My First Collection of Poetry is now available for purchase:
Selected poems from Dancing the Bones of a Far Older Future, all rights reserved:
Come Closer There is a peace, here in this place I remember this intimate breathing space between your body and mine. Remember? It is both our very recent past and part of a far older future embodied by ancestors who knew each being by name: Whale, Thrush, Rabbit, Salal, Lichen, Stone, Marsh, Sea. I know their names, just as I know yours once I meet you a process of meeting and being met. Now that you know me there is an intimacy between us when you say my name your breath a small wind that softens my face into the sound of your name this is how friendship is formed a way in to the landscape of love. 2020
Compost As our kids return back to school after six months of pandemic and facing a future of climate catastrophe the most important lesson I can teach is how compost works. How old stinky banana peels and last night’s spaghetti get put in a pile with slimy carrot rinds and rotting mashed potatoes which then becomes the most important thing needed for growing future seeds. But first, it stinks. Then it rots. It’s stench calls together all the tiny lives no one thinks are important and they quietly digest all that garbage leaving their poop behind as a valuable resource transforming all that smelly glop into fertile, black gold. I want to remind them that compost is boring. It takes a lot of time. It attracts flies and worms and creepy crawlies. It’s not the fun part of the lifecycle. It requires patience and perseverance. I also want to remind them that the creepy old white men standing on the rotting piles of racist patriarchal trash are losing their balance, slipping and dying away. It is their generation’s ability to digest all these old broken structures of yesterday and make something new that makes the compost ready to amend these broken lands and lays the groundwork for the tiny carrot seeds of hope to grow our more sustainable future. 2020
Family Weavings There are patterns that are short-lived, the way a hand brushes away a stray hair. There are other patterns done so often, they form a groove and sing their own song: a chorus of refrain and return. We are given tapestries ancestral weavings of various threads some cordage made of nettle and sinew, hard to the touch and stinging even after all these eons, other threads made of molten gold precious as jewels made long and sonorous fabric songs of silken mirth and wisdom. Weaving our own lines into the cloth, what we weave with what care or what chaos depends on our attention. We are given the blanket, a tapestry interwoven and complicated. To unravel the threads is not impossible, but clearly Penelopian. We hold the lineage of threads in our hands. We cover our sleeping children in these quilts the patterns absorbing into their subconscious sleep into the dreams of their future lives. Cherished objects, quilts. Museum pieces tapestries family heirlooms knitted blankets sacred sutras: threads. Perhaps we are not at liberty to undo the errors of history. Perhaps it is just our turn at the loom. To sit, to weave each stitch a prayer of attention* to create our own patterns dancing totems of wisdom and folly habit and intention. To leave for our children's children to befriend the repeated mistakes, our humility before God. To perfect the love woven into each stitch to pass on what small wisdoms we have learned. We, the weavers. We, the woven. 2019 *Quoted line by beloved poet and mentor, Sally Atkins “Each stitch a prayer of attention” from the poem “Breath is the First Prayer”.
Trained to be in Love with the Now Yesterday, under the too hot breath of the late summer wind as I danced my yoga under the clear blue future of the sky I thought, I love the Fall. Next I thought, I love every season. I love the deep invitation of Winter to go within cuddly with a good book and big mug of hot, honeyed tea. I love the transition wet and windy blue into the new promise of Spring. I love how Spring gives way like a lover falling into Summer into her hot heat her ripe abundance the dance of fullness. And now I love how tawdry Summer speaks in dry husky corn and voluptuous squash. The sweet acidity of juicy tomatoes and the cool kiss of cucumbers. I love every season because I have trained myself to do so. I love every minute of this one and perfect life I have been given. To take what is mine for only this one breath and stretch it out to encompass a whole year and then another. 2020
