Nancy: Variable weather, winds and tides, bottles and boats, flotsam and jetsam, mostly lost, sometimes found.
Weather Notebook, 12/97
Ice, fog, snow squalls, rough water.
Little enough sun, with the days pinched
short. No one was tending the dinghy;
it must have heaved in a gust and slipped
its mooring. One morning it was gone.
Ice, fog, snow squalls, rough water.
As the days shorten, the cold sets in hard.
First, ice covers the marsh, then it fills
the small coves. Yesterday, just at sunset,
the air thinned enough to see a flock of
buffleheads, riding it out in the bay.
Ice, fog, snow squalls. Wind.
Winter begins at 3:07 p.m. When the wind
lets up, trees, surprised, fall into the
pause. Out on the bay, the dinghy has been
blown back and fetched up on a ledge.
In the coves, the ice thickens.
Winter begins.
Alan: When nothing can be done, the heart opens. Call it prayer, or supplication, or just a crying out in darkness.
Night Watch
You’re so sick
and I’m helpless –
all my ministering a fraud.
Through night to a cold dawn
I listen to your shallow breaths
and the unceasing whir-whoosh
of the oxygen concentrator:
whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-whoosh!
whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-whoosh!
driving thought out of mind
in fragments,
atomized,
gone.
Only
the White Tara mantra remains
where I tenderly offer up your name:
om tare tuttare ture Nancy ayuh-punya-jnana-pushtim kuru svaha!
White Tara,
Green Tara,
Kuan Yin,
female embodiments of active compassion –
help us now!
Wrap her in your arms
for, though my heart yearns as a mother’s,
I am of male form and helpless.
I would hold her now as a mother
her suffering child –
as Mother Ocean holds her continents,
as Mother Galaxy holds her Earth,
as Mother Emptiness holds us all –
do this now
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