Category Archives: Poems

Yoga Comes to You

Yoga comes to you when you need it. It’s like a fine fuel, my teacher said;
it can last for months, getting you through the hardest moments.

The Yoga exists in service to you, my next next teacher said;
We do not live in service to yoga, configuring ourselves into shapes.

No, the shapes come to us, the way fog seems to drop down out of the sky,
the way it comes together, level with the earth,
the way it pillows on the blades.

It is a way we move like babies in the womb and outside the womb,
the ways we pandiculate upon waking.
It is a way we notice we’re breathing and unbreathing.

Writing is like this, coming to us the ways leaves come,
budding out of branches, soft and bright,
falling off the trees, hard and true.

They are connected, this moving and writing;
they are expressive of our natural ways of being –
attentive, expansive, budding out of ourselves
the prana flowing upward and downward, toward and away from, in and out,

a fine fuel pulsing soft and bright, hard and true, inside, outside,
expanding and contracting, the spanda, the life.

Don’t you feel you would die if you didn’t write,
my teacher asked me,
like you can’t breathe?

What is it to feel full, to feel empty?

I woke this morning and realized I haven’t felt like my true self for months.
Has my yoga not lasted long this time, this phase of circling the sun?

Is it only in contraction, my yoga, my writing, getting ready to burst from the world into the world? Can I not breathe? Am I not breathing? Am I unbreathing? Is this what it is to die and to be dying? An unknowing? An arresting of the pulse, a cessation of the turnings of the mind stuff? Is Yoga the end of this iteration of me?

Do my words fall hard and true, having lived their time insulated deep in the cortex of my life, swaddled and fed by the sensations of opening and closing, stretching and squeezing, the spanda coming to me, in service to me, rising like sap ascending from my roots to the tips of my tree?

___

I feel the July fog around my skin this morning while the pillows of dew break against my toes.

All of life falling and rising, coalescing and dissolving, expanding and contracting, and me, noticing, playing yoga the way we cover and uncover our eyes, peek-a-boo-ing with oneness.

Telling My Son His Dog’s Death Story While Driving

He was home from college and rode with me
to pick up his younger brother
from soccer practice.

I explained what we thought was a seizure,
what happened to her body,
how she couldn’t move.

I told him how when she was able,
she walked slowly to all of her
favorite places in the house.

She even climbed the stairs somehow,
stepped onto his platform bed,
and lay curled up on his mattress for a loooong time.

I told him how his sister and I sat with her on the couch, lay with her on the floor,
how restless she was, and after hours and hours the way she struggled,
how she ran flopping and twisting toward the back door

how her legs slid out behind her and she lay down on the cold oak floor
how I brought the blankets
how I lay there praying for all of us and sending her reiki

the way dad helped me at the end
when I was scared
when I couldn’t touch her

when her breath was going
and then when it was gone
and the way his sister sobbed.

When we stopped at the sign I looked over at him
and saw his tears. I saw the boy he was
and the man he is and he said,

“‘…but when his parrot died,
he cried and cried…'” and I told him
how those same lines had echoed in my mind.**

We finished the drive and I told him
the way dad had wrapped her in a blanket,
how the suffering was over.

And then we sat feeling it all,
his younger brother coming to the car,
the two of them wrapping up together crying

making it real
making life true
finding death and together finding ways through.

** The lines my son and I remembered as we grieved – independently of each other – are from a children’s picture book by Mem Fox titled Tough Boris. We read this book so many times together when he was small. The narrator describes how all pirates are tough, among many other things, and, that all pirates cry. It was a gorgeous moment – in the book and in our lived experience – to realize that these lines came to us in our grief, bubbled to our surfaces, and resonated deep in our heart spaces. Thank you for reading this, and for sharing in our grief.

Poems & Ashes

It’s so cold today that we gather inside, light her candle, and read Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching A Cloud Never Dies. 

I can’t read my poem out loud, so each person reads it on their own. 

Then we all go out in the yard and take turns spreading our dog’s ashes together, wherever we feel called.

I spread them beneath my magnolia tree under the branch that extends far out over the grass.   The branch that holds her windchimes now. 

My daughters do the same.

My eldest son chooses the open space where they play, and my youngest goes all around the sliding board.

I am spreading the last of her ashes beneath the wild bushes where the cardinal flew – just behind our firewood, because it feels right for her to be with what transforms.

This is my morning, writing and releasing, preparing a ceremony for our beloved.

We do not keep any of her ashes

except the ones on the wind,

the ones we breathed in.