Sacred Ash I literally dust off my typewriter dust, the ash of all our dead skin cells I remember and list all the images That live within me as seeds: The dried egg shells that I blend into a fine powder that look just like my mother’s ashes. The ashes of activated charcoals that leave little round pucks of spent prayers and how looking at them, I remember that ash, too is a holy substance. The mounds of sun bleached, broken white shells on the seaside that speak about the lives of mollusks farmed long ago who have left their rugged bones as reminders of their short and glorious lives. And how when I pour my mother’s ashes out into my hand for her third death anniversary on the Spring Equinox how they look like pulverized egg shells and sun bleached oyster shells. A mix of fine silt and the hardened, stubborn bones that refuse to become dust that remind me of her tenacious spirit her loving, oceanic heart so vast, so constant in her tireless love for me. So she comes to me in dreams, with my dead cat. She hugs me as she sorts boxes of Christmas candle holders a box she saved for a day like today. I hug her, and feel her warm flesh in the dream not the ashes and bone pieces, so dry so without the illumination of animated flesh. And so it is, that the fine dust of time that has settled on my typewriter this morning is a second hand recording of moments past and becomes a welcome silt of where future rivers meet dream oceans of mothers and beloved pets and hopeful horizons. And I remember how calcified shells feed living bones. How dust becomes fertile soil again and how the passing squall of rain and sunlight through the cedars this morning washes open my heart like a delta reminding me of the confluence where the warm flesh of my hand meets the sacred ash it holds at the intersection between my body and god. 2020
Stadiums of Absence For Stella Marie, Jan and Lynne So now I understand loss which is to say that I don’t understand it at all. The oddest absence. The empty hallway where just yesterday she stood and you talked together you in your angry, articulate ups and downs and consonant staccatos. She in her inside voice vowelly growls and breathy woofs. You think after all we’ve lost: friends, lovers, parents, memories, technologies we would be good at it by now. But it turns out you still need all the room where they used to stand all that room that needs to stay open as “space available“ but not for sale or rent. Stadiums of absence big blank spaces where they used to stand where we will stand one day when the game’s over and the janitors are cleaning out the the stalls sweeping up spilled popcorn and lost dreams in those empty stadiums of absence. Turns out, that’s just about how much space we’ll need. 2019
Earth Bodies, Sky Spirits Where sea becomes sky the circle continues bleeding colors bleeding into green blues grey scale sea scale fish scale mermaid scales the scales balance heaven and earth linking the dead and the living. how is it we bury the dead in the earth but imagine their spirits existing only in the sky? We, earth dwellers our clay bodies break break open and leave the clay husks behind lightning shoots forth soul a shooting star thunder claps the gun explodes the clay pigeon explodes in the air and the clay body rains down on earth from sky to sea. Where does sound go once it is no longer heard? 2017
Strawberry Moon Inside, looking out the invisible wind moves through the landscape. Tall summer grasses dance as unseen hands brush their tops and they bend toward the red wing blackbird nests hiding below. What is it to watch the unseen move through your life? Crab apple limbs flailing, leaves shuddering. The trellised Concord grape and the faded prayer flags waving in unison. There is a necessitated emptying out that comes before the new can arrive. The mowed field, the empty studio and the deep quiet that accompanies the next arrival. If you sit at the lake long enough for the silt to settle, clarity arrives. If you can stay with the discomfort of the unknown, and endure loss and emptiness a few moments more suddenly, on this full Strawberry Moon, six golden haired children will come running through that freshly mowed field, galloping kitten in tow, laughing, exploring this uncharted field of infinite possibilities. And the unseen wind continues, ruffling their hair, the long grasses, the surface of the lake, your life. 2019
What Water Teaches Me King tides and long drenching rains. We are in the time of Great Waters. Time to flow fluidly with gratitude and drink soup & tea. Time to let old insults roll off the back and watch for new mushrooms to emerge overnight in the fertile space created where resentment is composted and made into fruit watered by the forgiveness of their mycelial roots. This is the time to allow rains and waves to wash away the bitter, the hardened, the calcified. Even stone cannot stand up to flowing water and her old companion: Time. Time to return to the softness of water, how in its shapelessness it can become take any form. How it can be liquid, solid, gas. Can float from sea and become cloud, then rain drop then river and return back again to sea. Time to be watery again. Time to let tears flow and resentments go. Water has returned to us to nourish us and remind us: all is fluid, all is flowing. We are but drops returning to our birthplace, rivers flowing to the sea. 2020
Stillness We Expect to Find Now I notice the peaceful ones the clean ones the ones who have made friends with the stillness. Youth in all it’s precious unfoldment of tiger lily petals and lightning ambition shoots across the sky and heads as all sound does towards silence. It seems as we approach that horizon line the sunset of our lives a still deeper silence approaches us beyond entropy beyond fear we approach enveloping light or darkness depending on what we expect to find. 2017
nikyta palmisani 