Writers
Posts tagged Union
Poem: The Sunburn Purchase of 1970
0May 19, 2013 * Dominique Larntz
Dedicated to the Rights of Nature Movement
Nature purchased me early.
At 3 months old, the sun
scorched my skin
across the side of a mountain
one afternoon
like it thought I might be
an agent of photosynthesis.
I am owned by nature
and fail to fathom the delusion
that man owns land.
Like a long-running movie
with dramatic courtroom scenes
where everyone’s malnourished,
I’ve stepped out to get some air
and seen the scenes are two dimensional,
and the script’s someone’s trip to make money.
When I was young, the fingers of reality
found me for that mountain moment but now
I am old and nature finds me everywhere.
I refuse conversations about who-owns-what
and I silently grow thyme on my back porch
as the plants call forth their right to flourish.
I hear it like the thrum of my heartbeat,
a song so much fuller than the noise of commerce—
the verdant cadence of reality
trickling through fantasy as the ice melts
around schemes of domination and colonization—
old ragged frozen prehistoric fish rhymes.
Instead the letters of real things start to appear.
Lexicons that interweave breath making and breath taking,
water ways and solar rays, until I can walk up that mountain
at a time near my last breath making friends
with the sun, with technology, with my fellow man,
with the landscape, with the whole of the day.
We don’t own land like
I don’t perform photosynthesis—
which the planet needs to make air—
the air I depend on for every breath of life;
breath I gulp as the plants move me.
Poem: Security Systems
0November 25, 2012 * Dominique Larntz
We could build a wall, you and I,
and see it fall back into the particles
and pieces that all physical things turn into,
like Legos in earth’s generous toy chest.
You could write a cypher and make it cyber,
wed a hacker and the two of you could spend
your life staring at screens as your bellies quicken to text
and procedures instead of the bend of a baby’s elbow.
I could serve the neighborhood watch each night, my flashlight
joining the neighbor’s flashlight, repeating until the night yields
and the watch has to watch itself, being over-crowded
with people who need to turn the light on themselves.
You and I could amass a pile of nuts like a squirrel
or a pile of anything else that seems valuable now—funny
money that keeps changing forms—when I was young it was
cash and now it is a credit score or an abstract number on a card.
But we know, you and I, that nothing secures us to life,
not even our bodies, because we give them back too,
when destiny points directly to us and tells us it’s time
for the most courageous of human moments.
The only system that works for the human spirit is love,
life’s animating storyteller whose songs keep us fed, who meets
us at every grief and joy equally not as a fragile parent
but as an entire ocean for us to dissolve into as ice.
Poem: Be Quiet
0November 8, 2012 * Dominique Larntz
Be Quiet
Be with me without thinking
through what I should do.
Be quiet about your
superior view.
From your judgments,
icy stalactites and stalagmites arise
where moments ago
breath and water flowed.
I am surrounded by a society of judges
that turn conversations into caves
instead of skies.
People judge because they are
only one step removed
from the subject of their sentences.
Would it be too close
to say you are afraid to look
as vulnerable as I appear?
Be still, create space—
for as ugly as you think I am,
you with your unkind eyebrows
and the knots in your fists,
my heart is filled with love for you
as weak as you perceive that to be
it connects with you like nature
eventually overturns destruction
when you judge her irrelevant.
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: Inadequate Hinges
0Dominique Larntz * October 23, 2012
Inadequate Hinges
Doors keep falling away;
keep breaking.
The back screen door slid right off
the track—night before company came.
The front door keeps opening
as the wind signals a change in weather.
I left the back door open all day,
let the sunlight slither in like a snake
I’ll find under the table and need to battle
or avoid later by hoping it belly-slides back out.
I Let the wind carry in flying gnats
that Chuck will likely notice.
Made a mess because I didn’t fix that
broken, leaning door I have been using
like a divine barrier between me
and the dust
and the bugs
and the soil.
This is what gods do—turn
once proud barriers
into nothing but caves.
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: The Eternal Red Light
0Dominique Larntz * August 10, 2012
Driving,
(how do I find myself here again?)
I saw the spirit of the bird rise above the blacktop
as its body took another tire pattern like paper welcoming ink
while I watched cross traffic pour over its broken form.
This form,
softer than pavement,
and the things we forge into smooth surfaces
(its final chirp whispered into the eternity of that red light)
is the death that brings
the fortunes of civilizations to tears
because
no matter how we pave our roads,
if we drive over our birds,
blind our songs,
stifle our softness,
lay tire tracks to our heart’s coherence,
the paved roads lead away
from our true nature.
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: I Probably Shouldn’t Go Through My Kid’s Stuff
0Dominique Larntz * May 25, 2012
It’s questionable to go through my kid’s stuff
but Twitter and Facebook matured
right along with him
and when I found his pixelated picture
on the Internet after 16 years
of indirect mothering,
my heart started walking into rooms,
forgetting what it walked into them for.
I found out I kept trying to make him proud
through things like salary leaps
and being kind to complete strangers
because I didn’t cradle him
against my chest with the permanence
to reassure us both that life longs for us
to spend our days peacefully,
in deep union with one another
and in a spirit of compassion
for ourselves and others
and any space between.
Poem: Mixed Blessings
0Dominique Larntz * May 11, 2012
Mixed Blessings
Is our chemistry
such that
if I love you
like cake batter
at three hundred
and fifty degrees
for an hour
you will rise
to meet me
so that a tooth pick
inserted into the core
of our union
will come out clean?
Poem: Stent
0Dominique Larntz * May 10, 2012
Stent
They propped up his vein
and I keep wondering how that would be–
to have the most tender pathways
inside me opened up by doctors and devices.
I trace a line along my sternum with my finger
when he is not here and when he is beside me,
run my fingers along his chest, trying to feel it.
I place my right ear against his heart,
feeling the gallop of it inside him,
grateful for his life, grateful for mine,
feeling him as intimately
as I feel the inside of my eyelids.
He is the resolution of my life’s projections
and almost losing him to a heart attack
helps me know love the way you see space
only by the things that fill that space.
Poem: Calyx
0Dominique Larntz * January 14, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Calyx
I am walking uphill on my high
desert winter stroll,
hardly noticing it.
Just as this desert willow
has no idea whether I am
ugly or beautiful,
successful or abysmal,
vain or humble,
violent or kind,
female or male,
if I have a diversified portfolio
or if I have given away my last penny,
I can hardly grasp things about its life,
such as if trees have statuses.
Do they think the redwood
is more evolved than bamboo?
For that matter, is it possible
planted life perceives moving,
mammalian life as less evolved
since we decay back into soil
and eventually–
in an old tree’s time frame–
become plant food?
For now, though, I touch the trunk
of the desert willow on my path,
and we meet, both alive.
No matter what we perceive or call it,
we share in experiencing life and death,
and we complement one another in breath.