AT THE WELL
A passage through
narrowed caves,
graveyards, wilderness,
down rivers, across oceans
my walls breached,I choose
to not eat from my garden of despair
where long ago perennial vines were dug in,
seeds sowed by wounded ancestors and my own
tangled invasives. Today
I am wandering
waiting for someone else
to tell me I can enter, belong,
It has been
a fiery summer,
too hot to sustain
the newly planted May apple.
as in the yoga class
feeling hands
shift my outstretched arm
to re-align with my hips
and when I opened my eyes to
acknowledge the help
there was no one there,
how sometimes
the adjustments
are subtle, a shift
of weight, of word,
a sigh, a release
of thought, feeling,
anger, hurt
and sometimes
it is more positional,
a postural habit,
bones and muscles
making do
constricting form
over 36 years
of bending forward,
listening, attending
as if in prayer
A man walks a field straightened
by young potato greens. A vagrant
wind raises dust. My windows
are closed. How does
he still walk with burning eyes?
I have grown up
even though
that same young woman
still sometimes
takes the steering wheel
The morning after
I wonder
was I fully present
did I receive as the earth does,
in gullies and fields filling
my empty thirsty places.