SAHM

I hunt poetry in the rhythm of family,
     Heartbeat of a home,
       Syncopation of life,
         Crescendo of triviality,
           Ebb and flow of want, need, have.

I am the besieged city,
the forgotten tribe,
the lost ark.
I am the laughter of a fool,
       ignored,
       belittled,
       hushed.
I am the wisdom of an old woman,
       ignored,
       belittled,
       hushed.
I am the abandoned generation,
     fallen in the crack between an acronym and a simulation,
       smothered in the fold
       that is the present
       in the tesseract.

It's no good as a script, they said. Too much punctuation, and no soundtrack.
You lost us already.
Too many words.
Too small a budget.
The effects are terrible.
It borders on ridiculous.
Next, please.

Station stop. On time. Doors open.
Closeopenclose. Openclose. Open. Close.
Can we make the next one?
Arrhythmia of the world.
Next time, kids.
We can wait.
Now, what page were we on?

Hold Only Breath

There is a sweet relief these days
To let the others speak the words,
To watch the sun turn into ice, and ice to rain, and rain to snow,
And not to put them in the prison of my mind,
Not cage the wild ideas that hiss at me and fly
And hold them in the sweaty palm of my control.

There is no ready turn of phrase
To hold the things that I have heard,
Enfold and capture all these dreams, these tears, these smiles, these things I know
And yet do not know: all the me I've left behind,
A self so fragile it will crumble if you sigh,
So giant that I cannot seem to see the whole.

Saxon Braid in Undyed Wool

If I could look back on the years
in the same critiquing way
that my fingers check these stitches--
Could note the nubs and notches,
the patches and holes,
Knowing that if I wanted
I could unravel the wool and redo the rows--

Would I?

I watch my fingers bind the final edge.
Feel the bulk of it,
Stretch and tug and smooth and look again,
Look and look again and feel again like
I can't bear to put it down.

But would I?

And my silly heart beats faster.
I always say not to play what-if's.

And still I am tugging and smoothing.

the dropped stitches
the poor tension
the irregular threads
stretched thin
bunched up

Over time, I tell myself, it will all wear in.
Those little things, no one will notice them.

Except me.

And all the while, I know I will be writing this down, writing these words,
Asking my self aloud for the first time,
watching my own heart spill out on this page,
watching my own letters scrawl
faster and more
blurred...
as they are.

If I could unravel it and do it again,
fill in the holes
straighten the rows
even the tension

Would I?

Yes.
No.
I don't know.

Yes?

as summer passes

these days give so much
in their too quick hours that I
breathe wordless in them


The summer has gone by--too fast, as always.
Fall. I love fall.
School. I love school schedules.
Gardens. And canning. And the timeless beauty of the task of saving the fruits of this season to feed my family for the winter. I never feel more the glory of being a wife and mother than in the fall, as I preserve those gorgeous healthy summer days in jar after jar, and wash the blankets, and stack firewood, and fill holes in the cellar walls, and build foundations, and .... oh, wait.
But I do love it.
And obviously, I haven't been on here often.
Autumn has a bad habit of leaving me speechless.
And my husband has a bad habit of leaving me computer-less now that the semester is fully under way.

But today, I have a computer, and a few minutes of blessed silence, and to prove that I have been thinking of this page for weeks, though I had no time, I shall put up a few pictures, in no particular order, of the past few weeks' worth of busyness, that I took with each of you in mind.

Summer apples.

Pickles. Dill ones. Tons of them.



SUNY Potsdam kindly landscaped their campus with crabapples, and every few years there is a great season with more than enough for everyone. Except, only my family is crazy enough to put a sheet under a crabapple tree in the middle of a college campus and shake the trees and drag home the loot. Makes a gorgeous spicy jelly.




Does he look ominous? We got an hour of happiness out of him:

stuffed with plastic bags, with jingle bells tied in his tail.
Anything to keep a very busy one year old occupied.

The makings of tomato sauce.

And...afore-mentioned one year old. One and a half, rather.

(No longer quiet right now, by the way).

And because the silence is gone, I must end this post prematurely. But I will come back. The "magnetic poetry" words are back on the refrigerator, and as they arrange and rearange themselves over the days, I have no doubt that inspiration will slowly resurrect while the leaves die and the cold cozy days return.
My best to all of you out there.
May your whiskers be long and your whiskey golden.
Or something.

There are more words in my head and my heart that want to be in these lines; probably one of these days I will add to the poem. For now, here it is: and as usual, I can't think of the title. It will come to me some day....I hope....

We called the earth
our mother,
The wind our father.
We sang the words,
and whistled, and laughed for freedom;
We laughed with love of dreaming,
of one another:
We missed the tears in his murmurs,
the sob in her breath.

We realized when we, silent,
stood by our children
And loved with so much anguish,
such helpless passion,
Our hands were his, caressing,
that could not hold them,
Her arms outstretched for her children,
but empty till death.

no one ever said
how lonely my heart would be
when it beat alone

Something about lamplight in the twilight:
I don't know what, just something.
Maybe I really am a hobbit.
Country roads and green leaves and sleepy birds.
And lamplight.

Just something.