Category: Poetry

Liminal Velocity

This is a piece I wrote at this time last year. Liminal space is the space between, the transition zone between one thing and another. There is always space between the forest and the wetland, a mixture of both where a completely different set of ecological interactions take place. Just as there is a liminal space between us.

Liminal Velocity

Home is the liminal space 
Between dream and reality
Like the space between a swamp and a fen 
Where the speckled alders and cattails grow together.
A space you occupy
Where we meet in the in between
Of late summer chorus and early mabon fog

The liminal space
That land between the rose garden and the industrial blocks
Where we roam and witness lives 
Without really being a part of them
Liminal Velocity
The instant between the story you tell me
and my brain processing the words- 
and losing them
in the high of seeing your smile again.

The liminal space
Between having a voice and the 
Silence of a lichen 
Is not so wide a canyon
As the illusion projected on the screen.
It is a pinch of genetic code, and political gain
Taught by worlds with borders between
Urban and wild
And you and me

Liminal space,
like the sandy shore between my feet and the mantel of the Earth
where things grow and death becomes life
decomposing to a base substance we call dirt.
Soil, a rush of petrichor between the rain and the sun.
blending together with the sound of your laugh
like one essence of laughter and smell, 
a dance between sensation.

Liminal Velocity
The space between 
my perception of you
and the reality of you-
different forms of the same perception-
is the same as the space between the sea smoke
and the inland sea herself.
The one perception we share.

September 4, 2022

The Beats of Continuing On

The Lakes Shore we once paddled continues to breathe-
In and Out. 
The siche folds its layers over itself in fractal waves
      Like percussion beats.
The beats of your breath, have ceased. Is life
Like a butterfly? 
Beating its wings, effecting change
Half a world away.
Is it the change you fought 
So hard for in the world. Or is it
Just the incessant beat of the world marching on?
You once told me you were afraid
To imagine the change we marched for-
	       Side by side lifting a banner in the streets of St. Paul.
You lived it and where is it now. Here, Now. 
With the Lake and the rainforests of Panama. 
	Forever impermanently interwined with reality.

“Where ever you go, there you are.” He once told me. 
We had taken such different paths to that same Canadian Beach.
And the waves of Mother Superior went on 
With the beating wings of a quail. 
We walked together from Hattie Cover to the distant point of rock
And we laughed until the sun set over that glistening Lake.
And we wept.

	The waves continue
	From us to thee
	Forever impermantently intertwined
	While we are apart
	One from the other.

A Frost’s Amanita I found growing on my driveway this morning.

August 24, 2022

Woodstove Dreams

The South Shore is chilly today, with the jet stream pushing cold polar air southward across the Lake. A sublime Autumn chill may hang out with us all week long, as our bodies still crave the celebration of August, time spent sunning on the beach or working in relationship with still growing food. Instead, yesterday I lit my woodstove in the afternoon, retreating inwards toward myself and my fire while I let my cat be fascinated by the mother deer with two fawns, and by the hummingbird who visited my feeder for some rest. Yesterday, I needed to give my curiosity a break to recover it again for the week ahead.

My woodstove gives me the most lovely warmth, while it burns away years of history. Each piece of wood I burn is a record of an individual history, full of years of bounty and years of withering. What did the trees of this fire dream of before now? How did they perceive the world? I sit, I wonder, and I listen to the crackle of the fire as history heats my heart. I’m thinking I will post poetry on Sundays and essays on Wednesdays for now until my big move in November. We’ll see how it goes.

In the flame of the woodstove
Witness the dreams of the universe
As embers weave their way through the air before 
Revealing themselves like stars
Just more delicate
Fewer parts of hydrogen to fuel 
Your heart.
They are multitude and small
Simple as a hallucination
The one that tells you that you turned off your
Alarm Clock, that morning the sun had not yet peaked through 
The window to your naked body. 
Your alarm clock still sang
The sound of waves crashing, even though 
Those same waves are frozen now.

The same waves that made rainbows in the mists of the sea caves
The same waves where we kissed and first began to dream
Of things like windows, things like orchards, things like birch trees
Those same waves who are frozen now
And without motion are they still waves?

The universes hallucinations, as
Vast as the love between all the people
When it shrinks and cracks between two, 
Rekindles between others
And healing must take place.
Healing as though humans were stars
Or embers
With a constant spark,
Meant to be bright,
To transcend without a wisp or a name.
Yet to be the material of us all.
A staggering bend between Aspen trees and sandstone cliffs
The dream of a spark
And little more
Along your beaten path
To those waves between us.


