What trickles down
The commandments say
That punishment tumbles down to the third generation
Like a sharp boulder in the rain,
But love endures to the thousandth child
Like rain collected into tumbling streams
And strong, still rivers.
The good lasts long.
It reached me from the wildflowers
On the rough-cut table
Of a camping kitchen
In 1866.
I see it in the smiling watchfulness
Of an ancestor my age,
Who sits on a stone with an open book.
Her kind of quiet does not concern itself
Over her ruffled dress
Or the camera’s gaze.
In a newer photo, one that catches the blue of denim and sky,
My aunt sits on a granite slab
With her forearms on her knees
And a pistol in her hands.
She’s shooting pinecones as they float downstream.
Youth poises in her shoulders
And sweeps her hair back in the sun.
The loving mountain women, we last long.
Someplace West
When My Mama Grows Old
May my patience be a broad pool
and her forgetfulness a fog
that brushes, softly, the surface.
There her mind may swirl,
her thoughts purl,
part, and gather again
in peacefulness.
May I be the sweetest host
when she becomes a stranger,
receive her joyfully
when she becomes a child,
and guard her mind
as she once gardened mine.
Sabbath
I'd like to defend crooks—
not criminals, but the shape.
Yesterday, the dividing of an oak trunk cradled me,
strong and gentle.
I folded my body into the tree
and stayed on the phone with my mama
long enough that her conversation turned away from me
to laugh with the neighbors who bent the rules
and planted pumpkins outside their fence.
Later a hammock crooked around my shoulders
and I watched
how the clouds bent,
brittle as fishbones,
around the embrace of the wind.
The whole day took a bending trail
toward a loquat tree
and a changed flight
and conversations all of different lengths and times.
The time wandered comfortingly.
I'm growing in allowing my days the easiness to turn
without wheeling
or whipping the moments into minutes.
I've found hurry dims peripheral sight
so I solely love what's straight ahead.
but it's only the crooks in my path
which cradle a need not my own
or the sigh of a friend
entering, shyly, into peace.
Palo Alto, CA
"R"s
Tuesday mornings clasped me to a table with a hard woman in capris
who didn't know me
who didn't want to be known.
Before me
she scattered matching games, enticements, and bright-eyed shame.
Her easy exaggerations
"Ca-ar—car—She dr-ove the red car a-round the curve"
caught and strangled between my tongue and throat.
I flattened my frustration
was polite but didn't practice.
I despised
absolutely shriveled
when the school rushed past the room.
They peeked at the woman and snatched at my secret.
She made me cry, once
I got home, away from her and my crust of nonchalance.
The waste made me cry:
my forced effort, thin but long, washed useless against habit.
My future, dried up because I couldn't talk right.
("Right" is easier to say than "normally.")
The warmth of my mother, lost in a waste of nags.
I love my mom now.
I gave a valedictorian speech.
Why does the shame still sear my memory?
Where were you then, Lord?
"I was the grace which stopped the children from asking.
I stopped the adults before your breaking point.
I wrapped your brother's thoughts at taunts in mercy.
I trained your tongue.
I sat with you, the third at the table.
I brushed the tears from your cheeks.
Your speech remains imperfect.
Perfection, though, would constrain my grace.
Your wrestling cleared a space around your soul.
May I fill it with mercy?"
Centennial, CO
Her Kitchen
The light mixed itself into the pale yellows,
sage greens, and soft whites of my aunt's kitchen.
Her gaze, as dim as a slow scuttling storm at dusk,
settled on my eyes when I spoke.
When she gave advice she took my elbow in her freckled hand,
but for stories she held her rumpled rag
against the counter’s corner, or circled it flat against the granite.
She told of three ladies
who lived out their last decades on her street.
Two hated the one who wore a bikini
in her front yard, back in the fifties.
Even as her figure weakened
and her skin drooped into limpid folds,
their jealousy snouted deep
like a disgruntled mole in dark soil.
My aunt lifted her palms and eyebrows.
“It was just the strangest thing.”
That night, dinner moved slow
from counter to table to prayer—
nothing taut between souls or schedules rushed that house—
and my uncle told of a redwood as high, brawny, and solitary
as beauty may be.
The owner of the earth between its roots
(if a man can own the age and change
of an evergreen or sandy soil)
determined majesty to be lumber.
At the crash of the felling, a splintering sprang
from limb to ligament,
and he never changed his wood to wealth.
“The oddest thing,” my uncle said.
The old pair looked at stories with a frankness in their eyes,
and sometimes a heavy-swelling worry.
But then a country song would swing
my aunt and I around the kitchen
in the ageless sway which is the meeting of two eras,
of two strong hands,
of an old womanhood and a new.
