I trust you

Your coming,
your going.

Your loving,
your knowing.

You belong to the whole,
world, and beyond.

This heart knows
the rich grass of that endless field.

This heart knows the fullness
of loving
all of you
through all that is.

Surrendered, replete, unafraid.


 end November 2013

inheritence

I was the secret keeper-

even of things I did not know.

They gave me the keys,

to the doors that locked from the outside.

I was the watcher,

the listener,

who held

our family history

in my body

until it became

so dense,

so filled with silence,

that I lost my own

voice.

My skin kept the world at bay

and I let it thicken

and grow hard

outside

so that

the home

for my soul

was small,

and safe,

and silent,

within.

And then.

Existence,

my

beloved friend,

burst me open

heart-side to

outside,

raw,

unbounded,

fragile,

receptive.

My own heart

feeling for me,

seeing for me,

listening for me.

Free.

written February 2012

womanly

I was taught that the
shape of a woman was
made by absence.

An absence of
height,
fat,
noise,
needs.

It was made by stillness
so that her absence
would never be a disturbance, also.

She should be felt only
as that invisible order
which calms men,
and waits patiently
till required.

I was taught that the shape of all women
is made by absence.



written 16th November 2013

Animusity

Sometimes I am a good wife,
to myself.

I scrub until invisible order
becomes visible,
and I forget to resent the loneliness
of doing it.

I feed myself
like the self devouring snake,
stomach to hand to
stove to mouth.

Sometimes I am a good wife,
to this inner man,
and he leaves me alone
a little longer.

written 13th November 2013

inside

three locks on the door today
to keep me safe,
and the world at bay.

the march of the sun through
the living room,
and this heart curled in,
too tight to bloom.

Sleeping and dreaming
 the thoughts away
letting greater forces
have their way.





written 6th Nov 2013

To Jane, My Mother

I deduced small insights into
who you might be
in furtive searches; your lipsticks,
the books you read, your bedside drawer of secrets.

I longed for you and shielded you
from my need,
 for fear
you might
be overwhelmed.

I drank in the brief touch of your hand
on my hot, fevered, forehead
and imagined the cool, wet cloth I held
in place
was you.

I feigned sleep, collapsed on my bed after school,
to overhear you cluck quietly in concern.
I stole money from your purse and fed myself secretly.

I wore the clothes you sowed for me,
with a burning shame, for my hatred of them- with utter detachment at the teasing. I kept my fierce silence bottle- stoppered against all the things threatening to explode from my throat. At night I slept wedged between the cool wall and the mattress of my bed. I hid decaying lunch boxes in my cupboard, again and again, rather than tell you I couldn't stomach the packed sandwiches you made. All the things I didn't see, I didn't say, for you.

In these ways I loved you fervently, hopelessly, Mom.

And now,
since your death,
I undo
with painful, trembling, fingers
all the threads of you
I wove tenderly, imperfectly, into my being,

so that I can escape this dreadful undertow
to become submerged
by your life,
to rest my face
against your memory
and just give up,
this excruciating search for myself,
this burning growing into your essence,
this never ending search for your presence,
this deathlike resignation to the Fates.

One day
I will have lived longer
without you
than with you;
every self sufficient breath
a betrayal of
my utter undoing at your absence.

Moving Haiku

House empty again,
my heart and boxes full-
I carry them out.


The house is empty.
I will not open the door
to a stranger's home.


I am in storage,
split into boxes, locked up.
Keep it together!


Change is rolling in,
only the waves seem to know
the right direction.


written 31st August 2013

When

Just when
the spaces inside me opened, again,
and filled with freedom.

Just when
my body had risen, with the dawn,
and found beauty.

Just when
my memories had spoken every wisdom,
and stilled.

Your soft breeze, and these old, fallen leaves
begin to dance.

written July 12th 2013

In Love

Oh Beloved,

I cannot remember your face,
but I see you in the strangest places.
My heart leaps for joy when I hear the name I do not know you by.

I confess: I have hidden my longing for you in relentless ways. I have scented a promise of you in others and have made myself content with shadows.

Always the little things have brought me back to the center of my heart, to hold your flame for comfort, and to pray.

I hold on, dear, knowing that you long too. We will break on each others shores and wipe away with our love the flotsam of these daily storms.

Days

I climb the front steps of my house,
to gather the footsteps of strangers
in my small bowl.

It rains.

I go to carnival, testing out my lesser known shadows,
and cross the carnie- line for a few days.

I dream.

Can I hold anything in these hands?
Can these fingers unpick the birds nests my sleep-weaving has created?
Is there an answering hand to take in the crossing?

I am spinning on this globe, as it spins almost imperceptibly.

God Bless Jung

 'If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem...the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth'.^[5]





The antithetical archetype, or enantiodromic opposite, of the senex is the Puer Aeternus.

 Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it is an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. 
The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.




 
"That higher and 'complete' (teleios) man is begotten by the 'unknown' father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—'vultu mutabilis albus et ater'—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's 'Except ye become as little children' prefigures this change, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.^"

Margaret's quest

My love for you is a grain of sand in my heart.
I remain on my rock,
in the depths,
and feel the vastness of the ocean,
and my raw flesh.

the question arises: how many layers to you are there?