Writers
Posts tagged Joy
Poem: the insignificance of importance
0Dominique Larntz * December 11, 2012
Even I fall
into the spire spiral
of seeking status.
From my solitude
there waits an imagined
audience, anxious for words.
I’m less prolific than I could be.
Shamed for writing too slowly, my pen nestles
as a needle against my thumb.
The drumbeat of my blood presses
me to create a clever lyric to hush
that great fool wanderer of a muse.
She laughs at my manufactured timeline
and its coated companion, stress. She trades
this suggested piercing for sunshine.
Her compositions blossom into me
off-demand when I am not ruminating
about my breathless audience.
When I am pouring a glass of tea,
liquid in the complete pleasure of being
myself within a wave of language.
Poem: Tree-Hugger
0Dominique Larntz * October 31, 2012
I read in a book my mother gave me
that school children in China
learn to plant trees.
The oldest trees are Redwoods
in or near California,
whose smells and crackles
embolden my memories.
I’d like to be buried in those odors.
So far I’ve only learned to plant things
in containers
and I learned it on my own.
I couldn’t go around flinging seeds
just anywhere in this desert,
on this concrete,
in my enthusiasm,
in my greed for growth.
Surely the ground is too bricked,
despite the refrain of moss
and grafting that repeats
in my mind.
What if I had
a reference,
a reverence
from the structures
of my world
so that I had no need
to wait
to meet someone
from China to ask
if they really learned
to plant a tree
when they were young?
Poem: A New Habit
0Dominique Larntz * September 2, 2012
A New Habit
I think I did it first:
he asked me if I liked the shelf he finished
And in my mind I said,
are you kidding, it’s fantastic!
In my heart, I sang of the way a shelf
we carve into our lives to set a book upon
was made from a tree that reached as deeply into the dirt
as its branches stretched toward the sun.
He asked me again, a little perturbed this time.
“Do you like the new shelf?”
I shook myself and said aloud, “Yes, yes. I love it.”
I noticed this new habit we have—
assuming we have heard the other respond.
When we were younger and first in love,
we spoke together fast and secretly—so fast
that we would finish the others’ sentence
before listening and laughing in the joy of it.
Now our love life is ecstatic with age
and I can report back in time
that there is nothing more beautiful
than love well lived.
The love well lived requires both sides
to mature, both sides sometimes to be wrong,
a song of sacrifice lived behind the curtain
of deep desires to do something different than
is being done—requires abandoning the place of want
and its unending possibilities—those are ceded
with wonder and awe for the roots and depth
where we have best blossomed instead,
like two bookends slid securely into place
holding up stories on a shelf that will last for a while.
For twenty years, we have said and not said
so many wonderful things to each other; it seems
like sunshine to be around him.
Our relationship sustains this living landscape
and our daily lives are finally slow enough to feel it.
The other day, I asked him a question—
I can’t even remember what it was—
and he didn’t answer,
so I answered yes for him.
When you ask your next question,
only to wait and wait for its answer,
perhaps your spouse or child
or aging parent or God
is so ecstatic with you
they have this sense
you have already heard.
Poem: Birth Mother
0Dominique Larntz * July 8, 2012
Every child walks a mile as my child
and they make a trail of sacred steps
back to you, beautiful son.
I see to the needs of those around me
as if the mended ghosts of their wounds
will sing in the electricity around you.
I bathe the concave wombs I can save,
fill them with loving soup and soil,
set them out in the sunlight, let them go.
Poem: Dharma Antidote
0Dominique Larntz * July 2, 2012
Her body cradles the sorrow
in a canyon so deep
you can’t hear a quarter drop
when you let it go over the edge.
She’s been saying it’s fine
for you spin words of delusion
that swaddle her up to her throat
like a spider’s web.
Her body can’t heal any more
unless she follows the path
of rest and peace and joy,
taking every nap she desires.
Her nerves need a bath of love
and the culture is a river polluted
by overstimulation, by addicts
rushing to destruction.
Her cells weep in blood, the only
language they have, calling for life
to be lived, enjoyed, cherished,
preserved, flowed, balanced, loved.
Poem: Arrival
0Dominique Larntz * April 12, 2012
Arrival
On this birthday, death exhales his musings
into my carotid pattern and I wonder
if it is as stable as ever. I am in the middle–
this precipice point where I have let go
of the potentials of birth and I have begun
to embrace the vague details of death.
I care less and less about celebrating
the day of my entrance into this body,
but the fact remains that it is still marked.