And then my uncle’s smile would deepen with his delight
of plunking a biscotti into my coffee
and rolling small blueberries into my palm.
The clouds scurried dark and swift across their countenances
because a strong light threw those vapor shadows.
Walnut Creek, CA
Bildungsroman
Twice, yesterday, I saw my dad in pain.
A father ages into weakness
as a child hardens into strength
so that compassion might soften
the meeting of two minds
made as rough as a broken stone.
Tyson's Corner, VA
Welcome, November
Welcome, November.
Welcome, morning cold,
to which that first breath leaps
like a catch breaching silent water
into the mist at dawn.
Come, November,
to help the trees off with their coats
and show them the guest rooms
for their winter sleep.
Watch their last generous show,
their last grateful kisses to the warm ground—
here, summer, have your golden sunshine back,
the trees say.
Have back your red heat and carefree shimmering.
Watch our one last dance down
to die in the dirt, yes,
but then to resurrect the earth
when our leafmeal lifts
small growing things to the sun.
But first, all things must rest.
So, November,
as I welcome you in,
welcome me out
into the crispness of shuffling leaves,
to see slow sleep drop onto the trees
and onto the mild, scurrying things;
onto the mountaintops, back home,
in wide stretches of white silence;
onto my too-quick-pattering thoughts.
Teach me nature’s rhythm.
For time is but a measure of the swelling
and receding of autumn waves
and rock-bound tides,
of stones leaping
or sliding into the sea.
So come, November, and slow
my rambling steps at the twisted twigs on my mother’s door.
Blow me in from the Colorado cold
to flannel embraces and the cradling
of newborn joy.
Palo Alto, CA
The Women in the Rocking Chairs
Over coffee on the front porch
or iced tea on the back,
I welcome my mama’s friends—
some at ease in their aging,
some tightening at the edges—
and I find myself received.
Perhaps womanhood is the making of a peace
Strong to hold the laughter and fears
Of decades we have not known.
Littleton, CO
The Lesson
On every walk
my mama
(soft, eager, and generous
as a morning glory after a rain)
says, "Look, Bethany."
Now I exclaim her,
"Look!"
back to her,
echoed over the years
and across state lines
and into poetry.
Palo Alto, CA
Digging
In among the sunlight and tall grass,
my brother and I dug ditches.
I hopped on my shovel and pushed little tufts aside.
He shafted deep into the mud, fast,
young as a wind wrapping around granite boulders.
I squelched in the oddly abundant water,
said I felt like Seamus Heaney.
"I'm the old dad digging, and you're the poet
digging with a pen," he laughed.
"Both living our dream job!" I said.
"Daniel too, in Chicago."
"Dunno how eighty hours a week is the dream.
And Ben? You think he hopes for anything wild?"
"To be a dad, I guess."
"He'll be a great dad."
I heaved turf blocks onto the bank.
A fat, five-inch worm squirmed from the mud.
I pinched it, lifted it in the dry sun,
said, "Here's lunch!"
We're children still, I suppose.
My brother’s back breaks someone else's land,
my words ink out on a grant.
We're testing dreams not hardened by time,
prodding hopes as soft as moments
or sandstone memories.
Our lives are loose
as light freckled onto a clear creek bottom,
light riffled by the wind,
light caught by the dimpled trout
which drifts above the rounding stones.
Salida, CO
Reaping Stories
I walked, the other day,
among stories rooted deep
in alfalfa fields near haying time;
stories rippling over a pond
which crooked itself in the arms of a plateau;
stories rolling hard down a rocky road
and blowing tender around the stunted pines.
I was a stranger there, but a mountain woman welcomed me
as the land had welcomed her.
Into that ground she'd sown a promise
of long faithfulness.
Lara adopted a hard story, eight years ago,
from a girl with sixteen years of tears.
On returning from our walking she sat,
simple and attentive, with the child,
as sure of growing goodness on that front porch
as in the aspen trees beyond,
or in the field where her son baled hay,
or in the rough hands of her husband
as he set upright a flagpole for a daughter coming home.
They built their ranch in such a way
so as to build more everlasting things.
Their mudroom deepened to hold the saddles and the skis;
the kitchen swirled with the slow conversations
of the wandering and the homing, and those deciding which they'd be.
The long loving pair painted an old house for a couple newly made
(he proposed in the meadow the night I visited,
wrapped her in a rough blanket under the July fireworks).
The chicken coop rustled and clucked again,
and Lara taped the bindings of her books to stand
the wear of this time and the next.
A morning in the steady grace of a ranch which loved itself
sowed in me a longing
for things which will be slow in the reckoning.
Salida, CO