faithless.

According to your faith be it unto you.

Matthew 9:29

I've been wondering lately, how much faith I actually have, how much I put into practice on a daily basis. I've been noticing my walks, literally and figuratively, and how dulled down by fear they are. Noticing how the lack of trust--in man, in self, in God--takes the shine out of life. 

I hold onto lists and numbers and ideas of how I think things (marriage, womanhood, friendship, motherhood) should be, with no clear idea of how these notions ended up in my head to begin with, and God strikes right through my pride down to the center of me. I try to stare Him down with my white-knuckled death grip on everything I feel life owes me, and a still, small voice inside asks me to let go. And I push back against it--NO. Arguing and rooting myself in stubbornness until I am utterly exhausted.

It's in these moments that my brain, I swear on purpose, forgets all the goodness I've experienced as the result of letting go. How, through a phone call, or an unexpected visitor, or by taking the wrong road on my way to wherever, I was guided into amazing, blessed situations! Led to incredible new people, or an area of the woods unexplored, or a quiet bookstore, just when my heart was screaming for all the crazy to stop. How many potential friends do I turn away from, how many needed things have been placed directly on my path, unseen by me, the woman just hoping to get through the day?

So little faith. So little trust. Such a dishonor to the sheer enormity of my spirit, the unfathomable, ancient knowing of my soul. I combat this distrust every day, every hour, knowing that I've been blessed with the gift of recognizing trouble when I see it, but also coming to new realizations. That shutting out and avoiding everyone, at times even avoiding my Creator, is not the answer. 

I was not created to be so diminished. 

poem #29.

29.

Here

place this crown of flowers

                on my head--

dip your fingers in the paint,

blue,

and press them  into my cheeks.

i want to feel like a paper boat in your palms

i want to feel as beautiful as the moon

so much red.

Writing. Revisiting poems both recent and years old--the latter being pretty terrible. I'm slowly weeding out the cliches, and learning all over again how to simplify my message. I keep walking away and coming back to it, probably taking breaks and thinking more than getting words on a page, but I'm determined to be kind to myself. It's been almost 8 years since I've adhered to any sort of creative schedule, and the going is mighty slow, for now.

Which reminds me, I need to remember how to write a stellar query letter. Another bag of dusty bones to drag out and unpack. It's all very exciting though, if only a little tedious. Writing again feels right and familiar, and feels like going home.

all i can handle.

I feel like
the sharp edge
of something

It makes you
ravenous
for the hand of God

1 a.m.

I worry
that I gave away
my beauty
too often

And now it runs from me

writing at night.

Untitled

Give me

His hands moving

his hands

down

my

back

At the window

We watch a leaf

curled

like old parchment

hop down the street

his lips on my hair

A prayer in the morning

I want Him to know

(He already knows)

I can't feel anything

until I've been touched

"For the first time in my life then, and just for a few seconds, I was able to see Doc Homer as someone I felt sorry for. It was a turning point for me, one of those instants of freakishly clear sight when you understand that your parent might have taken entirely the wrong road in life, even if that road includes your own existence. I pitied Doc Homer for his slavish self-sufficiency. For standing Hallie and me in the kitchen and inspecting us like a general, not for crooked hems so much as for signs of the weakness of our age: the lipstick hidden in a book satchel, the smoldering wish to be like everyone else. Being like no one else, being alone, was the central ethic of his life. Mine too, to some extent, not by choice but by default. My father, the only real candidate for center of my universe, was content to sail his private sea and leave me on my own. I still held that against him. I hadn't thought before about how self-sufficiency could turn on you in old age or sickness. The captain was going down with his ship. He was just a man, becoming a child."

it writes.

