This found today (revisited)

They Have a Point

When the gods gave us all the holes
leading into our darkness, they planned
on our needing a mystery. It amuses them
that what is inside the body
is more body. The same body, but different.

They first said the bodies should be mostly moss
inside. But they kept coming back to the mystery.
Moss, they said, can be seen outside,
and what is outside can be accountable.

Though they liked that moss would have kept
everyone soft and green, they decided it was best
to fill each thing with itself, which would then be hidden
within the other. Look at stones, they said.
Look at water, which is like the throat of water.

- JENNIFER BOYDEN

Romance

In love with the body, especially when
it dances in love with its own dance as it toes
and taps . . . flickers, creepers, chickadees
around a tree trunk, a click beetle in a flipping
somersault, the soft-shoe swish and sway
of the chee and feather grasses, the lissom uvas;

in love with the melding of the body,
especially when it languishes in the surf
of its own sleep . . . the belly slump of a leopard
stretched high on a branch, camouflaged,
leaf and fur, the tight sleep of a tumblebug egg
in its buried pod of dung, the man in a backyard
hammock slowly rocking with the slowly
rolling sun through evening shadows;

(so floats the sea otter on its back, bobbing
with the rocking sea, so bobs the gelatinous
umbrella and stinging strings of the jellyfish,
jelly and sting being the design and event
of the sea’s own rolling body)
especially when the perfumes of a vigorous
body at rest are of the salt of the sea, his body
itself being the salt of the earth, in love
with the taste when the salt is tasted;

no ardor surpasses a body on the hunt,
halting abruptly, one foot lifted above the snow,
poised, as intent as frozen air, eyes as pure
and sharp as ice, then the bolt—the élancé—
beat and soul wholly in pursuit—the sail—
the contact—most foreign, most familiar,
on the far edge of the horizon.

- Pattiann Rogers

Crescent Moon: Winds of Change

Through the normal course of things, I chanced today upon this modest rhyme, after being greeted this morning by a colleague bearing a heavy heart, and the news of two deaths--one expected, one not, both quite tragic in their way--in one extended family, in one day.


A spider web pulled tight between two stones
With nothing left but autumn leaves to catch
Is maybe a winter sign, or the thin blue bones
Of a hare picked by ants.  A man can attach 

Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out,
But, having stumbled into this season of grief,
I mean to reflect on the life that is here and about
In the fall of the leaves–not on the dying leaf. 

Something more tough, reliable and stark
Carries the blood of life toward a farther spring–
Something that lies concealed in the soundless dark
Of burr and pod, in the seeds that hook and sting.

I have learned from these that love which endures the night
May smolder in outward death while the colors blaze,
But trust my love–it is small, burr-coated, and tight.
It will stick to the bone. It will last through the autumn days. 

- Winter Sign, by Loren Eiseley


There is, also, Fall, who this time has chosen to caress with warmth our living skins, before we softly slip them into the long sleeves of our shortening days...The wind is generous tonight; he stirs the pot, that the Moon might sup, and that both might rest by morning.

this found today

All Wet and Shine

It sounds like the cracks and clicks of the house settling
as the room warms in morning, it sounds like a fan
whispered up. It tastes of wood smoke—sweet and then stale.
It looks like the curve of a mountain
under streaked sky, and everything pale blue
just before sunrise, everything translucent,
even stone. The stone is blue, it tastes, after all,
like tea in a glass cup, it feels like wanting a
blanket on your lap, nesting, hovering around
a wound, no a break, where the mountain opens,
wanting to heal, to soften the gap, to close it,
like an empty room inside of me, and I want to give it fire
and fill it with humming, and make it hum
and vibrate—the resound of a chamber
opened and filled with air—with beating.
I want to fill the gap
but it keeps opening, pressing
inside to outside, unhousing
and unseeding the husk of me.
I am not a house with an empty room,
a broken window in a wall.
I am not sleep battered open by a dream,
not even a mountain turning solid again
as light rises, I am not a cave in the mountain. I
am not I—that’s what it feels like
today, waking alone in late winter. A spider
hanging her web in the doorjamb, spinning in three
dimensions—to catch what passes,
trembling with capture, all wet and shine,
moments when everything is a door.

- Cynthia Huntington