Still breathing through.

...The woman you used to know is nowhere in your life. 

The crazy woman you have cut out already, a thousand cuts.

Strangely, somewhere down the line, you’ll want her blessing, still want her presence at an event, maybe a wedding.

You have no idea who she is now. 

She does not even look the same, and her reactions will be all wrong, and awkward, and it will be hard work to have her near.

But some small piece, a thousand cuts deep, says

I remember you.

Lots of skiing

So glad for lots of skiing this weekend, Wanoga yesterday and Meissner, miles and miles of Meissner, today.  I feel thirsty for exercise, I can't get enough of outside, trying to soak up as much snow and sunshine as I can, infuse all that bright energy into my cells.  I've been putting out too much, and not replacing enough.

Two small pieces

I'm enjoying these pithy little pieces created from the words of someone else's sentences.  They seem a bit mysterious, I'm grateful that they're out of my control.  Here's another piece with each word of a sentence the beginning of a line in a poem, of sorts:

I peeled a mango and
decided that life should have this much slip as
to escape, seal-like from one's fingers, and
heave upon the floor.  You
chase such a sweet thing.
A pit requires
technique
designed to separate the mango threads,
to suck the last bits of sweetness from the sunrise
weather of the fruit.
A hard fruit might belie a
storm ahead.

The line from whence it was born, "I decided to heave to, a technique designed to weather a hard storm."


And still one more:

Another young girl might have
factored in the brightness of the sun on her yellow dress, but
to consider such things is beyond her.  She
is instead within the sun, startled by daylight
the spangle of dust motes her dancing
color the thrum of blood in her delicate arteries
of flesh nearly not-human
the spins of her dance an arc upon
paper.

From, "Another factor to consider is the color of the paper."

Bits and pieces

Lisa and I have decided to hold each other accountable for posting bits of our 1 hour writing sessions, at least 3 or 4 times per week.  This piece was just today's warm up, a prompt that asks the writer to pick a line and write the words, one per line, vertically down the page, and then complete a poem of sorts.

I walk on a jetty, storm-battered balance makes for a giddy trip
needing the sharp stones to cut my toes, razor's edge presses reality up through me.
To recover some sense of presence
a
rhythm in the rocks is necessary, a universe of opposites
in balance.  Will
my
heart, not centered in my chest, upset
that delicate tightroping, will wind that
moves wraith-like around straining calves upset
my tortured dance?  A
body like water can
first hope to bubble
and shimmy but
mine will not
mind and will boil and burst
second.

The initial quote is, "I need to recover a rhythm in my heart that moves my body first and my mind second, that allows my soul to catch up with me.  I need to take a sacred pause, as if I were a sun-warmed rock in the center of a rushing river."  Dawna Markova