What a dance

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What a dance

Snow flakes fell every day

that I reclined sick

indoors watching them

probe

limbo

from the red chair

but still they

barely

fill the wrinkles

of ground I walk

after all that lying down

not having been able

to rest

themselves

being blown

continuously

around

like thoughts

that don’t

murmur

beyond seeds

Something

has happened

in the night while I

lay

sleepless and warm

walnut leaves lie coupled

stiffly

around the silent

chicken yard

bucks have rubbed

diadems

on the social thrift

of sumac

thistle heads toppled

and surrendered bladders

of silk

the fallen tree

is piled in half-chopped logs

like stacks of half-

read books

poke berries shine

like deer pellets

and deer pellets shine

like poke berries

the frozen white platter

of the pond

bears black marks

that twirl and slide

jump and land

such tiny paws

and large hooves

tied together

by claw-dragged lines

What a dance it must have been

for each one

going after the mystery

in their own way 

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.
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The way I want Christmas

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     The way I want Christmas is withdrawn, but attentive, and giving. Like a woman. During holiday hullabaloo the thrusts of commerce, and even sometimes of the church, impose upon the quiet of inner space. Any day of the year, whether in a state of joy, sorrow, or even turmoil, I want to rise and fall gently on the day's currents--nose flared, eyes raised, hands unclasped, ears unlocked. But some of the air is raucous, rank, deafening, false, and deadening. At home I pull down Christmas tubs and unsnap lids. Out with the ribbons and glitter spirals the remembered scent of oranges studded with cloves. It is a woman’s fragrance, the earth. My mother.

     And out comes the 1955 Christmas songbook, dull matte blue with worn embossed singing angels on the cover, its spine reinforced with duct tape by my father. Mom’s dark eyes ignite in candlelight at the mahogany piano, and blue-ridge vein rivers roll over her knuckles while she plays Go Tell It on the Mountain. Hip-to-hip on the needlepointed piano bench we sit where she has also taught me to play in hours of tearful frustration. But as if turning out the lamps and lighting the tree and candles illuminates a different piano and alternate faces, during these easy-going Christmas carol hours there is no tension, no mother-daughter resistance or pride. She plays and plays, and I sing, and turn the page to the next. The music floats in flakes of effortless snowfall. Many songs are foreign, strange, and special, never appearing in a church hymnal. They are haunting in their folk lyrics and minor keys. They are of woods and tender brown animals. They bloom with holly leaves and stars. They rasp with bagpipe and fiddle. They are blue, cold nights of Croatian shepherds, French rushes of wings, and a hand hewn rocking cradle of Czechoslovakia. They are whisper-sung by a woman in front of a fire, baby at her breast, fat cheeks aglow and rosy-warm, drinking the quieting calm that streams from inside a woman. Christmas is my mother’s lullaby.

TO SAY BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

I would like to sing someone to sleep,

to sit beside someone and be there.

I would like to rock you and sing softly

and go with you to and from sleep.

I would like to be the one in the house

who knew: The night was cold.

And I would like to listen in and listen out

into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,

and one sees to the bottom of time.

And down below one last, strange man walks by

and rouses a strange dog.

And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;

and they hold you gently and let you go

when something stirs in the dark.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow in 1991)

Sleep, little Jesus, my treasure, my blessing,

While Mary comforts Thee, tender, caressing.

Lullaby, little one, in loving arms lying,

Guarding my darling and stilling Thy crying.

~ Polish Lullaby
(translated by Henry W. Simon)
from my mom's Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols,
which I posted about previously here

Please listen to Edyta Górniak tenderly whisper-sing this lullaby in Polish, 

called 'Lulajże Jezuniu', here

 and-

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Used Beauty

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There were days in the 1970s when I was a young married woman that dried flowers were very hip. You could go to a fancy gift shop and buy a beautiful cachepot of dried purple larkspur and status, faded roses, and baby’s breath. I loved them, but I didn't buy them. If I was given fresh flowers for a special occasion, when they began to droop, I hung them upside down to dry them, and then arranged them in vessels around the house. I buried delicate heads of Queen Anne’s lace in silica sand to remove moisture for a few days and preserve them for mounting on cards and decoupage.

Then suddenly one day in the late eighties or early nineties I read somewhere someone challenging the idea of putting out dead flowers on tabletops or walls. “I don’t want anything dead decorating my house,” she wrote. “I only want fresh flowers.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time that I didn’t agree with her. Dried flowers were fading from vogue. Carolyne Roehm was publishing large gorgeous picture books on how to arrange fresh flowers, and I was buying them or receiving them as gifts. When Kirstie Alley kicked her cocaine habit, she decided to spend the same amount of money that she had spent weekly on cocaine on fresh flowers. Elton John had two full time staffers just arranging fresh flowers for the rooms of his mansion. At the house where we lived then, we had a dozen pink and fuchsia peony bushes, and I cut some of them for vases. It was a “free” luxury and added life to our rooms.

I spend little time cutting or arranging flowers now, and I’d rather not receive purchased flowers from a florist for a special occasion, feeling that the flower industry is a gigantic waste of resources, shipping them all the way from the Netherlands so I can have them on my table. Here on the farm, hydrangeas in front of the green barn blossom like fine Battenburg lace every spring and stay moist and lovely most of the summer. When the lush petals begin to dry, I think they are still as beautiful, if not even more so, and I know that soon snow will fall and accentuate the shapes and splay of the dried heads.

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What Matters Most

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"What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire"

- Title borrowed from the title of Charles Bukowski’s 1999 book of poems, 

after reading a poem of his in The Writer’s Almanac

In the dark of morning the day begins

with another couple of logs snugged into the

cast iron box of the wood stove

after stoking the night’s starry embers.

If the embers aren’t first stoked with the brass poker

the logs take much longer to ignite.

I open the news pages on my laptop

and on one I read about the long iron rod of rape

by Congolese men who enslave 11-year-olds

to mine tin, tungsten, tantalum

the metals used to magically ignite this screen I read.

And just so, in the comfort of my red leather chair

just then, the logs take fire. I hear

the knock as the metal expands, I see the shimmering

orange flames behind the creosoted glass

crisscrossed with a pattern of black iron

and I see that the fire is caged, a tiger

burning bright, all the sun’s heat reborn right here

in my own dark cave, working for me,

warming me, controlled by me, Imagine!

just with a poke of my brass rod

~ Ruth M.

Read Ashley Judd's devastating article about conflict minerals, which are mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo so you and I can have cell phones and laptops, titled Costs of Convenience here.

Read what Business for Social Responsibility said about conflict minerals here.

Read what Steve Jobs said about conflict minerals and his industry here.

Read one take on the Financial Reform bill in the U.S. that includes legislation about conflict minerals and disclosure here.