but how can this be?
when no matter where I turn
I am always moving toward you.
there are maps that only the heart can read.
it will tell you that sometimes even the shortest distances
are immeasurable, are too much.
no one praises a heart of stone,
but I must confess that mine is granite,
lead and quartz,
weighted, heavy.
my being is always falling in your gravity
toward the earth, your touch
your heart.

with you

the first time you held me

it was like a house burning

in the night.

and for the first time

the world around me

-illuminated only by fire

seemed black, immense

frightening.

the moon a pale seed

buried in the earth

with no more light, no more substance

than ghosts, than memory.

being with you meant

 understanding being without you.

being without you was unbearable,

cold, immense

black

- a pain illuminated only by fire.

my heart was lost in it

as cool, as distant

as a nameless star.

nothing you could say

could call me back.

nothing could

convince me otherwise.

the flight

I left you today, love

though perhaps you didn’t notice.

I never left my bench,

never transgressed the garden wall.

still – for a moment – I was

as far from you as the first star.

I planned my escape as carefully

- as painstakingly – as any prisoner.

I crafted my wings from your stolen letters,

from clips and tape left unnoticed on the desk.

I hid my rings (they were too heavy)

in my shoe at the toe

like the mouse we once found

nesting there.

I took off my clothes and opened my chest

(how the rusted hinge cried out!

- I thought for certain

you would hear it).

I wanted to leave behind my heart (it was too heavy),

like the rings, like the shoes, freed for flight

but there was no place safe to hide it.

nor would the door – opened - close again

 like a broken shutter

vulnerable, caught by the wind.

did you notice?

did you hear?

I will tell you, love

(though you did not ask me

-though you found my creased wings

torn and folded in the bin)

why did I return?

always I the felt the weight of my heart in flight

the cold and

the stars and the hazy purple twilight

swirling in my open chest

and I was afraid.

I saw your face – as distant from me as the last star

and then . . .

something drew me back.

something drew me back.

the cardinals

I put it all in words,

but these were like the seeds

lost in the snow at our feet.

I watched the birds hunt for them,

each one a red plumaged pulse

breaking raggedly

frail, desperate, determined

against the cold.

what is it they say? even the birds

are clothed and warmed by some miracle.

you sat beside me

and in our nearest thoughts,

our close silence -each of us counting

-each of us wondering

-each of us imagining,

their wild and windswept homes,

their frail shelters in the night - each only big enough for one

and the soundless, stealing cold.

you took my hand and I blushed,

imagining the feel of their down, their hidden softness.

I never found my words, never spoke them

though I had written them on placards, on buildings, on my heart

-frail

- hopeful

-sustenance

mere words.

like the birds without shelter, without worry,

I didn’t need them.

all love is stolen

do you remember my grandmother’s wood?

-the hanging snake vines that formed swings for two,

the pale, upturned roots near the shore,

that made strange, magical palaces?

we called it her wood – though in truth it never was.

we raced through the neighbor’s field to get there

-how furious he would have been to know

that we had crushed a single tender plant.

you held aside the barbed wire,

and I crawled through,

my hair caught, and you pulled it so roughly free

that I cried.

all love is stolen

-you taught me that.

it moves through our heart like a fever

and then it is gone,

no more our own than the amber moon

passing through a cloud.

like children we are freed only for the planting and the harvest.

in the winter we will be called back

to stand in line.

Top 5 Things I Love About Being A Writer

These past few months I’ve been taking some time off from writing.  I just finished my most recent novel and frankly, I’m a little burned out.  Taking a break from what you love can give you a little perspective though – so here is my list of the top five reasons why I love being a writer.

1.      Being a writer has given me a lifelong sense of purpose.  Since I was at least 5 years old, I’ve known that I was a writer.  I never mistook this for a career path or a job – I still needed to figure that out like everyone else.  But I’ve always known what I’d be doing for the rest of my life.  That’s a powerful thing.

2.      Writing organizes my thoughts.  Without writing I often feel like a soul adrift in the sloshy sea of my brain.  When my thoughts shift from one thing to another without coherence for hours at a time, I feel a little dizzy.  When I’m working on a writing project, I think and daydream in a more organized way.  I conserve my moments of reflection for my work.

