did your mother ask who do you think you are?

a foot tapping new ice, brocade splayed white on rivulet

the odd wrench in the socket set

one of the self-sowers, flower probably blue

a soapy fluid rounding off an opalescent sphere

so many apples, sauced

the dash for clarity

fairy duster? filaree?

gentle vertigo, a door along the floor

a frail clang, the steep pilgrimage

a page torn unevenly

Notre Dame Review 47 (2019)

The eagle does its day job
feasting on what’s left by crow and vulture.
Anything I’d planned to do is over.

As my head nods its usual consent
to imaginary promises and dreams
my corpse appears before me.

Time’s come to set my mind
to ribbon flesh, chop small, pile it in a dish
made from the cranial bones.

I scout the stinking ground for anything
to start the fire, use my own desire.
The skull cup, on its tripod, enlarges as it heats.

Half-moon on a finger
pokes from the pile of blood and bones
simmering to stew, to nectar.

All who are wise, the ordinary, furred,
obstructors, germs of sickness—
may their bodies, minds, be sated.

From every distance and dimension, beings
afraid, unsatisfied, or blessed, feast to satisfaction—
devils, angels, animals, everyone I owe.

I see no stopping to the world
but there is respite from the demons
that arise daily in the head.

That this ritual could do the same thing twice
—my awareness cuts that thought. O, I cherished
this poor body. I quake. Invite.

Now, knife the ritual words         in vast space
reduced to dust         mounded like clouds
clinging          dearly held      to let in silence.

For all that is perceived, flesh or consciousness,
appears then disappears, image in a mirror—
red drop, a fingernail, a ball of hair.

Tampa Review 51 (2016)

Faint, humming, inexorable in the damp
below the ruined walled castle garden
Mare’s Tail tunnels an eight-foot root.

Sly-boots, I’ve spaded the circle, reached to my elbow.
Still the plant breaks. As Eve brought a man
his labor, it will multiply tenfold.

I shop for survival: a sprayer to level pride, melancholy
and unwanted shoots. The canister is lowered from
its shelf, bagged in plastic. The till rings.

Keys in hand, I see the carpark as a horsetracked swale
where Cadfael leads his roan, saddlebagged
with an apothecary box. Medieval herbicide?

As he stumps through mud, the monk’s brass scale tips:
one pan sways with the bitterness of interrupted life,
the other, Eve’s radical helplessness.

TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics (2018)

The almanac’s laconic whistle
passes a millennium at last grown
nonfungible. Day breaks up the where-were-

you party. Feet wander concrete platforms
lit with radiance weak and discomfited
from two bare bulbs, stilled double-naughts.

Mobiles dry-rattle beneath posters for stewpots
and holiday sales, the forecast troubled music:
history, or at least cold wind of a startling event.

A cricket’s chirrup slows to intermittent pipe.
Hooves break the dried railside bramble. Auburn
summer coats thickened gray, the fawns cluck.

Notre Dame Review 41 (2016)

Initially I did not plan
         a painting of a ladder
                  faithful to phantom 
                           noises before sleep
wearing a clean chemise
         beneath dirty shorts
                  under a worn abaya
                           in my pink slippers
with my red cheeks in the shop
         for spots of vitiligo
                  and smoothing of their
                           plump ragged history.
The canvas came bare
         as a bell before it’s struck
                  by brisk forced air
                           on open waters
or the blue wasp
         that loved me
                  when I was a child
                           with a sting to the pineal
scattering bars through light
         all the way to dark
                  faster than brush
                           leaks down my hand.

Vallum 15, 2 (2018)
online Vallum Poem Of The Week 25 March 2019

There’s studied madness in opening bills after breakfast,
signing bank transfers. I clear my mind enough to know

a fallen stick of incense won’t burn the house,
to figure out the cassette’s lack of sound, the rasp

of its rotation, is my error not the answering machine’s;
side A not B is the voice, still there, metallic

in the renovated room without its furniture:
I’ll be he-e-re—the abecedarian of 4 am—

I know: Dinner time’s the best time. Talk to
you later—the manic laugh, disintegration after

successful surgery inside the frontal lobe.
Pick up. Pick it up! I am healed. Oligodendro-

glioma spreads its treeroots in the brain. If I
could have work to do, take aspirin and move on

instead of staring at the sad museum pieces
that pondering sculpts from love, as though understanding

were a place to live. If I could simply talk about
the damp closet upstairs, the milky trail of mildew

on black velvet, the yellowed dry cleaning tags.
Is the number on the scrap of paper 6 or 9?

As though knowing would be alchemy? Square one:
hot bitter brew, then the nothing that has to be done.

For an agitated hour I bundle one towel about
another in a ball, sort the light fabrics from dark.

Notre Dame Review 43 (2017)

Make history pleasant; give it a changing
and half-slumped position. Make war
squat and cushion-like. Make a birthday
cake of the emperor’s furniture—if a stick
persists, make warm brown tea. Aethelwold
is drunk again, Cnut buzzing like a fly.

Morning is a busy time. We must forget
variations on the quake and sweat
in a walk on the long stairway of necessity.

A great crisis occurred, guilty verdicts,
no rescue for the dead. Devoid of human
population, seas abound in fish. No such
seas are left. Put the project aside. No one
will miss you until lunch. History disappeared
in a yellow boat behind the island.

originally published in Stone Canoe (2012)

reprinted in Strange Histories by artist Ian Trask, slide collages with writings by friends. You can order this book directly from Ian’s website.
The multimedia Strange Histories (2018) contains 3 of my poems.

One of the rotations in my website’s header image is
the ‘Kitchen Theater’ page from this fine art book.

You wrote the promissory note a year ago
That he would not be improved on.

Perhaps the day could magically be re-opened
To a place where it would not collapse entirely.
Perhaps your heart could be treated with robustness
And lemon drops before you fall asleep.

Not that you want an extension.
It’s time for his flash of light in the night.

Vallum 17, 1 (2020)

On the eighth day we looked on and realized
it wasn’t good anymore. Where did they go,
the shared rituals? We buy greeting cards
that could be sent to anyone, nineteenth
century fixtures shine without a lamplighter
and the city spent millions wiring
the whatnot.

Coffee in a paper cup, a painted wood duck,
little darlings on the back stairs fed
morning and night–no one born yesterday
will ever see contraptions that we use to
communicate. What of the game under
the tree root left behind the hill?
Step up.

And leave the affirmations by the wayside.
Inveigling all the separate types who
might begin to dance is no path of light.
Your hygienist can look for other work.
You might as well slink off to your room
without lipstick or a gold dress, seeds
in your hair.

Matter 22 (2018)

Proserpine

I fell in with a man from a small country.
He stopped on a rainy lane and asked did I want a ride.
My mother’d told me always to follow my feet

but the fumes that day overpowered my nose.
He bit me hard then nubbed at my love pearl.
Red seeds fell from the wound. He says I ate them.

He offered me board if I paid for room
among bloodless artistes and ivory heroes
by charging his battery—one or two shocks.

Time passed and faded. There’s a beauty in that.
He took up his helmet. I saw he was sightless.
I said let’s let it rip. Soot fell about us.

Once I’d signed his note that hell could not be
improved on, he set me loose for the summer.
He’d have slipped me into his wallet if I’d fit.

TAB: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics 9, 1 (2021)

Author COMMENTARY on ‘did your mother ask who do you think you are?’

I was made into such a good girl that I had no answer for the question at the time.

My poems age 6 to 10 rhymed and metered the small joys of family life as the household accumulated tinder that would later crash and burn around us. I am of the Roman Catholic generation brought up on hellfire punishment for sins we were unaware of and a cardboard box on the teacher’s desk with a slot for our pennies for the missions.

In my thirties as a member of a group doing transactional analysis, I learned that phrases my parents commonly shouted at their children in frustration or anger were injunctions that disrupted the natural flow and connection between thought, feeling, action.

My reticent father would blurt You’re defiant! in a tone mixed of shaming and admiration. His accusation placed me in a position just this side of sinning, a precarious culpability from which no argument was possible. He might well have been mouthing his own father, and a lineage of early onset mental illness and alcoholism.

My mother, with children all day in a household that grew with the regularity of Irish twins, was more inventive and more caustic. During the transactional therapy I kept a notebook that started with the disclaimer, in case I died first, that the contents would not apply to her present person or her beliefs, which in her fifties transformed in more positive ways than any other person I have ever known.

But in my childhood and adolescence, she leveled an array of pithy phrases at her children, sometimes while swinging the belt. (What did I answer to the poem’s eponymous question? Was I mute? did I scream back ‘I am myself!’? did I dare sarcasm—‘oh haven’t you heard? I’m Mary Gilliland’—which would have or did make everything worse at that moment: None of your back talk!

One consequence of my parents’ childrearing methods is a frequent delay in my response, whatever the circumstance; it can take me ‘forever’ to think of what to say.

These reflections arise long after the fact of the poem. What was in my mind when I wrote it, despite the sorry circumstances of her utterance, was the gift that my mother’s question had become once I felt free to answer truthfully, to know my own mind.

When her spirits were less stressed, my mother’s sayings were often cribbed from her German father, such as my being Slower than molasses uphill in winter! I am. Taking one’s time can reveal much more than the sum of the parts.

I have always loved riddles, particularly those from the Anglo-Saxon. I’ve had years of Zen training with modern koans, of Vajrayana visualization and dissolution. I can sift the items in this list poem into 2 categories:

—what have I always loved? just-frozen ice on a stream or a pool; flowering plants; apples, our archetypal fruit; pilgrimage; paper;

—what have I coped with enough to learn to make my own? tools; deadlines; concussions and falling.

Those 2 questions, more than the specific answers, are who I think I am.

—Notre Dame Review posts extras with publication.
I wrote this for NDR #47.

The large outdoor grass Labyrinth at the Foundation of Light, adjacent to the circle of standing stones at the southeast corner of Ellis Hollow and Turkey Hill Roads, was constructed on May 16, 1998. Based on the 11-circuit medieval model originally laid in the floor of the nave in the cathedral at Chartres, France, the FOL labyrinth has a diameter of 54’ and paths 18” wide to accommodate passage of those walking in alongside those on the passage out. This labyrinth is open to the public 24 hours a day. It has been the locus for many ceremonies and cultural events, and a source of joy, curiosity, and contemplation for thousands of visitors.

Many are familiar with the turf labyrinths and hedge mazes scattered throughout the British Isles. The first historical mention of a labyrinth, by Herodotus, recounts a structure in Africa; the earliest form of certain date is believed to be a clay tablet from Europe: Pylos, 1250 B.C. The symbol is found in Hopi baskets of the Southwest woven with the motif of the man in the maze. The recent usage of labyrinth, however, means a single-path maze. You can’t get lost. The only danger, if such it be, is that you get found.

Art is psychosomatic and it knows when to make its demands. When poets speak of a single work’s gestation, we refer to the sometimes hourlong, sometimes yearslong, search for a match between language, our daily currency, and the priceless source of the realized poem: an intuitive flash, instantaneous; auditory but often nonverbal. Touched, the heart challenges us to unify the twists and turns of a multisensory hunch; our language seeks to align words in such a way that, however complex the material, readers will follow a unicursal path toward a perceived center.

            I had been following my particular hunch a long time: a many-sectioned disrupted narrative of domesticity. Incrementally, in the interests of simplicity, I’d cut sections referring to public events and political violence. What do the swimming on a Sunday or ridding the garden of woodchucks have in common with the fall of the iron curtain or the bombing of Iraq back into the stone age? Everything, said the poem whose umpteenth draft wasn’t working. Our individual households are dots of dust on a larger household, the globe.

Stone labyrinths were built on the coasts of ancient Sweden and Finland; in medieval Europe the symbol appears in illuminated manuscripts. Poets such as Ovid, Petrarch, and Lady Mary Wroth have drawn the motif of the labyrinth as salvation, entrapment, or development of the soul.

When my internal editor began to speak about all the times the poem had not come right, I told her to hold it. For a few days I reviewed the notes and drafts, the rearrangements, the priorities; both poem and I were ready for the final transcription. Sensing this kind of hunch is as important as sensing the poem in the first place. I promised myself to get started if I woke early enough, by 7:00 a.m., to get a good chunk done before I had to leave for campus.

The pattern has been decoratively used on a wide variety of human artifacts, from coins to rhytons to printers’ dingbats. The form has even appeared as graffiti carved in a miner’s shaft in Britain. Labyrinths come in different shapes, some circular, some square, and the complexity of the path design can also vary.

The poem had its own plans. I was awake at five, dream in cone hand, coffee in the other. I stood at the drafting table, parallel with my favorite tall locust outside the second story window. Locusts keep their leaves into the autumn. This time the poem knew its own mind; it flowed, no question about it. I’d promised my husband I’d be ready to leave the house by 9 or 9:15 and at 8:45 the last dot hit the page. I got out of the car by the gym and kissed him goodby, my reward not just a long workout but also the half-hour guided relaxation that for weeks I’d been vowing to attend. I need a certain tension to compose, but now…hey!

The instructor puzzled over the whereabouts of all the participants from the previous weeks; we hardly minded—lucky us, only two. Following his voice we became so still that the world slipped away, as we lay on our backs, knees bent over bolsters, feet solid on the carpeted floor. Instrumental music played softly. From time to time, the building’s cavernous ventilation system groaned.

A birthing place for creativity, a map of the imaginal world, the labyrinth is a universal symbol of wholeness found in man of the world’s cultures, from Egypt to China. K MT 9, 1 (1998), a magazine of Egyptology, notes of Sobekneferu (1789-85 BC, last ruler of the 12^th dynasty): “She completed the Hawara mortuary temple of the third Amenemhat (known to readers of Herodotus as the ‘Labyrinth’)…. Today, unfortunately, that vast structure has been reduced to odd damaged blocks and a waste of sand.” Throughout the centuries and the globe, in turf and in stone, in the visual arts and in literature, walking a labyrinth has functioned as a symbolic representation of life’s quest. To walk the labyrinth is to wind along a clear unicursal path to the center area, then to retrace the same steps outward, guided by the circuit path.

The session seemed as timeless as poetry; at the end, there was some apology of running over, but I didn’t mind, as there was no pressing business at the office. What presses when you’re truly relaxed? I dressed and then walked across Triphammer Bridge, nearly noon, the sun brilliant, the year’s chlorophyll cycle collapsing, the leaves gaining color.

 The labyrinth is an archetypal tool for harmonizing movements of the body, turns of the mind, and self-discovery of the human spirit. It is profoundly humane in terms of the mathematics necessary in its design and the aesthetics of its completed form, and like any true cultural artifact its function is to move the heart, kindle the imagination, and inform our earthly journey.

            Inside Rockefeller Hall a broadcast was blaring from a professor’s office. Two students sat on the corridor, their backs against the tiles, staring at nothing below a bulletin board on the opposite wall. I sensed an odd energy. Oh. Beyond the perceptions I’d been privately enjoying was the rest of the world. But what a day I’d had already, full and centering. I unlocked my office, sorted some papers, turned on the computer.

            The phone rang. “How are you?” said my husband’s voice.

            “Oh fine. How are you?”

            “Oh,” he said. “You don’t know.”

It was September 11. We never do know what the next turn on the path will show us. My solitary poetic feat, completing the disruptive narrative, had synchronized itself with a moment of national vulnerability and grief.

*

            As a war was declared in the aftermath of the WTC collapse, my friends at the Light on the Hill Retreat Center in Van Etten telephoned. Would I give a workshop on labyrinths on October 6, prior to installing one outdoors there, open to the public, for world peace. Using sound and language, we gathered to give simultaneous voice to each part of the pairs spirit and body, terror and peace, divine and daemonic, seeking transformation for ourselves and for our world. After lunch we set thousands of white stones, a gleaming outline, on a high plateau that looks down the Susquehanna valley into Pennsylvania. Walking the circuits, we had the opportunity to see lives pass before our eyes—both our own and those of others.

The pattern of the labyrinth and its symbolic associations works well with writing, an activity that for many people can become a psychological or emotional maze. The labyrinth replaces the dimension we’re most driven by, time (the minotaur said to be responsible for many of us not writing, or not writing well) with space. When I asked college students in ‘Mind and Memory: An Exploration of Creativity in the Arts and Sciences’ to share with me their thoughts about their writing, some e-mail was nearly as long as the paper it described. I made a composite of the students’ reflections, a legend for an essay. The cuts and pastes rendered individuals anonymous, venerable as a medieval guild, as the legend described the floods and droughts of the writing process, the best thought and the second-thoughts. Each section of the text of their composite reflections about writing matches one of the turns of the classical 7-circuit labyrinth, a place where the walker is shifted by the path to look in a new direction.

Among the series of cultural events funded by the Community Arts Partnership that accompanied the creation of the Foundation of Light labyrinth was a writing workshop at the Moosewood Café. Art creates a sanctuary within the everyday: in ‘Litanies and Labyrinths’ I use the most mundane writing we are capable of—a quick list—as foundation for the kind of list that people remember, recite, and pass along to others—a litany. Most moving for me, however, is a return to the oral tradition. At Light on the Hill Retreat Center, after individuals composed two brief texts, each had a partner recite one text while the writer recited the other—simultaneously, and slowly. The rest of us listened to the paired voices. I call this format overtones or voiceovers when I use it for a poem. Many pairs had a paradoxical or even conflictual relationship with each other, which seems to me an accurate representation of the multiple thoughts, wishes, identities that each of us contains.

*

In an eleven-circuit labyrinth such as the one at the Foundation of Light, the path meanders throughout the whole circuit. There are 34 turns on the path going in to the center. Depending on the pace, the walk to the center can take 45 minutes or 5; the spirit of the walk can be serious or playful. People often walk in groups, following the same path but in different locations on the circuits, developing both individual awareness and a sense of community.

As labyrinths spring up across the United States in hospitals, churches, community centers, private lawns, fields, I have pondered the revived tradition of seeking, walking and building them. They seem a contemplative and collective antidote to an increasingly tense, fast and overly individualistic way of life. People use them at times of uncertainty, when facing an important decision, for healing emotional wounds, during illness and bereavement, when awestruck by joy. To walk a labyrinth can be an act of praise, thanksgiving, mourning, festivity, prayer, rejoicing, inspiration, hope. One of the best teachers of labyrinth use is a three year old, for in addition to walking, one can also skip, run or dance. A labyrinth can facilitate a state of calming, energizing, finding what you’ve always looked for, facing the unexpected, allowing the path ahead to become clear.

I’ve been privileged to participate in making three of the many labyrinths in our area, including the one that our geometric genius loci, David Gallagher, installed as Wisdom’s Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies. My file holds correspondence and calls with arts councils, churches, colleges, healing and recovery centers, and private individuals from various parts of the country, many of whom took a guided walk or visited the Foundation of Light Labyrinth in order to create their own elsewhere. Late October brought an e-mail: “Hi, I wrote about your Labyrinth on pages 89-90 of the just-released guidebook Eccentric America. Thought you might want to know.—Jan Friedman. The book is subtitled ‘the Bradt guide to all that’s Weird and Wacky in the USA.’ Now I know. I wish our many other labyrinths made the list, for at the rate they’re proliferating, it will soon be time for a Finger Lakes Labyrinth Trail.

*

          I was teaching during the Columbine high school massacre. Al-Qaeda has more resources and a bigger network but the mind to me seems similar to that of those sorry teenagers, in its aim to destroy the existing world and create another. We all go about creating another world to live in; that—individually and collectively—is our fundamental problem as human beings. Thin of creation myths that chart the fall, the memory of the ideal life. Think of a few hours or a few days from now, your plans for…. But imagination is also our joy. We long for pattern, for a form to hold our slurry. So, if our consciousness has not evolved past generating mental constructs that separate us from the world we live in, we can literalize the separation. Measure it, mark it. See it. And walk it.

And love it. It is so becoming, our path. Let us become one with it. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. Or today. The shape of the labyrinth creates a symbolic, resonant space to use in daily life. Like a work of art, its function is to go beyond what you expect. And in doing so, to bring you to what you truly know.

—originally published as ‘Passages’ in The Bookpress, December 2001—

It was mid-December, there had not yet been a frost, roses still bloomed in the sandswept front yards of Cape Cod. We were deep into our seven-month residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. We lived two blocks from the bay, where the sun rises, and less than two miles from the ocean, where it sets. As if to remind us we were living with the tides, a storm during December’s syzygy full moon swept away a waterfront restaurant and sent the seaweed washing along Commercial Street.

And we lived with the tides of creativity, twenty writers and visual artists selected each year, given a living space (and in the case of the visual artists a large studio), a small monthly stipend, and best of all, the gift of time. We had been awarded time to pursue our individual work as we saw fit—a bunch of creative oddballs free to be ourselves and able to draw on each other’s company and inspiration. In my journal the day of that phone call I wrote “During this week of revising, I’ve felt the most light and free ever—in adulthood, in adolescence, in late childhood.”

