for Ruth and Gladys
Building a fire, love;
bent low
over a flame
I am afraid of.
Coaxing passion
from dry twigs
and dead leaves,
the failures of the past, dirty fingers,
and a moment of sunset
huge orange
hangs in one eye--
in my breast a sun
which, if I could see it, if I could
know it, would
light the world
with love. Then,
an unexpected memory
of my mother in the car, snow piled
along the gray streets
of Massachusetts. It was my sixteenth year
and we were fighting a life
and death struggle over my desire to give
myself away completely to love before
I had a self to give.
There she was, my block, my barricade,
my iron grate, my broken door--our one shared
passion, to hurt each other into truth, and
it was the millionth skirmish
of our everyday war when she said
"I don't know if I've ever loved anyone,"
and began to weep. Monks sit
in the middle of fires
they set themselves. They let
their bodies bloom
into suffering,
in the hope that, like this, they will open
someone's heart.
What do we have to
see, how close do we need to live by the
beautiful terrible flame of this world,
flame of ourselves, which is
the same thing?
How much anguish do we need to pour
from cup to cup, drink of melted rubies,
underwater food of the fevers that live
in our blood, in the light of our eyes
where infinite tears are waiting and still
you say, "Light a white candle," and I do, asking
whoever it is, Teach me to surrender
this mind that grasps at shadows
when the whole house is ablaze, when the only thing left
is to leap, carrying the impossible
weight in my arms, into
the heart of our fire, to melt and to bloom.
Originally published in Storming the Gates; women write about spirituality
