The longest sunset
(a found poem)

I look back, toward the Chesapeake
a blue blush splits the sky blue pink
of the clouds kissed by Baltimore's evening sun.

I saw that sun this morning
broken into a fractal of waves
within waves
each forming and receding
itself, distinct for a moment before going back
to the mother ocean.

Now the sky ahead beckons
the light blue of civil twilight in St. Louis
as we fly high above the clouds
spread far below like a crinkled baby blanket
with a lone pink puff of cotton candy
catching the sticky summer sunset above.

I watch the staccato conversation
between two neighboring thunderclouds.
The cotton candy is now a glowing golden mesa.
A banking turn reveals a fiery red cloud
edged against a flat yellow sky.

The mesas are now snow-capped mountains
Popo and Izta, as if seen from Puebla.
Above them, a sliver of a waxing moon stands her watch.

A thin flat cloud divides the blue sky above
from the neon orange of the sunset
above a full sea of cottonball clouds
evenly dispersed.
Popo and Izta continue to erupt in intermittent lightning.

This is a new season
Too warm for autumn
too dry; the teardrops leave
a desert of salt on my cheeks
Too late for summer
runs in the park in shorts
The sun setting at 4:45
jars my internal clock, which proclaims
I'm overheating!  Something is wrong!

This season of fear.
of seeing things.
things I have seen only in the old movies
that showed the hatred still visible
during the civil rights era.
But they didn't end then.  They went underground.
Like the yawning mouth of the cenote
where the river flows back into the earth.

Pie de leon and cempasuche
flower here on Dia de los Muertos in this false season
But there is a time to live, and a time to die.
even the genie knows
bringing someone back from the dead
it's not pretty.

Today is backwards day! the children proclaim!
how else to explain that the cubs won
and we have woken up to news
that cannot exist
except now in this new unnatural space
between seasons.

The secret

We are chatting over coffee
in the warm safety of your living room
watching the snow land gentle outdoors
When I ask
"Do you remember 2016?
You were so sick
and Trump had just been elected
Grief was everywhere
It felt like the world was ending.
Could we have ever foreseen this talk?
Years later, our children grown?"

The clouds today
stopped me in my tracks
walking up the farm hill

a heavy one drifted casually eastward
Big enough to block the sun

A little wispy one
- or was it two, entwined?
danced north, below the first

as I watched, it dissolved
before my eyes
the cloud going back to not-cloud
humidity dropping just below that threshold
into seeming nothingness that holds so much potential

And I thought of you
of us dissolving slowly
into something no one can see

hot tears streamed silent on my cheeks
but with no fight
I let them evaporate
back up to the clouds
letting the tears go

The sun streamed through
in three bold, distinct rays
like a child's work in crayon

What a gift.

That cloud erupted into thunder
from where? I wondered
It was all peace before
but the sun shower brought a rainbow
stretched tight against a starched blue sky

Settle

Settle

in this land that is,
as the signs say,
thickly settled,
do you need to settle to settle down?
are compromise and compromiso really true cognates -
can commitment and compromise exist alone?

do I need this time and space to integrate, or just to let things settle
to let the chips fall where they may

wading through the muck
trying to find the courage to stand and speak
without the crutch of my journal
and its scribbled notes

I want to reach deep into my gut
and touch my heart, still beating as you hold it in your hand
dismembered yet still warm
what can we learn from reading the entrails?

what does our own gut,
swirling mass of primordial ooze
the part of me that is an ecology of microbial not-me
tell me that my revered mind cannot?

because "our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate;
our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure"

Sometimes the very thing
the very thing
I want
is handed to me on a plate
- chocolate chip cookies, fresh from the oven - 
And I turn to olives
I don't even like olives
but I've heard they're good.

Essex Farm, part deux

January through February I worked at Essex Farm – up on Lake Champlain. I learned a ton – from how to make soap, how to strip cows, how to set up an evaporator for maple sugaring season.

Essex is a lovely little town on the lake. I lived right across from the ferry dock, and could see the little green light at the end of the dock (felt a bit like Daisy from The Great Gatsby). I had run-ins with Casper, a Jersey bull they were using (apparently, when you have your period you should be particularly careful around bulls), helped matt and sam move the sows into farrowing pens, in which we’d constructed little tables that fit into the corners so the piglets could fit underneath and the sows wouldn’t be able to sit on them. I got my time in hand milking a jersey down to 10 minutes and built my hand strength up to milk 3 jerseys in a row. (don’t tell me I have popeye forearms – I prefer the comparison to Rosie the Riveter). I learned how to split wood with a maul, which they brought in with teams of horses (they use Belgians as draft horses for most of the work on the farm)

In the meantime, I drove down each Wednesday for a class in Greenfield “Tilling the Soil of Opportunity”. I came out of the class with a business plan for a CSA in western mass. Between that and working with Target Hunger on establishing a relationship with a farm out there, I’ve been busy!

Orlando

It's raining here.  A big sobbing storm, the raindrops pelting down.  I'd like to think it's the world's way of mourning Orlando.  but maybe it's just a sense of despair that this world, this country are just so terribly broken.  Yesterday was such a brilliantly beautiful day.  It's both so hard and so reassuring to know that those exist at the same time as such horror.  Whenever one side of the world is illuminated, the other side lies in darkness.

If we need to have bad days to have good days, do we need hate to have love?  Is equanimity just wallowing in the okayness?  Being a rock and letting the waves wash over you, does it breed complacency?  Because I can see that being swept up in the waves doesn't work.  But I don't want to harden my heart just to take the thrashing.  I'm trying to listen, seeking to understand; the world needs more of that, I know, but it feels like I'm doing a lot of thinking and little doing.