You guys, go read some Mary Oliver. I don’t even care if you look at this first. She’s brilliant, and my favorite poet. Even before she died, when she was getting up in years, I knew there’d be a day when I found the last of her books I’d never read in a bookstore, and that made me so sad. Sad enough that it moved me enough to write on, when I found one of the last collections of hers I’d not manage to acquire.

(Owls and Other Fantasies isn’t her most recent work, just one of the last ones I managed to find. It is a great read though, if I had to recommend a book of hers to anyone.)

On Finding Mary Oliver’s Owls and Other Fantasies

It was finding an old friend again,

all out in the wild and unexpected.

With the familiar golden words 

falling from her mouth, her birdsong,

calling back to mind

Exactly why she’s my home.

Together we’ve long wandered

her woods and meadows. 

Though I’ve always felt, subtly

the sands of time slipping past.

So now her warm call has,

on the back of it, a metallic tang,

a stab to some, for now,

non-lethal area—the kidneys?

We’re running out of chances for

these chance encounters.

These latest words, now perching, 

head quirked upon the page,

are some of the last birds

From her flock I’d yet to spot

In my wilds, (small, unkempt bookshops).

She’s not here to send any

new hatchlings out our way.

So I am left to cherish

what she did give in her day,

left now listening

for her call’s echo.

My mom is also a writer, and always told my sister and I stories as kids. It’s interesting to be able to compare the creative journey and process of someone you’ve grown up watching, once you are grown too.

Stained Glass

My mom always held up

the most beautiful stories

of her life to the light

like other moms might

hang stained glass flowers

or wind chimes

from the kitchen window.

She’d hold up a story

of being one of twelve siblings,

forgotten at school pickup,

of her grandmother’s haunted farmhouse

of her big sister’s torments,

and let her children

laugh in delight at the

fractals of light

shining down through her past,

making a dazzling prism-ed dance

on our floor, in the present.

Now I have enough odd

and broken pieces of my life

to start picking them up

and holding them to the light,

eyes squinting tight, to

examine each piece, search for

some glint I swear I should’ve

spotted sooner. But only after

I started to piece together

these fragments with voice, with wires,

to articulate these pieces into tales,

did I realize this untidy mess of creation

was always the tradition, and

the finished fancies

merely a by-product.

So I’ve taken this tradition up.

I take the stories

that still snag at my hands

so long afterwards,

but hold them out

to examine the light cast

into the present,

to let others come,

let them learn from

the lights, possibly help decipher

what’s still an unassembled mess

in this storyteller’s mind.

You know, that kind of night. We’ve all had them.

That Kind of Night

Had the kind of night

leaving you longing

to strip down within a circle of salt

and chant in ancient tongues,

the names of Hecate and all her ilk,

to hold up a sacrifice

and make it bleed deep

by your own hand.

That sort of night you

offer up to the crows,

along with a heart

from your now hollow rib cage

and chant and pound in the dust

until your pain is gone.

Now there’s just a bit more

blood in the world,

soaking into the night’s earth.