3.       Rarely is there wasted time in the life of a writer. I’m seldom bored.  The random moments of my life feel connected, strung together like a necklace of bright Murano beads.  Recently for my work (not as a writer), I spent the day at an electrical lineman’s school.  A week later I decided a character in my next book needed to be lineman.  When you’re a writer all of life feels like important research.

4.      The conversations with random strangers are more interesting.  My sister is a nurse.  Random people stop her all the time looking for a medical diagnosis.  For example, her waitress at a restaurant once discussed her bladder infection as she handed my sister her burger and fries.  Thank god that never happens to me!  When strangers hear I’m a writer, they usually want to tell me their most interesting story about themselves – or ask me how to get published.  I can handle that.

5.      Novels are all about character development.  Plot is important, but it is meaningless without people interesting and real enough to move it along.  To develop characters you need to develop your ability to listen to and understand real human people all around you – their motivations, their concerns and fears.  I can’t think of any other aspect of life – work, play, marriage – where this isn’t a useful tool to hone from a young age.

So these are my top 5 reasons that I will go back to writing.  The “big break” as I call it – my six months off from writing has a few more months to go.  I’m looking forward to going back, but I’m also enjoying where I am now.

The Big Break: 6 Months Off from Writing

I’m taking a break from working on long form fiction (novels) for a little bit. For the whole next six months. The long and short of it is that I just finished a long, engrossing project and I’m a little burned out. This six months off will allow my current project to ‘breathe” so to speak. Hopefully when I go back to it for a super, final, absolute last read, I’ll have fresh eyes.


I’ve been working on one long form project or another – some failed, some successful, for awhile now. Something close to fifteen years, if it’s possible to believe that. Nights, weekends, holidays, any spare time from my full-time job and parenting, all the time. Even when I wasn’t writing – say after the birth of my children – I felt guilty about not writing. The projects were never far from my mind. I wake up early. I stay up late to finish them.

I only work on one project at a time. This is what drives me to finish a project. Somewhere around the end of the second draft and the beginning of the third, I always start to hate a novel. Loathe it. Doubt its very purpose. That’s when the temptation is high to start another project. When I was young, I learned my lesson - work from beginning to end, first to third draft, no distractions, or it won’t get done.

Right about the time I start to loathe a project, I fall in love with the next project. If only I could finish the old project, the bright new, hot project and I could be together! The closer I get to finished, the more eager I am to start something new. As a result, there haven’t been more than a few days breaks between projects for the last few years.

So I’m trying something really new to me here, by trying to force a rest between projects. Force is the right word. It turns out, however, that thinking about taking a break – planning for it – is worse than the actual break. I’m two weeks in now. For almost a full month before the break, I wavered, I panicked. I compromised, suggesting I could still do some outlining. The last day, I woke up at 5 am to squeeze in a few more pages and found my heart was racing painfully – already pounding as I was waking up from a sudden, deep sleep. For weeks before the break I would debate with myself over its merits during my long commute to work. I remember muttering to myself (yes, I talk aloud in the car alone) that planning for this felt something like being forced to schedule my own lobotomy.

But the time to stop was helped by external events. I had planned for a week of rough camping with my family. No internet, no computers, no novel. I shelved the project and started packing almost without having the time to think too deeply about it. Packing up the kids, getting everything in the car, giving the house a brief clean before departure – this didn’t give me a lot of time to think that I was starting the big break – as I’ve come to think of it.

One of my goals for a week of camping was to teach my oldest son how to ride a bike. I was counting on the calm country roads at the campground to give us room to learn. A few days in, it wasn’t going so well. My son, who is so good at so many things – breathlessly good sometimes – was having a hard time learning to ride. He was embarrassed and sad. “Mom,” he said at last, “I think I’m wasting your time.”

No, I reassured him, he wasn’t. I was on the big break. The only goal I had for the whole week, I told him, was to get him up and riding. We could try a hundred times if he needed. I had the time. He smiled, calmed, reassured. I loved his smile. Isn’t the ability to reassure your children, one of a mother’s best talents? I’m as proud of that as anything else, including my work as a lawyer or my ability to lay down clear sentences on a page.

Whether I was on the big break or not, I would have told him the same thing, of course. What was amazing to me – to my internal thoughts that my children never see or guess - was how sincerely I meant it. I had all the time in the world, only this one task. I felt free. Almost elated, honestly. After all my wavering and worries, it appeared the big break had begun.