SHADE PULLED DOWN ALL OVER US

If I could draw a curtain shut
Block out certain wreckage, 

If I could yank you down beside me
Huddle here breathless,

If I could keep your hands from racing
Toward the window, toward the phone

If I could have you as a tree,
As a ballast, as at least a worry stone

If I could cry you sweetened tears
Let you lick them, paw my face

If I could insist we exist
In a cloistered darkness, press 

The tight cocoon of our tongues
Toward a kind of forgetting

If we could withstand time a minute longer
Until whatever was going to happen

Happened and we could glimpse
Around the shade together

Our eyes incredibly intent
On what work we had in front of us.

      

VILCABAMBA

While my marriage buckled, I rode on horseback
up the Andean trail, into foreign clouds and briar
with my friend instead. She was not the wise prophet
I craved, who might hush me by a campfire,
explain the way love and self were supposed to balance out.
Her questions and hugs were sparse.
But she was the one who came and I was grateful.
At least she spoke Spanish and knew how to use her boot 
to jab the horse’s side when he stalled to chew grass.
I copied her and my horse kept up. Our guide
took such a lead as not to be a guide at all except
to open farmers’ gates and drop some coins in a bowl 
on the porch of a shack that marked the turn
leading to the waterfall. All day I’d suffered,
under sun without sunscreen in the thinness of air,
my breath strained through chest pain, afraid
of slipping on the scree slope, my horse’s wild body
tangled with my limbs and reins, my children’s future
without two parents together or alive, all tumbling into the river. 
So when we dismounted beside a vein of snowmelt 
flattened over a boulder, and our guide tied our horses
with twine to a bush, I only expected to cool off and risk
drinking some runoff to quench my dizzy thirst.
But here at this altitude, in this mid-afternoon,
my friend tugged a low-hanging vine and hoisted herself
up an embankment, then jumped and swung out–
she might as well have flung across the universe–
clarity ripped open, light and Earth and life and heartache
all came into focus as she hung on and pendulumed
back and forth across the small churning pool
where our guide had brought us to see what his country could offer.

WHAT LITTLE WE CAN

One afternoon at silent retreat, I skip meditation.
Too much burgundy and Buddha in the great hall.
I need to breathe, not as taught, but on my own
terms, desperate for a breath that isn’t inward.
It’s dull February in Massachusetts, I walk
down the steps of the old manor onto the lawn. Ice
binds the grass in a prickly crust. Last year’s green
is smudged, forlorn. I feel it needs me–
so I lie myself all the way down on the ground,
stomach and cheek pressed to the earth.
My heart beats through my jacket. I lie there
listening to the icemelt crackle close to my ear,
feeling fingertips numb, jeans become soggy,
feet slump side to side searching for a nook to rest.
It’s there I make breath, after breath, after slow,
sweet breath. Draw them in; offer them back. The sun
stays quiet behind the clouds, the planet
shows no sign of distress. Nevertheless I keep
my position on its surface, I choose this patch
of skin and become a bandaid, I am convinced
it is my turn now to take up the work
of healing the world, and I don’t know
any other way. My body heat exchanges itself
for the cold of winter and when I leave
there is an imprint of my body, a residue
of me-shaped animal, this one human trying their best.