I know the date, the time, the year
and the desert place in which my small fist
leaked out into this mortal blossom.
The date of my demise is unclear.
I might celebrate it in some sort of heaven,
dancing between layers of golden scarves
in a semblance of whatever my spirit
will know to be naked abandon in the afterlife.
There may be appreciation
for this sort of visceral joy.
We may gasp ourselves
into death with a breath
we do not yet know.
We might work ourselves to death
because we are in some sort of
prolonged gestation,
reaching to grow into something spectacular
through life-school–
so that death is another birth.
In the womb of death’s wooing of me,
I am comfortable with the outlines of my mortality today,
stretching into the sky with fingers
that are large to my pupil but tiny to the moon’s eye;
exploring with legs that are huge
compared to the models of my culture
but small compared to the waves of an ocean;
kicking with hips that rotate open
to uncover a chakra base
tunneled into an earth
to sustain me for a long curious life
that for the sun is only the time span
it takes to glance around at its planets
and assure itself they are still there.
Today, I am thinking about people I care for,
primarily the people in my blood family.
I can feel them in the pulse at my neck as I breath.
They are as close to me as my carotid artery
and as far from me as the nearest stars.
I have been writing them secret love letters,
knowing I may leave first.
I hope they arrive.
Poem: Invocation
0Dominique Larntz * April 2, 2012
Invocation
By now we glimpse blossoming colors
opening into the sweet morning air.
May you delight in their dazzling array–
even in this desert, while the dew
sticks to your shoes as you walk from
your front door to your car door,
if those are the only moments you have
to observe them today.
May you rejoice as Winter’s dormancy transitions to renewal.
May you love as the flower opens–
fully, sun-facing, extending trust.
Time again for rebirth, fragrance, eggs, and colors.
May Spring enter your life wholly.
Poem: Injury Roadsong
0Dominique Larntz * February 9, 2012
Injury Roadsong
Take your hand
and the rest of yourself
and hold me here
where I am mortal.
Tell me again
that you know
the same truth as I.
In youth, we have glimpses
of our singularities.
However, these injuries of age
engage a handsome brake
in our soul’s engine, giving us
our own acceleration rate
and there is no speed limit
imposed anymore.
I can finally slow down,
ignore the lines,
get off the road.
Poem: More Traveled
0Dominique Larntz * January 17, 2012 * “Love Letter to My Body”
More Traveled
The concert of contentment
plays in the chaos
of this day when there is so much
energy and so little focus.
So what if I don’t finish
and I travel a path
on which I help a few folks
and it is hardly noticeable?
And those fellows
do new things for me,
teach me a couple facts,
and I come back
to this same chair,
write a few more notes to you
and you hear some little phrase?
Poem: Breadmaker
0Dominique Larntz * January 15, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Breadmaker
I don’t know the reason
but there were many youthful years
when I could not be consoled,
and now all I need
in order to feel peaceful
is the hint that yeast exists
for the bread of joy to rise
from the core of my heels
to the crust of my hair.
The only gluten I can find
is your daily offering of love
that I have been
so lucky to discover,
kneaded faithfully
throughout the later decades
of this life that would be
unwise, bereft, and unbaked
but for the skillful addition of you.
Poem: Bearing Witness
0Dominique Larntz * January 5 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Bearing Witness
Does my body bear fruit
like citrus, with some
squeezable, zestable,
usable outer peel
protecting an inside
so irrevocably liquid
that all you have to do is
twist your hand a bit
to release its juice
along with its
dozens of seeds
and possibly so sour
or so sweet
that it transforms the taste of what it is mixed with
and it cleanses what it rubs against
and it stings wounds it drops into,
and are there many chances–
from all those citrus seeds–
for propagation?
Or does my body bear fruit
like a peach or a plum
with a soft outer skin
that reveals strength
and density
and sweetness
all the way to
a central core seed,
one purpose from which
this type of fruit
propagates?
Or does my body bear fruit
like a coconut,
growing a series of shells
around sweet water
high up in a palm tree
until the day it is ready
to trust that falling
is part if its nature
and it joyfully releases its hold
from the branch
where it has suckled,
and it turns
to embrace the ground
as it stops resisting gravity
and holding onto the trunk–
with its singular seed,
complex and protected
inside many layers,
knowing others
of its kind have been
picked up by waves
and traveled ten thousand
ocean miles to germinate
on a beach
far from
where it started?