Sunday Morning


Violet light spreads
like watercolor,
patterns blooming over the walls

The white quiet of morning
except
the squeak of your feet
They scamper across wood

The bed sheets rustle like
handfuls of peonies
A blue-jay presents himself,
his squawking call bring us
out of our morning fug

You are warm and
slightly sticky
You smell of peanut butter
and shampoo

You smile as you nest down,
triumphant
We will pretend to sleep--
another ten minutes perhaps--
before you spring up electrified,
Demanding pancakes for breakfast

**from the journal, 4/21/12

sometimes i write (about tablecloths).

Imagine linen,
not as an object but
as a feeling:
A falling over your hands
and wrists fluidly,
watering you, feathered.
Whisper-soft in
its parachuting down,
sliding off scratched wood.
Carried to the wash room;
armful of plush peonies.
A thousand words and stains
bleached-out to silk.

"Metamorphic rocks are rocks which have been changed. Changes may be barely visible, or may be so great that it is impossible to determine what the original rock was."

- Rocks and Minerals, A Golden Nature Guide

I thumb through the old photographs, always a dumb decision. It takes mere minutes for the familiars, the ghosts all their pets to sidle up next to me, poke at me with their sharp instruments. I lay them out across the wooden floor, like an installation, glossy, matte, yellowing polaroid.

In this one, I am riding my first bike. It is pink and white, the training wheels are still smooth and clean. My outfit is ridiculous considering my chosen activity--the frilly, pouffy-skirted dresses I refused to take off for several months. I am pedaling diligently down our gravel and dirt driveway, and he is walking behind me, poised and ready to rescue me from gravity's whim. We are both browned by the sun, our skin exactly matching in shade and color.

This one was taken at a state park in southern Texas, though the name of it eludes me. We are hiking through deep woods, snaking through trails choked with growth, stomping over sturdy plank bridges laid across swampy sections of marshland. He carries his machete, as familiar to me as the rest of him, hacking vines and thorny braches, clearing the way for me to come through, unscathed.

Fast forward several years, where the documentation of events lessens considerably. Dig down to the newer photographs, the ones I hide from myself, only occasionally admitting to their existence.

A few snapshots, corners of our new homes, if you could call them that. I see him, the fracture lines that were always present splitting in earnest now, nothing to strap them together, to keep the structure sound. In this snapshot I am on the side of the world held together, barely, by willingness and forward-thinking. Visiting his side is an exercise in futility.

In this photo, he sits in his lopsided recliner, constantly smoking cigarettes. The room is completely closed and unbelievably stifling. The apartment is a strange mix of things: newly acquired trinkets, movies, pornography, beer, keychains, bottlecaps, cigarette packs, beef jerkey, empty picture frames. The kitchen table is covered in detritus from two different lives, there is no pride in the placement of anything. In my density of that moment I did not understand that bonds mean nothing, as tenuous as they actually are, and that all of that time was temporary, already fading to white-out.

There are no more photographs after that. Lives ended and yet, did not. The dissapearence of him is inexcusable, a perfect example of what neglect looks like. There are no explosions here, only the steady mining of the soul, the chipping away that is slow and first and then suddenly complete. You blink and it's done. There is a sensation of having been visited by a thief in the night; he has taken the jewels you stored in the freezer, inconspicuous in their brown paper bag. There is the discovery of wells that are indeed bottomless, the plink of the pebble is never heard.

The sediment, stone, the plates of your life shift. All settles and you are as layered and heavily clouded as marble. You are strong, you can be knocked around and take it, but when dropped from unimaginable heights you crack down the middle, then outward in a complete circle, then you splinter apart and fly around dementedly. Others have to shield their eyes.

I pack all the memories back in their box, in the past, in the dark, probably where they belong. The ghosts dissipate with one last angry cry, sucked back into whatever hellish vortex they crouch in when I'm not scratching open old wounds. And just as efficiently as I remember, I compartmentalize, I forget. Like all things learned throughout a life, it's an acquired skill.

"...finally the original rock is completely absorbed, and the resulting rock shows no traces at all of what it once was. In structure and composition, it is granite."