The mask of love, the mannequin, the shape, the eyes the form, Can be found in clouds, in the lapping tide, in the swaying of the trees,

The exact likeness of love can be seen in the mundane patterns of roof tiles In the sound of squeaking bus breaks and birds diving in the traffic and sweat

Bank statements, late notes, warnings, advertisements, thankless tasks

Clear and stormy horizons, creativity

The exact likeness of love can be seen clearly In all of these. Though love itself is the seer who sees.

You didn't take much of a risk with that one Emily.  Love it.

Happy birthday.  How was the cruise?

Love it Emily!  Happy 32nd!  I guess maybe time and spring is making us all feel the same way:

Carbon copy of the full moon
Cards clacking queen of spades
In the spokes of my three speed bike
Stole my whisky flask from the sink where I cut my teeth

Wandering the streets on the hill
Examining homes and smelling the air,
Enchanted by the mist, and brisk cool,
Traces and scents leading nearness
Pine trees and tulips.

Revisiting recording studios,
Signing the wall in pink chalk, not legible, or barely so
What did I write?
Greeted as a returning hero, the achievement of my youth,
So singular, so wrapped in lore.

Tormenting me and comforting me at the same time,
Muse – I resent you and I long for you all at once.
Angelic life unsettling my temporality,
My hopes and sentiments tipping towards death,
More sentiment than hope,
As years and days lock by invisible layers,
Which by dreaming disappear.
But in waking I am shunned and I shun
What was and can never be again,
Is at the same time eternally present
Acting arrogantly and without pause,
Considering not my dual heart
That both breaks and is made to fly.

-from my dream journal 4/9/

I'm reading this great book by Anne Lamott called "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith" and it starts out with this poem:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~ Lisel Mueller ~

"I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other"

I like that.  Thanks Cindy - made me think of this one:

Sunset, Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors

which it passes to a row of ancient trees.

You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,

one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,

not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,

not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing

that turns to a start each night and climbs –

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)

your own life, timid and standing high and growing,

so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Some nature poetry, to round out our discussion

We just got back from Colorado today and had such a beautiful time!!  My husband and I went for a hike on Friday at Lion's Gulch and we were the only humans there!!  It was such a peaceful connection.  I crawled out onto a boulder (yes, actually crawled on all fours, my irrational fear of heights was quite sure that my 100-something pounds would dislodge this rock that's been in place for millions of years ) and as we sat in silence this poem came to mind:

"The Peace of Wild Things"

by Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world,

and am free.