Posts tagged spirituality

Poem: Getting Out

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September 9, 2013  *  Dominique Larntz

 

I find myself getting out of the way
for folks a lot now.

I put my fingers on a door knob
and there is a pulse that pushes
like piano wires through my arm
to let me know there’s someone
one the other side.

I turn my wrist to release the tension
and there is a burden like books
falling from a bookshelf as I begin
to know the heaviness of being
the opener.

I pull the door forward shifting myself back
and there is another person precisely
timed to walk through, arms full,
unable to carry their packages
and open the door.

I watch the parallax of their passing
and there is space for it like planets
that have plenty of room to play
amidst the outer stars.

It appears almost nothing is empty
except my need.

Poem: Security Systems

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November 25, 2012 * Dominique Larntz

 

We could build a wall, you and I,
and see it fall back into the particles
and pieces that all physical things turn into,
like Legos in earth’s generous toy chest.

You could write a cypher and make it cyber,
wed a hacker and the two of you could spend
your life staring at screens as your bellies quicken to text
and procedures instead of the bend of a baby’s elbow.

I could serve the neighborhood watch each night, my flashlight
joining the neighbor’s flashlight, repeating until the night yields
and the watch has to watch itself, being over-crowded
with people who need to turn the light on themselves.

You and I could amass a pile of nuts like a squirrel
or a pile of anything else that seems valuable now—funny
money that keeps changing forms—when I was young it was
cash and now it is a credit score or an abstract number on a card.

But we know, you and I, that nothing secures us to life,
not even our bodies, because we give them back too,
when destiny points directly to us and tells us it’s time
for the most courageous of human moments.

The only system that works for the human spirit is love,
life’s animating storyteller whose songs keep us fed, who meets
us at every grief and joy equally not as a fragile parent
but as an entire ocean for us to dissolve into as ice.

Poem: Tree-Hugger

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Dominique Larntz * October 31, 2012

 

I read in a book my mother gave me
that school children in China
learn to plant trees.

The oldest trees are Redwoods
in or near California,
whose smells and crackles
embolden my memories.

I’d like to be buried in those odors.

So far I’ve only learned to plant things
in containers

and I learned it on my own.

I couldn’t go around flinging seeds
just anywhere in this desert,
on this concrete,
in my enthusiasm,
in my greed for growth.

Surely the ground is too bricked,
despite the refrain of moss
and grafting that repeats
in my mind.

What if I had
a reference,
a reverence
from the structures
of my world
so that I had no need
to wait

to meet someone
from China to ask
if they really learned
to plant a tree
when they were young?

Poem: Inadequate Hinges

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Dominique Larntz * October 23, 2012

Inadequate Hinges

 

Doors keep falling away;
keep breaking.

The back screen door slid right off
the track—night before company came.

The front door keeps opening
as the wind signals a change in weather.

I left the back door open all day,

let the sunlight slither in like a snake
I’ll find under the table and need to battle
or avoid later by hoping it belly-slides back out.

I Let the wind carry in flying gnats
that Chuck will likely notice.

Made a mess because I didn’t fix that
broken, leaning door I have been using
like a divine barrier between me

and the dust
and the bugs
and the soil.

This is what gods do—turn
once proud barriers
into nothing but caves.

Poem: Breathing Caves

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Dominique Larntz * October 22, 2012

Breathing Caves

Even the earth has caves
that inhale in Winter
and exhale in Summer
but they must have
multiple mouths.

Poem: Dare

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Dominique Larntz * October 16, 2012

 

Dare

Knots surround me
and knots and fibers surround
these tears that somehow
reincarnated all over my face and
my wire form from this week’s
vessels class when I turned on
Native America Calling
and heard they wanted to celebrate
especially by hearing IAIA’s
funny stories.

I thought, maybe if I had more
indigenous blood I would
deserve to be an artist.
Maybe if I could draw like
Donita Grimm could sketch
those Palominos in the 5th grade
or maybe I would deserve to be
an artist if I had not colored
those shoes so black so black
and then colored over the lines
in the 3rd grade—like I was
trying to make a foundation
where I had nothing but wind.

