Wednesday, April 30, 2008

ADVICE

























Painting/collage by S. Auberle

ADVICE
"Every angel is terrifying."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
An angel told me, once,
it's never wrong to add love,
only wrong to take it away...
I didn't see the angel,
I'm not that crazy.
She was only a voice in my head
as I walked the bluff road.
The wind was fierce that day
and I imagine
the angel didn't want
to venture out of my cozy brain,
her wings being fragile and all.
I begged for more advice
but she was quiet then,
sleeping, I guess, until
she roused one more time to say
it will be years, my dear,
before you grow into this poem.
- mimi

Saturday, April 26, 2008

UNFOLDING

























Photo by S. Auberle
SEVEN ISLANDS IN THE RAIN
After Reuben built this house
on its small, rocky hill,
I imagine he would sit at his table
drinking coffee on mornings like this.
I picture him here, content, as he grew old,
savoring the oak floors, the stone
fireplace--safe shelter
from west winds that could batter
lesser dwellings and he might look out
at the islands, remembering
when he'd sailed among them
and when his coffee was finished,
go out into the soft air
to feed birds, check his apple trees
and admire the hundred tulips
he'd planted by the front door,
their bodies bent low in the rain.
- mimi

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

COSMIC


Digital collage by S. Auberle
Please don't ask the meaning of this image. I have no idea. It may be a Cosmic Message meant to save the Masses--regarding the universality of joy and sorrow.
Then again, it may be simply what it is--the virtual scribblings of a slightly derangedwriter (I believe that's an oxymoron) who will go to any lengths to avoid tackling a rewrite on which she is stuck.
Poet Billy Collins says poets spend most of their time by a window, productively or not, so I go there--watch a dark object in the orchard which turns out to be a wild turkey. Consider Wild Turkey. Don't. Throw together a pot of posole for dinner. Fill the birdfeeders. Consider raking old grasses and weeds. Don't. Admire stones I found on the beach yesterday. Curse computer for deleting this post before I can save it. Do it over.
Finally, step out into warm April sunshine, enjoy spring. While I can. Before the rains come...
- mimi

Sunday, April 20, 2008

PALETTE



















Photo by S. Auberle

black and white ducks
courting
in wind-chopped waves
geese out for a stroll
at green
water's edge
cerulean skies
red mittens
April's palette...
- mimi

Thursday, April 17, 2008

CLOWN

























Osho Zen Tarot Card

CLOWN
I dreamed of you
in billowing
polka-dotted silk.
You honked
your nose at me,
flapped your feet
and declared
I must dance more,
live loud,
never, ever make love
without laughter
and, occasionally,
wear really big shoes.
- mimi

Sunday, April 13, 2008

APRIL SNOW


Rowe Sanctuary - 1000 Cranes
APRIL SNOW
Except for tulips
red is not the color of spring.
Not red of cardinal, radiant
against new snow,
not this lean fox
trotting through the storm,
unaware of cold or the fact
that it's the twelfth day of April.
Maybe a poem will come to me
today and I'll paint words on it,
shape the page into a boat
like those old Chinese poets did,
launch it onto a last floe of ice
or fold the poem into a red-crowned crane,
whirl it up into the wind.
- mimi

Friday, April 11, 2008

BLACK


BLACK
You think you know black.
You think you understand black,
that it's merely a color, a mood, a little dress.
You prefer not to think
of it as a hole, the unknowable.
The night you awaken--electricity gone,
black makes itself known.
The window glow that used to be there--gone.
Torrents of rain slice the panes.
No refrigerator sounds, no pump, no furnace.
You didn't know cold had a color.
Howling dervishes newly acquaint you with wind.
Monsters, axe murderers, old demons
you thought were long ago put to rest
crawl from the reptilian corners of your brain.
Daylight is hours away...
How lightly we talk about light!
Write poetry about it, sing to it,
go toward it, they say, when we die.
No exaltation is needed tonight--
flashlight, candle, even a match will do.
You cross yourself, pray, invoke daybreak.
Summon that ancestor who first discovered
the power of only a handful of light...
- mimi

Sunday, April 06, 2008

ANGELICA'S EYES


Photo by S. Auberle
ANGELICA'S EYES
She was only a sheep
who had just given birth.
Twin lambs nestled
in the straw beside her.
Outside the shed
snow beat on old wood.
We walked softly,
whispered to her,
but Angelica just stood there,
all the anxieties
of the world in her eyes.
I lost myself in them,
in the plea not to harm these new lives.
Yet nothing reassured her.
Sheep have no defenses,
they are vulnerable prey.
They know this, and do not
carry their burden lightly.
In Angelica's eyes I saw myself,
felt that tense fear
of a sometimes-savage world.
The lambs didn't know yet
how vulnerable they are...
- mimi

Thursday, April 03, 2008

ON THE BEACH

























Photo by S. Auberle

shattered
ice
like
shards
of
fallen
stars...
- mimi

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

APRIL

























Photo by S. Auberle

Today is Rachmaninoff's birthday and also, as Ma Nature has clearly shown, April Fool's day.
The lion of March has exited with torrential, icy rain and wind, now snow for this first morning of April.
Pinks and yellows, purple, tender greens weave through my mental landscape.
I soften.
Poetry frolics through the new grass of my mind. (April is National Poetry Month.)
I want to visit England--the hillsides of Wordsworth's daffodils, the new lambs gamboling in the fields.
Reality--I walk the icy beaches, fight my way through unyielding, dried grasses taller than me. Step on old fish bones in the shape of butterfly wings. Out onto bay ice, tentatively, where there are patches of muted green and white in the texture and colors of finest marble. Admire the tundra-like landscape, the calligraphy of old weeds curved in frozen snow.
Reality and Dream...always the whispering angels on my shoulders...
- mimi