emiliibk-blog

[emiliibk-blog]

Orange blossoms

Above them a haze of flowers

White and fragrant

In the countryside of the Holy Land

One day, in, 

I imagine,

Spring

He had previously been the worst of the worst

A Neo-Nazi,

And now he might even have the tattoos still to prove it

How, over the years, did he come to embrace Orthodox Judaism?

A gentle hand pushing him yet forcefully beyond his soul’s perimeters of disbelief

And into a great and glorious newness

Is that how he met her? 

Or was it because of her that he changed?

I don’t know.

All I imagine when I think of them

Is their nuptial bliss

Orange blossoms laughing from trees above them as they murmured their I dos

And maybe Someone above laughing too, a holy laugh

For isn’t He ever pleased, when we finally 

erase all the jagged lines

and return to the circle of love?

[emiliibk-blog]

Why I write

I am writing to save my life, I said

I said, I am writing to save my life.

To escape it, or keep it whole.

Two ruby slippers are this pen and this pad,

click them together and fly me back home.

I am writing for that sacred flame,

that flame warm and soft like slowly melting butter left on the counter of a summer’s afternoon,

that flame radiant like the electromagnetic field glowing around hearts pulsing in symphonic synchronicity,

that flame flickering from its good tether of a wick,

lapping the air with its subtly speaking tongue for all its worth,

for that benign inner being-ness, I write.

I wish to be, you know

a knight in the service of the majesty of that flame

My king, my queen

That fire in you, that blaze in me

More importantly that one in we.

You know, in the service of that flame I wish to write, with devotion.

I write for all the years of silence,

 tongue tied eons of deafening muteness,

when I couldn’t speak love’s name for fear I might surely stutter,

either that or be obliterated.

I am writing for all those children with no name crying still inside my mind,

those children howling for me to soothe their hunger for consolation.

For those babies of the night inhabiting worlds both inside my mind and out, 

I am writing like a bottle of milk given to my own infant self

so that I may one day grow up to mother the world with thousand-fold kindnesses million-fold caresses,

for that, I write.

I write for those dreams in my palm (two birds in the hand),

And those dreams out of reach (and one in the bush).

I am writing to save my life, I said,

I said I am writing to save my life.

For all the truths I’ve shown up just shy of shy to greet/

For all the moments bittersweet/

For all the light with twice the heat/

I write.

In the desert of nonchalance,

Underneath waterfalls of cascading laughter,

In valleys of despair ,

And atop hills of sanctity,

Do I write, have I written, will I write still yet.

Flying over fields of green,

Delving into the heart’s holy forests,

Drowning happily in words sweet vanities.

[emiliibk-blog]

Blizzard

Easy streets of white

Formation after formation on front lawns

This must be what heaven looks like

Pure and unencumbered  by other than itself

Billows of snowflakes overhead

I imagine I am in the pristine clouds

An angel playing a harp nearby

Minnesota simply dresses itself in the colorless

Water paradise

Frozen in time

[emiliibk-blog]

Roof rake for the snow

Here in the confines of unmitigated affection

I sit at the kitchen table  with my father in the next room over

It is a dance, between us

Him wanting to believe deep down

Myself as well

It’s a funny thing

Pushing the boundaries of love

Maybe unconsciously just to halfway see what happens

I want to go back to school, I told him again, decidedly

And immediately the heavy anvil of trust for me fell down upon him

He is given the choice to believe in me

Or suffer the debt of disbelief which is untenably uncomfortable

School. I want to go back to school.

It makes my heart skip three beats, four

Go back and meet a husband there too, if I have any luck

And I think of my father, in the other room now, and all his dreams over the years which still linger in the back of my subconscious like an old gramophone recording wafting in through the window of the decades

If I could be truly happy I could make him happier

Isn’t that what daughters are supposed to do? To bless back the generations like copal on the breeze?

He wanted at some point to be an anthropologist

I ponder over this as he (vainly?) tries to assemble a roof rake for the snow in the other room

I imagine pieces of the rake are a collection of dust covered artifacts, dug out from some excavation site in Honduras or Guatemala or Alaska

Where he has gone to study the history of some people

Before immersing himself in their stories, throwing himself headlong into their culture

And there in my mind’s eye is my father, twenty seven years old 

In that unlived life of his

In an Indiana Jones hat

Piecing together the story of some people almost forgotten in the frenzy of time, invigorated by life, sitting at their tables, drinking their drinks, hearing their wedding and death songs

Dreams of his realized like clouds coming into definite formations in the sky, taking shape

I am transported once again to an image of myself in the delivery room, a daydream of keeping my calm in my outfit of hospital scrubs while a laboring mother grunts and groans beside me, myself invigorated by  all the life spilling out from the very corners of the room

I think again of my father. Why is it me and not he that has the luxury of making one’s own professional dreams come to fruition like so many ripened grapes, God willing?

