self-portrait as subordinate clause

 

and when 

the larkspur

petals fall and when

the fall begins to sing

and when the song weaves

through the loss and when

the loss dyes

everything, when

everything is

emptier and emptiness

is whole somehow, when

whole is what a life 

does, when life is

what is now, when

now is

ever changing

and changing knows

no end, when

any ending

I might seek is

just another

when

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

from All The Honey

making it right: a prophecy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The duty of a musician is for us to take anything that

happens on stage and make it part of the music.

 

~ Herbie Hancock 

 

 

No wrong notes in jazz, said the musician

and the poet insisted, no wrong words,

No wrong leaf, said the tree,

and field said, no wrong grass.

No wrong time, promised the friend,

and the river said, no wrong rock.

And the heart said, no wrong love,

but the mind said, no, that's wrong.

And the wrong love replanted itself like grass

and grew wild in all the wrong places

like a gorgeous weed, like a tap-rooted song

until the whole field was beautifully wrong, wrong.

 

 

 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

from All the Honey

 

 

 

how healing comes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Healing comes less like a falcon

            with mighty wings,

                        and more like an earthworm

            that slowly, slowly moves

beneath it all, tightening up,

            then stretching out, tightening up

                        and stretching out, a simple

            two-part rhythm. Some days,

that is all the body can do.

            Contract. Expand. Contract. Expand.

                        In the meantime, through this

            artless act, what is dense

becomes porous.

            In the meantime, what is stuck

                        and clotted gets moved around.

            What is dead passes through,

is processes by the grit inside.

            There are tunnels now in the soil of me,

                        thin channels of recovery-

            a blessed loosening,

a gradual renewal, It's unhurried, but

            I feel it, the air, the rain

                        the life coming in.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

    from All the Honey 

 

 

 

 

filling my purse with commas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All afternoon, each time

I think I should hurry,

I pull out a comma,

 

such humble punctuation,

and I invite it into the moment,

and the comma does

 

what it always does, which

is to invite a pause, a small pause,

of course, but a pause long enough

 

to breathe, to notice what else

is happening, a slight

suggestion that right here

 

is a perfect place to rest,

yes, how funny I never noticed

before that the comma itself

 

looks as if it;s bowing, nodding

its small dark head to what is,

encouraging us to find 

 

a brief silence and then,

thus refreshed, go on. 

 

 

 

 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

from All the Honey

 art by Mori Yuzan

 

 

  

watching my friend pretend her heart isn't breaking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star

would weigh six billion tons, Six billion tons

is equivalent to the weight of every animal

on earth, including insects. Times three.

 

Six billion tons sounds impossible

until I consider how it is to swallow grief -

just a teaspoon and one may as well have consumed

a neutron star. How dense it is,

how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.

How difficult it is to move then.

How impossible to believe that anything

could lift that weight.

 

There are many reasons to treat each other

with great tenderness. One is

the sheer miracle that we are here together

on a planet surrounded by dying stars.

One is that we cannot see

what anyone else has swallowed.

 

 

 

 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

from Poetry of Presence II -

More Mindfulness poems

photo from NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO

 

 

 

 

 

  

a broken open place

inside, still no moon.

but there is a broken

open place.

I am learning

to sing from there.

.

~  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer