a ritual to start the work week
The bulbs scraping skyward
to bud lopsided chartreuse
after blanketed months
spent revving in idle may freeze
next week if the forecast holds
and winter slips as promised
a single gloved hand between
the post-show curtains to shimmy
and snap once more, but for now
it’s spring and the windows refuse
to close and the breeze can’t stop
skipping across our desktops and
our chins lift defiant sunward,
unable to sink back into our chests.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Blood
reveals what the body hides,
stitches up and binds behind
marble white wrappings, builds
reflexive with so many reps, push
days and pull days, bear and bull
days, to pare and cull and find ways
to legitimize and ameliorate
all the evil acts that stack
like vertebrae inside this spineless husk
that seeks our hesitant allegiance,
pledges to weary us, tire
our aching backs and burdened
shoulders, ask more
of our parched hands, let
them bleed. Let them
flood.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
leather straps flap
in the wind buck
and burn skin red
as the moon painted
black again back
arched sending rider
tumbling weeds dried
and sparked stones pick
up speed kicked up
by flaming hooves set
a new path ablaze
love notes
a ritual to start the week
We
long to live. Long
to stretch feline across
windowsills and mountaintops,
range spine-like through continents, span
oceanic over planets, orbit shared
suns and expand ever outward
as one. We long
and arduous folk, yearning
and burning ones, burst
momentary on our own, but
glimmer endless ember
together. We,
longing and living and loving and laughing,
grateful and gleeful
equally of invention and cliché, wish
for little but to last
long enough to pass
our ache for on-and-on-ing onto
another.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Towers made of hope can’t help
but crumble, buckle under
the strain of constant
storms. Those bricks are best
for front walks and garden walls,
paths to set in the ground
to guide our first steps
into the world and low
borders for our sanctuaries,
hold their lines and their growth.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
The snow can’t help
but fall. But
in this blustery aftermath, flakes
wander and dart in all
directions, some aimless
and meandering, while others race
down toward inevitable crushing or up
in some cosmic defiance. Lost
in this confused midair rush hour,
still
more hover and float, apparently
unsure which destination will best
suit their fleeting needs, keep
their crystals intact, help them
find each other, firm up and form
something more.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Guts twist ’neath spindle
fingers, nervy and clutching
for tornado’s end.
Sun behind and clouds
ahead as day wanes: the sky
ripened for rainbows.
Pretty assassins
nod unknowingly under
blankets of poppies.
Worry not, my loves,
of rising evil: ice melts
when mourning dawn breaks.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Head down, horns forward, hooves dirty:
much to do, much muck to push through.
The self distracts: the mind a maze
made to unmoor or unmake you.
But muscle knows the truth, the work
of cog and gear, how spring and stud
balance, the place where plate and wheel
meet and make soft hands tick and turn
over etched faces, meter each
moment on this endless onwards.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Years drip from the eaves
like last week’s snowfall,
melting slowly together
into a flat glistening glaze
of yesterdays and some-time-or-anothers
that slide over and through each other,
transparent and slick, before
congealing into precarious daggers
that gracefully grip the roof edge, each
preparing to suddenly plunge,
sink its glassy hand into
whatever soft and fleshy crust
waits below, or simply to unmake
itself one drop
at a time, that is,
to fall one way or another.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
To heal a broken heart is to release,
remove each pin that pokes out from the fist-
sized stuffed tomato locked away inside
your chest — one by one — to squeeze it back
into beating, press the blood to pump
again. Every needling betrayal
excised is a stone of sea bird hanging
from your neck, its feet stained by your footfall,
dropping back into the sea, shrieved by some
quiet prayer — words you speak but mostly
to yourself, let go from the heart that held
them, clenched them too tightly and for too long.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Joy bursts electric, all sizzle and hum,
through the early darkening of not quite
winter, a cold still yet to settle, night
unfallen, shroud in hand, waiting to leap.
We make these promises, loop them around
drying boughs, weave and circle them, stand them
in icy windows, line our roofs with them
in silent refusal to freeze. Flame and
filament link us in the midst of this
premature aging, remind us of all
we’ve left to give, of the pantries to stock,
bowls to fill, hands to take into our own.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