He too wanted to make his father happy, I can only assume

That is why he went to work for him

I too want to make my father happy

By making myself happy

And so I will fly backwards 

Become twenty again 

And learn, dedicatedly 

Study the textbooks as if reading the fate line of my own palm

He calls me to the other room

And I hold the screw steady for him as he arduously twists the wrench on the other end of it

We will get this stupid rake assembled

We will get this project of life assembled

He will be old and happy gazing upon his daughter

A delivery nurse

I can only hope for it to be so

And I’ll dissect those tiny infant cries

Study those tiny infant faces

Like an anthropologist

Tracing the intricate crevices of a tribal people’s history

In some remote region of the Earth

And his hands will deliver the babies

He calls me outside now, where he is in the process of cursing out the rake

Like a doctor asking for a scalpel and other tools of the trade he is calling out for me to bring him things.

Screwdriver. Check.

Instructions. Check.

Little blasted metal piece that doesn’t fit. Check.

Two of the pieces are in wrong, he informs me, smiling through his exasperation.

We may never get the demon rake assembled, 

But together perhaps we will assemble 

This thing called life

[emiliibk-blog]

Cousins

You are constant is your prudence

Steady as she goes

I feel nearly always in flight these days

Carried away by the grace of plans

Uneasy, then excitable 

We were five  and six and playing with toy ponies

Around us the sound of laughter

Of forks clinking on plates

The scent of unleavened bread

Baked into a plethora of foods

You were giggly, eyes looking like half moons as you smiled

I sat on the floor, my bangs brushing my eyebrows 

Both of us in our holiday dresses 

Playing until sleep stole in to our consciousnesses like

A sneaky thief

Then all of us on a blanket 

In the middle of everyone 

Oblivious to the commotion

Dozing in peace

If anyone asks what my fondest memory is,

This may well be it.

[emiliibk-blog]

One thing

Often, poems write me

As I go wandering through wildflower dappled meadows in my my mind

The flowers are each person I've met during the day

And they fill my heart with fragrance

Sweet and unencombered

The one sacred thing

They each appear offering that one sacred thing which they can

I inhale it and keep it as close to my soul as possible

And we are bound up in each other

Gentle simplicity the string surrounding us

We form a neatly tied bouquet

[emiliibk-blog]

Morning time high

This morning

I sit reflected in the mirrors of the finely sketched faces of the other passengers on the city bus

It is light out and the sun meanders in through the windows shaped like oversized placemats

I am drowsy and swimming underwater

Keeping afloat with a steady backstroke in the deep sea of people

Today is a kind of reminder

Sent by all the yesterdays and tomorrows

That I am alive here now, right now, in this moment on this day and not at any other imaginary destination in the timspace continuum

I am neither visiting the hot and sticky tropics of regret nor immersed in the tsunami of wanting

Just here now

Gazing haphazardly at my phone like a few of the other sleepy eyed passengers

Ready for another day of life's banality and surprises

[emiliibk-blog]

On music

There was a time when I thought there was no such thing as bad music

I thought all music inherently sang out its value in major key and minor

But somewhere along the way, I heard something discordant and disharmonious

And it broke my heart

(It must’ve been in me)

Songs about happy things move me through walls, out the locked door, and into the wide open prairie

And then there are the songs about the only heartache there is-the seeming separation from that one Beloved. Those are good too

May all the broken pianos sit naked out back idle, by the dumpster, where they belong, as they belong

Unless the alleycats decide to dance their paws across them there, finding beauty in the strange as they hit each random key with blithe steps

[emiliibk-blog]

Salt, then sweet

When I was younger I used to get massive cravings for salt

Then sweet

Then salt

Then sweet again

Stomach echoing heart's desire for vibrancy

Then for beauty

Then for vibrancy

Then for beauty again

Two attributes in a dance

As if in a battle for supremacy

Just wondering if

Attributes like that

Opposites even, sometimes?

Ever get along

In life or in the belly.

[emiliibk-blog]

A cup of tea

A cup of tea sits in front of me

Music wafts from the speakers as well

Another day of possibility

I am open in this moment like a cloudless sky

Waiting for the hat to put me on, the gloves to envelop my fingers

The jacket to zip me up

Forgiveness is the buzzword of the day

Can I be forgiving to each person I meet, 

let their arrows shot unknowingly or knowingly at me 

Hit the river of my calm and float down it like water lily petals that have somehow come detached from the flower? 