Listen to the crackling of the woodstove,
As it boasts the story of 20, 30 years of life,
A crackle as 1999 burns

August 14, 2022

Futures Spun on the Barren Earth
I am in between lives at the moment. As are the chickadees, and the maple trees in their way. As food grows more plentiful the chickadees have stopped flocking, and returned to somewhat more solitary lives. Maple sap, the sweet elixir of the Northwoods, flows from roots to branches. I love the process of gathering and turning it to syrup. The walk from tree to tree and back to the central fire. Each tree I visit today I see as a different future. A different life I can possibly lead. Unresolved futures. The central fire though has not shifted from its spot in a long while.
```
Walking between lives
is like being a melting glacier
I uncover new beauty with each retreat
And mourn the loss of myself
Drop by drop
Each piece of myself is a flood in Miami
And a drought in Phoenix
A degree warmer and I vanish
Along with the communities within
ideas and dreams and timeless records
down to the scraping of soil from the rock
Love lost to 400 parts per million of CO2
As we walk the chasm together
taking one step after another 
to a future spun on the barren Earth.
```
Recently I’ve spent some time reminding myself that we can each craft a mission for ourselves in life. Mine is to help myself and others create relationship with the natural world through how direct interactions with Gaia, specifically within the Lake Superior watershed. This is my central fire, through which I refine those many futures down to life lived well. Lately I have little faith in myself that I can reach that goal, but still I try. What is your mission statement? How does it do good for your Place in this era of The Great Turning?

Sugarloaf Cove as the ice breaks apart, one potential life to lead.
March 27, 2022
The Loudness of the Sunset
Lake Superior sunsets are loud, particularly in this time of year. We are between the tumult of the winter with its night time winds, and the songs of summer, with the birds and the frogs and the wolves all calling to each other. We are even before the Spring, with its sounds of people, out and about once again. We are in the inbetween time, when the sun thaws the top of the snow, and the night freezes it over again. The ground itself becomes a sheet of icy mystery. And we as humans project our own stories and anxieties into that icy layer of barren snow.
```
The sound of a Lake sunset is loud. 
It tells stories of the traditions of college students 
biking down to the rust belt breakwater 
on a first date. Stories 
of fire spinners and lovers 
shy together 
in tender moments by the creek. 
Never in the same spot from year to year 
As the creek shifts between channels. 
The Lake sunset tells booming stories in echoes of colors 
But not the colors themselves 
Giving space for new stories 
New kisses under cotton scarves 
And so the colors are ever brighter and sweeter in their memory 
Until they go grey in their eyes. 
And then dark. 
```
In one sense this is the season of greatest hope for the future, when the sap is just about to run and buds just about to bloom. Then again it is the season of greatest waiting, in anticipation for the sounds. And the silence seems timeless. The sunset and moonrise the only solace of time moving forward. All potential still.
March 12, 2022
Gravity Holds
```
Gravity Holds

Every step we find ourselves in dreams-
Of the moment the snow fled from the freshly covered
Winter boughs
Towards the ground that holds us so tight
The gravity of Gaia pulls so much 
Softer on each crystalline snowflake
Than she pulls upon our aging imaginations.
So trapped by Moloch as they are
Encased in screens and responsibilities.

Our minds soar like forming hail
Down through the clouds, then up again,
Then down again, and so on until 
We have so much icy weight that to the ground our mind returns.
Falling and falling in 
And within the winds. Towards
The withered stream, held by toxic soil.

Gravity holds me tighter than your touch
Folding and unfolding both on the level of the strings 
That make the universe
The strands which weave us together
For only a stitch or two,
Before splitting apart into new patterns 
And old.
```
I meant to post this yesterday, or the day before. But each time I thought about what to say to accompany it, adventure pulled me away. A ski at Tettegouche, where my Mother’s ashes rest. An unexpected opportunity to teach. Each bringing to a space of new discovery outside the realm of everyday gravity. I want to use this blog space to share my work regularly, predictably, in the grounds of the everyday routine, the gravity which holds us to our lives. That gravity isn’t a negative energy. It’s just that I cant let it control me while I live a space so magical as this.

That’s what this piece is about. Holding that gravity as a friend, rather than a prison guard. And letting the orbits that are our relationships to others run their course naturally. That is something I am still learning. In Love I hold and hold those with whom our orbits meet only briefly, and try to force the gravity of our lives to stay orbiting together when they would’ve naturally drifted apart. When do we hold on? When do we let go?

Lake Superior in the Late Autumn
February 5, 2022

Lichen Potions

The Lake and the Lichens tell the same story again and again, yet those of us who listen hear it differently every time. Yesterday I heard the story on the Beaver River, finding my way down slightly treacherous waterfalls and following otter tracks until the ice felt too thin to follow.

Wavy mother tree of the sands
Timeless song of grains like winding whisperous winds
The Lake is my potion, my elixir
Of intense life and shadowed awakening.
Lichens grow at a micron a year.
And the sands whisper stories so rapidly,
About the wine drops and porcelain branches-
How many stories have the lichens heard?

January 22, 2022

Entropy & Blue Jays

        I wrote this piece on New Year's day, after the party that would have been, wasn't. Instead, I sing to myself, tell myself stories of futures and pasts that could have been. Singing only to the space of my Home, like Blue Jay outside sang to the smoke of my woodstove. Burning away years of photosynthesis for warmth. Such is the way life is...

Every point in the universe is increasing in
emotional chaos at a constant and non-linear rate.
The Blue Jay on the bough,
covered in fresh fallen snow,
tells stories of their childhood 
in their songs
to the smoke flowing from my woodstove.
Smoke cannot hear.
It is only what once was,
and never again what is.

January 3, 2022