Winter Superior

You could heal yourself
at the palm of the lake
all winter long,
far from the dead dog
in the past,
the frozen pipes
that flooded a drafty house
in a snow-drift valley
one winter ago or two.
And this–the hunger
of a needful season
of bones and bare
branches.

Here, the lake
inflates
and deflates
like a living lung
on the shore,
the moist breath,
breath gathered,
black and deep,
beneath deer tracks left
on snow-covered ice
and next to your own
wider set of tracks,
a weaving path from
black cliffs and
down to the place
where the ice slopes
at the edge and into
the water.

You may not be cautious
as the doe who came
before sunrise to drink,
to test the thickness
of ice,
the graceful sound
of shattering.

Poem: Camouflage

Camouflage

We find predatory birds
perched in trees just off
the interstate,
wide-eyed open spaces
bright to either side,
good for hunting
rabbits and voles.

We don’t travel like this,
not during these
daylight hours. We are
such young, noturnal things,
scavenging for leftovers
with the owls and raccoons.

Still here we are, midday,
forest and field
illuminated alike and
we in the trappings
of grown-ups, fooling
the ground squirrels,
fooling ourselves.

Poem: Because at the time

Because at the time

we love people, and so we paint them beautifully, while we still love them. We paint their hair like birds on this big lake’s breeze, waves as heavy as bodies lying down on the shore and maybe it is meant to look like this passion locked up tight in the two, small apartment of our chests. But bold honesty might paint lions crowded around a tender, panting antelope, an image more accurate of our appetite at the time, more accurate of our gusto, a word heaving itself out from the linguistic pit where words are burned, the infinitive to eat flaming up and simmering down, and the sparks are other words like disgust, maybe all the way back to the shared root between taste and choose–words falling gray as ash, tumbling down from the mother word, and there you are on the other side, your features glowing with the last embers, orange, warm, a percussive heart.

Poem: Irreconcilable Differences

Irreconcilable Differences

I.
We talk about calling it quits for at least the thirty-ninth time as we drive past the paper mill at night. The bleaching process uses sulfur-based compounds and the odor haunts the air in the same way it used to stick to my grandfather’s clothes. He worked the mill for forty years. Worked there, and came home to beat his wife.

II.
The Five Most Common Reasons for a Marriage to Fail

1. Lack of communication
2. Money
3. If your arm didn’t choke my waist at night
4. If we’d bought that green, barn-shaped house by the river, the one your father called too small, and
5. Who am I anymore when I bleach away the you?

III.
I said, I want to curl into the corner of your lips like a white crystal of salt.

IV.
We roll on a mattress on the floor, breath as stark and white as bleached bones.

Blue

And you know my blues, the come in twos.

Cathedral

Spring green streaks in red rock, sand from a big glass heart like seeds for something sacred. Oh, let me shoot up tall as the clouds, let me leave only to come back, rain falling and running to the sea that is home.

This cathedral of sand and stone.

Epicurean Simplicity

“…[N]obody I know in the business is getting rich. Yet there are enough ardent, intelligent readers whose need for such writing is real–and, miraculously, enough editors and publishers upholding an intellectual commitment to issue challenging works–that the good books keep appearing. It is possible to consumerize the pleasures of books and reading, but as long as there are libraries, the cosmopolis of literacy, far-flung in space and time, remains a commons.”

-Stephanie Mills from Epicurean Simplicity, page 141

Summer-time culinary ecstasy

I love cooking in the summer. I love giving in to the heat, saying, “You win,” letting the sound of popping oil fill the tiny kitchen of my soul.

Right now, my real-life kitchen is brimming with abundance. It is wood-paneled and tiny, small enough to bump the hips of its two inhabitants. It feels even smaller when it bursts with green, like today. One day after market, a speckled blue stock pot, shelled peas: simmering paradise. Food in winter is nourishment; in summer, food is celebration.

In the heat, moisture rises frmom a skillet full of vegetables and it lingers in the room, a fragrant ghost. It fogs the windows, condenses on the wine bottle, sticks to my skin. It makes me aware of my body, every fleshy inch of it. The heat loosens my muscles, makes them easy.

