When This Body

Tags

contemporary form poetry, detachment, Elaine Stirling, letting go, moving past, Navarrete quatrain, physicality, reconciliation, self love

When this body is awash with love
of self, I see you free of worry lines
that once defined you fall away
revealing sun flares of exuberance.

When this body sees your vibrancy
coronas form around the simplest
words like hope and be and I
let go of distances formidable.

When this body moves through paths
we cleared together aeons past
converge to higher ground, remembering
volcanoes and their blinding ash.

When this body cashes in on all
she’s seen and done, the love
that crowns your form will lift us
both from grim, erupting histories.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

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Cheat of Thought

Tags

disintegration, expansion, letting be, letting go, manifesting, new love, perception, perspective, re-creation, signs

The string between the cans we used to talk
through snapped and hit me in the eye today

knocked out the scale that enlarged the speck
in yours to timber size & now I find I’m lost.

If I can’t see your flaws or hear the mutters
that once passed for conversation, what remains?

I hold an empty tin, a bit of string;
the tintinnabulation in my ear has ceased.

I catch no words, am cheat of thought beyond
the possibility of shapes of things to come.

A tune I used to hum is gathering
momentum on my lips, I feel the buzz

surrounding me of poets who sing only
of love’s presence, met one yesterday and

couldn’t think of what to say. Too fluent I’d
become in retro-specks. So now’s the time,

it’s obvious, betrayed of thought, to learn
a brighter tongue. So far, I know the words

for get and give, for let and live, and while
the space between us grows and falls away

I witness something tender that accommodates
and has no fear to speak aloud my name.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Spring Break

Tags

beginnings, continuity, Elaine Stirling, letting go, Palm Sunday, perception, poetry, revival

When there’s not much going on
when all positions have been tried
and cast aside, the years of playing
house and chasing Indians or being
chased have proven in the adult form
to lack their former mystery, it’s easy
to fall back on history.

What could be safer to this bored of
weary mind than what I have survived,
revived?

Comparing notes we pass the time
in passing notes create a time for us
to nail upon a tree with certainty.

They were the days, those days,
unlike the days that lie ahead, the ones
I dared not trust, for fear they’d prove
the lie consumed when droughts about
the truth of me rolled on and on
until the tributaries dried and veins
subsided rusty roads they cracked
my lips until they bled.

Rich pleas I formed in pleasant rhyme
to please and keep a roof above this head
till shapes appeared as lush and greener
pastures of a kind that might be kind:
how wondrous are the disappointments
that we find and find again—

But, no!
I break

this rumination, come from
ruminants of multi-stomached
cows, this gut I have but one
it sees me through and asks for
nothing but continued trust the
nutrients of which the light and love
and joy of life incessantly provide.

We have a history, the you and I, ‘tis sure,
as multi-branched as future our
capacity to choose the good and true
of it, eternal spring…now here’s the
bridge that only I may cross and so
I pause to kiss your mouth and look
once more into those eyes. Farewell,
my friend, and hale well met, my
love, my deeper love.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

“Rain, Speed and Steam: The Great
Western Railroad”, painting by
Joseph M.W. Turner (1775-1851)

Folio

Tags

acknowledgment, circularity, Elaine Stirling, forgiveness, letting go, poetry, redemption, remembering, tenderness

image borrowed from http://www.countrylifeimages.blogspot.com

It doesn’t happen often
anymore, but sometimes
in the cherry fullness of this
life of tart and sweet, from
misty edges like a frontispiece
or monolith of stone demattered
stands the doorframe like a
looking glass that shone
you once to me.

A latch of clappered
bronze inside my throat
springs free, for is that not
your span of shoulders, curls
that fall around the ears I loved
to whisper in? Your smile invites
me like a softly creaking gate,
I pray, oh God, don’t let this
be the coming round again, not
yet, for I’ve a mighty joy at work
and playing with the likes of you
who in this perfect moment
cannot stay—I am allayed.

We followed all the passages,
two runaways, a captivate I was
to monsters you would conjure
from the steppes and plains
of torments that were yours,
they were not mine; your kisses
paved the way, I have to say,
to pillared vaults of mind
and treasuries that to
this day deliver me with
coruscating leaps to dragon
lairs I never would have dared
in lesser days to plunder
for their gold.

So do not think in quiet
moments when you catch
the trace of me caressing one
whose shoulders can uphold
these coming glories that I do
not sometimes yearn for you.

I hope you’ve learned by now
that time, it does not go, it only
comes, and that you trust as I do,
in the doorframe, for it will appear
again and I’ll step through—you’ll
see, I am the one who long ago
agreed to bind in leather, free of guilt
these folios, full content, with an index
happily unexpurgated of our lives.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Surrender

Tags

Elaine Stirling, letting go, patience, poetry, the shadow

Image by alienationzombie deviantart.com

Inhabitors of will, this quiet
night awaiting birth, I count
the breaths and watch the rise
and fall of many, the diverse
extinguishing in words that
dissipate before my eyes
adjust, there is no black
or white, no cause to
organize or press against
for in this moment crystalline
we are, no two alike, immersed
in silent trust, and reaching
with these hands, I cannot
pull or stem the tides
and yet I try to imitate
the heart who knows her
way and pays no mind to all
this stammering. If I could learn
to dim the lights, inhabit—no,
this task is not for me to
know or tamper with
and so I leave the flame
untouched and back away
to rest among the shoulders
of the ones I cannot see
in coalescing shadow.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

The Freedom That Comes

Tags

Elaine Stirling, letting go, prose poem, relationships, survival

Image by Alison Jones

Final entries from the log of bush pilot James Armitage, 34. Wreckage from his float plane was found September 14, 20__ in a wooded area near Copre Lake in northern Ontario, Canada. He had been missing for eleven days; the notes were written with the stub of an HB-2 pencil. Cause of death: hypothermia.

~~~

The freedom that comes from not having to hold an uncomfortable vibration calibrates instantly higher.

All of what happens and is happening involves infinite adjustments of detail by What We Really Are at non-physical levels. What manifests in daily life is the furthest extremity of these events with the twin channels of thought and feeling as our downstream propulsion—like the left and right pontoons (looking pretty banged up, sadly) of this Cessna 172.

I’ve reached the far end of a chessboard, and now I’m trading up. Even before this happened, I was free in every moment to launch a new game if I didn’t like the old one. Next time, I’ll choose opponents according to their ability to bring enjoyment. No more assholes!

Anyone who feels compelled to correct my interpretations is welcome to launch their own new game.

It takes two sides to maintain a tug-of-war, and letting go the rope, while it ends the match, is not illegal. The collapsing heap at the opposite end is temporary and will sort itself out. Every collapse does.

The lead in this pencil is almost gone.

Emily, I love you, and I’ll miss our arguments. No one could piss me off like you, or lighten my heart, or drop me to my knees in gratitude. You were my greatest adventure.

Tell Brianne and Matthew their daddy will come back to them in a new way when they’re older, and when they see me again, they’ll laugh. Ask them if they know how much I love them, and listen to their answers.

Tell them there is no death.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012