L U M I N A * N O S T R I

 On Transubstantiation an exercise from Danusha Lameris using  Susan Firer's poem Transubstantiation  as a jumping off point. Enjoy I Before it is love It is just friendship. An agreement,  an exchange of favorites, time bound by two. But once it is love the binding melts. Everything is fire then. Time sizzles like a string on either end of the dynamite stick.  You are crackling towards the other now revelling in your separateness. He is not you you are not him, and oh how wonderful  that knowledge feels. Before the explosion,  the dynamite is a promise. A blowing apart of each separate timeline, a portal to somewhere new.  After the stick blows, there is a settling. A choice "Are we going to walk though?" After I hold my palm out,  it's no longer my palm. It's, a peach to be  carefully kept, lest it bruise, lest it spoil,  lest it rot. Before you decide where your palm will land,  it's a bird of prey, a peregrine falcon, in th...

  ON POETRY COLLECTIONS FROM THE LIBRARY As I open each offering I can’t help but be stunned. How are the pages still so white? The spines so unbroken? If this were mine, not borrowed, how I would dog- ear page after page, how I would crack each binding until the heart of it splayed open! I suspect this pristine condition a symptom of want for wear,  but then a flicker, something like hope sparks inside me, and I join a communion with the reverent.

Rosemerry Wahtolha Trommer once told me if it’s true, the opposite is also true. That inspired me to try this take on Mary Oliver’s The Journey. Enjoy! THE STAND STILL Everyday you really don’t know what you have to do and you stop, though the voices within you keep whispering their good advice— Though part of the house ceases to tremble, and you feel the new-nothing tug at your spine. “Break your death!” Each voice exhales. But you don’t move. You don’t know what you have to do though the water seeps with all its twinkling toes through the very foundations. Though their joy is delighting. It is not yet late enough, and a calm day and your chair, empty of fallen leaves and sand. And leap by leap, as you bring your voices in closer, the stars soften their burn over the cloudless clear and there is the oldest voice there ever was which impulsively you mistake as your own that abandons you as you stay further and further away from the world, uncertain about doing the many things you could...