Last summer, at the height of harvest, a friend and I improvised a meal together in an idyllic kitchen deep in the wilderness of the Upper Peninsula. We were house- and dog-sitting for another of her friends, in what turned out to be our separate but shared vision of the cosmic Home.

It was perfect: squat and sprawling with hardwood floors and stone counters, the house itself surrounded by out-buildings and exuberant vegetable gardens. We spent a late afternoon picking peas, green beans, and basil, and swatting away biting flies. The owner’s dogs sat on the porch and watched us, panting.

As we picked handfuls of cherry tomatoes to eat outside, we talked about our senses. The pungency of the herb garden. The dense warmth of tomato skin. The way our bones could settle into chairs across from the fireplace inside every evening, if we lived in this place.

Afterward, we brought our bounty and the dogs into the kitchen, opened two summer beers, and began preparing what would remain my favorite summer meal.

Pizza with Garden Vegetable Sauce

1. Prepare your pizza crust. Pre-made is fine, but I make the following recipe:
Mix 2 c. spelt flour, 1-1/2 tsp. active yeast, 1 tsp. baking powder. Add 1 tsp. honey, 1 TBSP olive oil, and 2/3 c. warm water. Knead, let rise.

2. In a food processor combine: green beans, peas, onion, garlic, olive oil, and feta cheese. To taste. This will be your sauce, so do enough to cover your pizza crust.

3. Roll out pizza dough, if making your own.

4. Top pizza crust with green-veg mixture.

5. Add more feta cheese and tomato slices.

6. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, or per instructions on store-bought crust.

Fragments of language

Mondays need poems like Fridays need wine. Two short ones.

Morning Song

Morning is
chamomile,
dampness,
desires for nothing
but what
can be held
in the hard white
case of ribs.

Record Keeper

I am keeping a tally here,
a long one in a leather-bound journal,
keeping a tally of things I’ve seen.
Each rare bird and each common one,
each fat bee hovering around
the swollen centers of peonies
and poppies, each time you say,
“honey” and “love,” each time
we eat olives, drink tea, which kinds,
each sticky, breezy summer morning
and the winters walking through the woods,
heavy boots shattering the fragile frosty ground,
each kiss and cloud and cicada summer.
And if anyone finds this, if anyone
reads this, if anyone says, yes, this,
this is the thing to recreate, this, you, us
if anyone.

The thing about depression…

The thing about depression is my life is pretty fabulous right now. I’m busy and successful and I have free time which I get to fill with wonderful things.

And then I pull a dish out of the cupboard (I even did dishes! That’s how Not Depressed I am.) and, oh, look, that one has a big blob of salad dressing that I totally didn’t wash off OH GOD I SUCK AT EVERYTHING I SHOULD JUST RUN OUT IN FRONT OF AN SUV.

That’s the thing about depression. I’ve been in deep, bellowing, life-consuming depressions, the ones where I didn’t want to get out of bed. I’ve had those depressions. And they suck.

And then there’s just Depression. The all-the-time, doesn’t-go-away, even-when-I’m-happy-I’m-depressed depressions. I removed an allergen from my diet about one and a half years ago and a lot of the acute depression went away. I remember driving to work one day shortly after the change and becoming suddenly very paranoid because, holy cow, I felt so happy. No reason. Nothing had happened to make me feel happy. I just did. I was just happy. And it was such a huge change. Which is awesome.

But that’s not the whole of it. The other night, I was getting stuff together for my booth at the farmer’s market, and I reached for a book to stick in the crate I was taking along and noticed its spine was looser than it should be. It was a binding method I had learned only a few months ago, so I’m still fairly new to it, and this particular book was one of my first ones in that style. And the binding was a little loose. This makes perfect sense. I was inexperienced. Of course the product wasn’t flawless.

Yeah. Tell that to Depression. So, I sat on the floor had a panic attack.

That night, I had experienced no other stress. I was feeling totally ready and confident about the market. I was excited. I do good work and I know it. Yet.

That’s the worst thing about depression for me. The out-of-the-blue-ness of it, the way there’s no build, no escalation. The way happy can flip over and be suicidal in the space of a moment. In the space of a dirty dish.

The thing about depression is having no control.