POEM - Morning Meditation (What The Bats Told Me)

“How we long for morning!” is what coffee sings
To me in aromatic melodies.
Soft as tissue, cat-like as it stretches
Through arbor vitae, stiff as royal guards,
This colorful ribbon that is worn around the
Neck of the day.
We remember things like how to throw a curve ball –
The toothy seams touching callused fingers, roughed by rawhide.
Like a curveball, the day spins away from us,
Once released.
Morning is the empty glass bottle, all angles
And curves that sits with the patience of a garden,
Wild with the kind of wanting that we do not
Usually carry around in our wallets
Like pictures of our family.
Desirous as a hairpin that needs to control,
As insistent as a cell phone.
Even the bats above, turning in for the day, know
That light has a serrated edge like a quarter
With which it tries to grip the slippery dark
And push it down.
We may doubt everything else about our lives
But never how the morning is ours –
How we belong to it –
How right it is to love the felt part of the day
Before it turns on us.

M C Biegner
9/2004

POEM - Surprise

What is cherished most is like the game we sometimes play:
“If a fire burned down your house,
which things would you save?”

A waterproof bicycle map of the valley,
given to me on my birthday.
A small coffee grinder I use
to brew organic French roast on Sundays.
A santuku knife I received as a Christmas gift.
Your trust
and how you said that you saw heroic things in me.

You serve up wholesomeness
in a couscous and mushroom casserole
with flavors that suggest you are no stranger.
You serve up faith in the family of disparate things,
wholeness bound by the thread you use
to sew the gaping holes in me.

I linger in the feeling of belonging to you
And this shocking truth still surprises me.

POEM - Listening For Loss

Listen
For the loss:
One great
Insurmountable
Lost love.
Inexplicable –
Goes
Ghostly and
Apparitional:
A heron gray
whisk of wishing verbs;
A leaden dross;
A heaviness that
Waits for returning
Things here,
At the mouth
Of September.
Wearing it
Like a cross,
Carrying it
Like old coins
I can’t bear
To spend.
Listen
To how
Quiet pronounces
My name.