Like Maharāni Denali, flirting
with the mirror of the lake,
sometimes hiding behind the breath
of the gods, and, at others, allowing
a full glimpse of her visage,

you are the pose that mothers all others,
and yet is rarely seen
in all of its profound simplicity
of purity and totality.

As a dream slips free from dreamless,
nīdra sleep, entire forests of trees
emerge from your granite shoulders
to trail down your sloping torso,
rooting in the soil at your feet,

where the shadows of your essence
creep into the breath of the crow
and the scream of the eagle, and the steamy
exhale of the magical being, named
Cakorāsana, who drinks moonbeams
and whose shape bears just a whisper
of your name. …

I folded towels today with Onessima,
who lost her husband three weeks ago
to a disease called COVID.

Senora, about the virus?

Forty-four years, that’s how long they
were married.

It’s bad, I had told her.

Their fathers were friends.

He did maintenance in a nursing home.

And now he, her husband, is gone.

My own mother lives in one of them, on the third floor.

And I can’t stop crying for Onessima’s loss.

How many more?
Are we keeping score?

Can you imagine if there was
no one to remember
when you were young,
or in the blush of middle age,
or to witness the sage stage
of your life? …

She grasps.
She calls. And starlight
falls upon her face.

The clouds drip lace
across the vault of the sky,
lingering at her neckline.

I cry. I scream. I can barely
see her now.

Does she mean to fly
across the hollow arch
of darkness again tonight,
taking delight
in the dance of life
unwinding below,

all the while knowing
that neither she nor I
will ever step into
that particular waltz?

Sometimes she flirts,
dangling like a grandmother’s
pearl on the thin necklace
of light rimming the silvered tips
of the day-clad clouds.

I can almost touch her then,
but she never allows it,
always slipping away,
sliding into that place
called night,
where I can never abide. …

“Continually being filled, the ocean remains unmoved and stands still, though waters enter into it. That person into whom all desires enter in this same way attains peace — not one who is desirous to fulfill such desires.”
— Bhagavad Gita 2.29

Like a wave crashing to the shore, 2021 has arrived, bringing with it both turbulence and a promise of clarity.

While walking this morning, I found myself thinking about what people really mean when they talk about life getting back to “normal.” Is there ever really such a thing as normal? “Normal,” I suppose, is highly dependent on the era and context in which one has lived. Will the new “normal” be anything like the old version? …

There’s a new dawn flickering on the horizon.

Can you see her, hiding behind those ropey robes of graying mist
she’s gathered to her bosom, the ones which have obscured
our vision?

Darkness and light so often dictate our sight. But those
grays… They are where true beauty lies.

I feel her now. Her salty tears whip the wind
and gather in my own eyes. I cry for
where humanity has been, and also for where
it is going.

Are we strong enough to show our
trust in the balancing of the equation?

We’ve wronged her, you know? Yet Mother Earth
still holds us in her palms. She who has sung
songs through the crash of waterfalls and
the sprinkling of desert rains and the mighty
heaves of the ocean’s breast, is crooning now,
singing to her children, calling us into
her eternal embrace. …

His squeal, as sharp as a tin whistle, slices through the morning air. A series of rapid clicks ensues. He’s diving — Big Red. I can see him, our dominant resident Anna’s Hummingbird, in my mind’s eye. His screeches of indignation are normally the first thing I hear, as I lay half-awake and half-asleep, in the mornings.

She was dissolving, pixelating, her wings fluttering
into stardust.

But she was simultaneously forming, cherubic limbs
and dimpled thighs about to be birthed
into the universe of the humans.

Would he be there?

They’d get it right this time, she knew.

A whole lifetime of true love blossoming in
carnation.

Like comets passing in the ink of eternity, they’d
flown through the same point an infinite
number of times before, burning out either too early
or too late.

He hadn’t known to wait last time, when her moment
of resolving was a decade tardy.

And she’d already settled her fate to another’s
the time before. …

When I was young, my mother started a Christmas tradition which has endured to this day. Each December we were gifted with a new “memory” — an ornament, often something symbolic of an event from that year.

The very first of these ornaments still hangs on my tree. Although I have no memory of it, my mother tells me that we were at the grocery store when I was about thirteen months old and I saw a package of red felt shoe ornaments and I pointed and said, “shoe.” It was one on my first words. That probably did not bode well. Although I am a yogi and spend most of my time barefoot, in the warmer months, or bundled up in cozy socks in the winter, I do have to admit that I still have a bit of a thing for pretty shoes. …