A Heart Adrift

I carry my Heart in a black wool coat,

through the white whirling of Winter

    As it beats warmth,

    Thawing frozen souls

        Trudging trenches through the snow,    

          Teeth speaking with chattering,

        Clenching palms with frigid fingers.

    . . . and so this Heart thaws with thumps.

Like that spindly black Branch, naked and lonely,

        Who writes weakly on the winds

    the story of his glory

As it leaves him every Fall.

    These days, he sways

        Clothed and glowing

            As Winter weaves him a wool of snow.

    . . . and so this Heart wishes warmth.

Singing, like that Icicle, passionate and longing,

    Chasing after his own dropped tears

        Prayers falling

            Building the other

        She rises up to kiss him,

    As he exclaims, “O Ice of my ice!”

    . . . and so this Heart prays and hopes.

Lend

Those hands

In your lap

    to the reaching and crying

        preaching and prying

            of this Heart.

For bears and squirrels have fur to warm them in frosted days,

    Where flakes tickle and tease almost numb cheeks

       Where a lake’s skirt freezes into a flying fringe along the shore

    Where a stream slows and trickles   t e d i o u s l y  along  the  trail . . .

. . . as the cold wind breathes.

So I am adrift

With this Heart

molded to be held not in

    The red-brown whiskers of my beard

      nor tattered sweaters with fraying sleeves

        nor dark recesses of black wool coats

          nor the fragile flesh of my chest,

But it was born to crackle

      warm and loved

In the hearth of your hands.

A friend once told me this poem is very 'me.'  I agree.

Words to a Friend with Dreams

Dear Friend,

Another word for dreaming can also be Hope and so I ask you to not stop dreaming.  We often speak about the "real world," and that dreams are imaginary worlds made of wind that blow away, but your experience is proving the opposite.  The "real world" falls apart, breaks and, like love letters that weren't good enough, it is crumpled up and tossed in the waste bin.  What is emerging is the Dream and the Hope and the Love, which were always just behind the passing Present, which is meant to be unwrapped.  This is why it is called the present and why St. Paul wrote,

 "So we do not lose heart.  Though our outer man is wasting away, our inner man is being renewed every day.  For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:16-18). 

Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians is one that has spoken to me a lot over the years, because it challenges me.  When I think that the world of thought, love, belief and hope is ethereal and ephemeral and that the boring everyday "reality" is thick and substantial, he tells me to flip it.  Imagine that your "dreams" are more the substantial things that don't go away and imagine that which we call "real" to be what is really passing away.

Continue dreaming, even though (or because) hope is thin.  And remind yourself that it is the nature of dreams not to stay dreams.  They're meant to come true. And, know that you are, in some sense, living the dream come true.  


Whoever you were when you were younger, even if it was just an hour ago, had a dream that she wants you to bring to life.  The Present is a hard time, and I know it is especially hard for you right now, but think of being a mother.  Realize that you are giving birth through the narrow birth canal of Now.  Our dreams come out kicking and screaming and it hurts, but this will bring you joy.  Rilke says, "Every happiness is the child of a pain it thought it would not survive" and these are times when our dreams press so heavy against our hearts that we can barely breathe.  


It feels like they are going to kill us, but we probably could not live the dream as we are now.  We have to die, because when we look at the dream-come-true face to face, it would seem that both it and we too had to be born again.  Remember when St. Paul wrote, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood" (1 Cor 13:12).


Your dreams of winter are beautiful, and even though you think you "have not met real winter yet," I would say you have.  In your dreams, you met the part of winter that, if you loose it, whether or not you have snow on the ground, the chill on your skin or lights on the trees; it makes no difference.  


Because if you loose that part of winter, you loose the snow in your soul, the chill on your spirit and the lights in your mind.  If you loose that part of winter, you could never appreciate winter at all.  Many of us can't appreciate the fact that the dream came true and so we trod the snow underfoot and curse the cold that reddens our cheeks.  

So hold unto that part of winter, but most of all love that part of winter, because when you meet it, your grateful eyes will remind us that we all are living one another's dreams.  Your hope opens your eyes to that, which we are blind to, and so in some sense, you are closer to it than we are.  The secret is that we are all close to it and this is what friends are for.  We are only as far from our dreams as we are from friends who help us see them clearly.  In the writing of these words, I hope I was a friend as much as you have  been to me.


Sincerely,


Sam

Still Small Thoughts

Psalm 131

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

my eyes are not raised to high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul

like a child quieted at its mother's breast;

like a child that is quieted is my soul.

O Israel, hope in the LORD

from this forth and for evermore.

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps  you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, IV

A Hall of Memories

My face once thought 

it were cut and hewn

from very old stone.

I cannot remember my birth

because it was so 

long ago.

Perhaps it's in my 

ossified and petrified 

memory

which solidly stands like 

a long corridor along which

some can walk and see,

chiseled in my walls,

the bas reliefs of
my bygone days.

Each sculpted image depicts

no childhood of mine

no record of my growth

but timeless lessons learned

and preserved in the unchanging

stone of my personal history.

Maybe you'll pass and learn

something in them which

I forgot.

It's easy to forget when

the hall's long walls

are full of sculptors.

My days and all who fill them

are crowding around these icons

sculpting in many ways

and leaving their signatures.

Some bring sandpaper and

gently smooth my jagged depictions.

Some hammer falls hit

the backs of chisels and chip

this and that part

of my potential to the floor.

Some bring drills and bore

holes in which dynamite 

is stuck, lit and detonated

leaving craters and cavities

in my memory.

But you know,

I remember the explosions

as they send tremors through the stone

and shake my memory to life.

The sound fills the air

and I hear who I am,

in who we all were,
in what we all made.

But you know,
when the blasts fade
and the dust settles

I hear most clearly

the lonely sound of

your footfalls as they

echo down the 

corridor of my past

into my present,

like the snowflakes

which landed today, 

on my face,

and tickled the 

soft skin of my cheeks,

which surprisingly

reminded me
that though many
pass through
the hall of who I am,

I am not at all

made of dead stone.