I don’t see why not, since 

like lily petals

 their arrows have somehow detached from the bows of theirs through circumstance and wind,

Just energy moving through

To forgive myself though, that is the great work.

[emiliibk-blog]

Certainty

I am at a loss for words so I try to make friends with The Silence now, once again

I run my fingers along the touchstone of my truth

I grasp the essence

While meanwhile all its minerals turn to water and evade my grasp

To be certain of things

Deciphering right direction

Like a sailor making his way home using the constellations for navigation

To have that ardent assurance

That things are unfolding like a napkin placed neatly on a lap at life's banquet

I've got to lick my plate clean here

To glimpse the patterns on the fine chinaware underneath anyways

[emiliibk-blog]

Longing

A clock ticks, the heart yearns

For that great unknown 

Longing, my constant companion

Directed at so many objects,

When in reality they are naught 

At least as pertains to the matter of the gold that I’m after

They are outside

My chest wants to split open

And devour the sunshine

The sunshine wants to burn me to a crisp

I yelp 

Because like so many other things

It is too much

The whole I-Thou of it

The magnetism between subject and object

This ravenous desire for intimacy 

Transposed into this constant, constant longing

Both banal and also everything important, all at once

Intimacy with all created things, in a good way, what would that even feel like

To know it in my bones that we are all relations

I suppose it would feel like hearing the first  song sung

By a blind man 

Who just regained his sight

[emiliibk-blog]

Little pieces

Some friendships are like crystal vases

Breakable, delicate, transparent when polished clean

Of high value

When they are smashed by a thought, a word, an action

All that’s left 

Are little pieces

Sharp and dangerous to the touch

They are daggers for the epidermis 

And, once past that,

Who knows?

I know.

Once past that, they become one with your blood, find a place inside you, more viscerally inside you than they were 

When they were just a pretty object you possessed, on a table, holding flowers for you.

[emiliibk-blog]

Everything within reach

Oh Star 

So beautiful above me

You who used to taunt me, consciously or not

You are but a memory now

But your memory haunts

Because it is still a cup filled to the brim with possibility

Leaving me overflowing with expectations that I release from moment to moment as they land upon my skin

Stardust they are formed from. Your stardust. So, then why do those same expectations imitate mosquitos? 

Does the material they are fashioned from believe itself to be insectoid rather than celestial?

I try to slap them dead as nonviolently as possible, if that’s possible

In my quest to become desireless

Oh Star

Did you love me?

I say you hurt me, when in reality I wounded myself trying to reach your heights

You gifted me with illumination, and I gifted you with incense I burned to perfume you, light years away, never certain if it reached you

Now it is all I can do to put on sunglasses even though it is evening and draw the shades, doing both so that I won’t see you

Still there, still high above me 

And still light years away

[emiliibk-blog]

Slowly, slowly now

Everything is happening all at once in my life recently

A conglomeration of confetti in the air, ticker tape parade, these events unfolding

Yet meanwhile, privately to myself, I swear I shoot for universal energy to be pushed back into a small, solitary point of light

Big Bang in reverse played out on a microcosmic scale within me is the dream

I just pray I’m not running around like a chicken with its head cut off as I try to collect the stars and black holes of my life, the comets and galaxies of my days, and offer them up to that tiny white dot of space 

Where they can become One, once again

All brilliance and warmth and even perhaps the lack thereof condensed into a single simple point of Goodness

[emiliibk-blog]

March

Today opens its jaws like an eagle about to devour some small rodent               

I sit huddled in a blanket of grass on the floor of my mind, uncertain if that poor, tiny animal of prey is me                                                                               

 How I wish everything would just fall into place like a jigsaw puzzle completed by the hands of the Great Spirit himself         

 I am elated one minute, fearful the next                                                            

First running through prairies of imaginary and actualized happinesses, then trailing off into cavernous holes of nowhere and nothing                                                                            

Heaven beckons, the abyss threatens me with barred teeth                                

Am I laughing in both of their faces? I certainly don’t mean to.                     

Tiny mouse am I, bird of prey overhead                                                                

Run run run pant pant stop                                                                            

Stop time, stop space                                                                                        

To just stop. And reflect, finally, like the patient half-moon in the nighttime reflecting the hidden overarching sun above                                                          

To build a home of mercy, burrow into the earth, enter in, find protection therein 

The earth holds secrets, let me in, let me in                                                          

I will be gentle this time, I promise                                                                   

And that promise will be kept, by me,                                                               

Tiny mouse of your soil Mother Earth,                                                                  

If only the Great Spirit above allows my minuscule feet to dance the cowardice out of themselves with each new sprint from predator