Light, no metaphor on the Lower Cape, inspires both visions and canvasses, illumines the air, reflects off the water, permeates the bones. It can wake you and break you. Blessings like this are the kind for which poets are grateful.

Provincetown’s ecology is fragile. It borders the feeding grounds of the humpback whales at nearby Stellwagen Bank, where legend said the major part of the waste from the Manhattan Project was dumped; it is bordered by shifting parabolic dunes which can move 90′ per year and would have buried the town by now had folks not channeled an outlet for Pilgrim Lake and planted dune grass and dune grass and dune grass. And the Pilgrims—Plymouth, across the bay, has since stolen the show, but the Pilgrims first dropped anchor in P’town harbor and while staying there six weeks celebrated the first Thanksgiving. They deforested the sandbar. They were the first whites to show up since Leif Ericson and his crew in 1003.

I can tell you the questions most frequently asked about my Provincetown experience: Did you write a lot? The answer: No more than usual, if you count by finished pages, but every part of me was writing. Was it difficult being separated from your partner? I have never been more lonely, nor more joyous. Are you looking forward to going back to work? But I’ve been at work. The response to one other frequent question—Did the setting influence your writing? is a simple yes, for the landscape is so unequivocal that ironic answers trail into silence.

I walked along the tideline, around the dunes, in the one deciduous grove known as the Beech Wood, where once or twice I crossed paths with Mary Oliver. I talked with forest rangers from the National Seashore and cetacean researchers from the Center for Coastal Studies. I learned about my feet. My routines of walking and yoga and a disciplined study of modern Greek exercised body and mind. Then the soul could make best use of the several hours of fully attentive composing that are possible in an average day. I dreamed. I slept with paper in my bed and woke reaching for the pen. I abandoned the computer revising to which I had grown accustomed, which had seemed so convenient for about five years. Its convenience left other conveniences in the poem—stray bits of sentimentality, hyperbole, extra words and other forms of untruth. My daily mantic activity of reciting aloud as my pen flared across the page again and again from the beginning of the poem, taking it from the top, brought me back to the child who was publishing her verses at eight and who had too quickly, by adapting to praise, learned to lie. My consciousness, sharp editor, directive will, audience awareness, receded before the essence of each poem. I remembered the reason I had started doing this work: love.

My fellow FAWC Fellows hailed from Hawaii to Poland, ranged in age from 24 to 44, and refused in as many ways as possible to be categorized. Some were novelists, some were painters. Some kept a grueling and undeviating work schedule. Some let the reservoir fill after years of labors. Some were regulars at the Holiday Inn’s free nightly movie, with reel to reel projection and a weekly change of program. Some played ping pong in the Common Room every night at 2:00 a.m.

Living alongside visual artists was a rich experience. I witnessed incredible art created from driftwood and sea flotsam. I learned about sculptors who work on installations rather than separate pieces, and I collaborated with sculptor Beverly Ress to produce a three-dimensional poem—flat on the page—for Provincetown Arts. With more than one creative mind employed, the need for clear verbal communication obviates most of the soloist’s niggling questions and doubts. We found collaboration to be half the work and twice the play of individual creation.

The Fine Arts Work Center was founded in 1968 by a group of eminent artists and writers to encourage and support emerging talent. I know of no comparable place—FAWC Fellows are free to plan and pursue their own activities; they are given a peaceful, supportive environment in which to work; the residency period is long enough to call it real time.

At the end of April when I was packing to move home to Ithaca, Stanley Kunitz arrived to open his house for the season. When I feel discouraged, this poet’s lifework restores my perspective on the vitality and the necessity of the art. Since I was the 1990-91 Stanley Kunitz Fellow, I made a bold phone call to ask if he needed help in his garden. For a few hours we puttered, the light shifted, the gulls busied themselves watching the tideline. Pruning the ivy while Stanley, one of the founders of the Work Center, watered flower beds, I was absorbed in the work of poetry.

Excerpted for the AGNI blog from an essay that originally appeared in The Bookpress v.1, no.1 (1991) Ithaca NY and in the FAWC newsletter, spring 1992