What the Muses Leave Behind

  Finding Grace Giving Grace Being Grace       Today five cranes flew by my window East to South.   The new sun blushed with morning, and I reminisced on waking up    with you in the red metal bed that fit us like a glove, white cotton around    our whole selves as we moved as priestesses do, spent from ceremony.     We spooned still tethered in dream threads, sleep thinning with the mist outside.     How did we get so lucky?   The smooth fit of our bodies, gently finding grace.   We hope this moment will cycle back again and again ;   that we could replicate such blessed disruption as if it weren’t like the tides and the weather.     How many others among us, calling this blue green miracle, home, woke to disruption -   to a 7.8 earthquake, a thirty-eight-railcar crash, a Russian missile in the roof?   It boggles my mind, how our Great Awakener came in waves of pleasure and   pummeled others with a big mean stick. We will never be the same.     They will never be the same. Nonethel

Quietly Quitting a Long Marriage     It has been a pink thread and big stitches that basted our stories together,    a regenerative and frail connection     reliant on its care and f eed ing .       Then there is quiet quitting , a n often-forgotten way to reclaim power,    a subtle recalibration.   When marriage serves as initiation, everything is possible.   We choose the magic we make.      Subordinating conjunctions suspend the moment,   bring a discreet signpost to a thought,     dew drop unpacking light.    After, as if, because, when, where, since – here are words,   I tender to wing open a line.      When marriage serves as initiation for the fireweed years -    those days of forging ahead, slower, living from our belly -     and there is nothing to prove, what emerges ?   What falls away?      Since nothing is new under the sun and the moon,     and we are subjects to the first law of thermodynamics,    it is easy to neglect the first letter of the next word.   It was an