When my eyes clear and the tears
steer into their own infinity,
age’s newest warrior whispers
from within wisdom’s hood
words that weave family
into every orphan’s knots.

She licks my heart with a wolf’s tongue
to tell me to howl my poems
for the moon to hear,
and when that queen moon
gives rise to tides,
oceans will respond.

She runs with me
around the basket
I form in spirals
like she is traveling
across a midnight mesa
with nocturnal eyes
that declare me an artist, finally,
a poet at twilight.

Poem: A New Habit

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Dominique Larntz * September 2, 2012

 

A New Habit

I think I did it first:
he asked me if I liked the shelf he finished

And in my mind I said,
are you kidding, it’s fantastic!

In my heart, I sang of the way a shelf
we carve into our lives to set a book upon
was made from a tree that reached as deeply into the dirt
as its branches stretched toward the sun.

He asked me again, a little perturbed this time.

“Do you like the new shelf?”

I shook myself and said aloud, “Yes, yes. I love it.”

I noticed this new habit we have—
assuming we have heard the other respond.

When we were younger and first in love,
we spoke together fast and secretly—so fast
that we would finish the others’ sentence
before listening and laughing in the joy of it.

Now our love life is ecstatic with age
and I can report back in time
that there is nothing more beautiful
than love well lived.

The love well lived requires both sides
to mature, both sides sometimes to be wrong,
a song of sacrifice lived behind the curtain
of deep desires to do something different than
is being done—requires abandoning the place of want
and its unending possibilities—those are ceded
with wonder and awe for the roots and depth
where we have best blossomed instead,
like two bookends slid securely into place
holding up stories on a shelf that will last for a while.

For twenty years, we have said and not said
so many wonderful things to each other; it seems
like sunshine to be around him.

Our relationship sustains this living landscape
and our daily lives are finally slow enough to feel it.

The other day, I asked him a question—
I can’t even remember what it was—
and he didn’t answer,
so I answered yes for him.

When you ask your next question,
only to wait and wait for its answer,
perhaps your spouse or child
or aging parent or God
is so ecstatic with you
they have this sense
you have already heard.

Poem: The Eternal Red Light

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Dominique Larntz * August 10, 2012

 

Driving,

(how do I find myself here again?)

I saw the spirit of the bird rise above the blacktop
as its body took another tire pattern like paper welcoming ink
while I watched cross traffic pour over its broken form.

This form,
softer than pavement,
and the things we forge into smooth surfaces
(its final chirp whispered into the eternity of that red light)
is the death that brings
the fortunes of civilizations to tears
because

no matter how we pave our roads,

if we drive over our birds,
blind our songs,
stifle our softness,
lay tire tracks to our heart’s coherence,
the paved roads lead away
from our true nature.

Poem: Birth Mother

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Dominique Larntz * July 8, 2012

 

Every child walks a mile as my child
and they make a trail of sacred steps
back to you, beautiful son.

I see to the needs of those around me
as if the mended ghosts of their wounds
will sing in the electricity around you.

I bathe the concave wombs I can save,
fill them with loving soup and soil,
set them out in the sunlight, let them go.

Poem: Dharma Antidote

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Dominique Larntz * July 2, 2012

 

Her body cradles the sorrow
in a canyon so deep
you can’t hear a quarter drop
when you let it go over the edge.

She’s been saying it’s fine
for you spin words of delusion
that swaddle her up to her throat
like a spider’s web.

Her body can’t heal any more
unless she follows the path
of rest and peace and joy,
taking every nap she desires.

Her nerves need a bath of love
and the culture is a river polluted
by overstimulation, by addicts
rushing to destruction.

Her cells weep in blood, the only
language they have, calling for life
to be lived, enjoyed, cherished,
preserved, flowed, balanced, loved.

Poem: Surprisingly, How Pain Left This Morning

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Dominique Larntz * June 7, 2012

I was walking down steep dirt in the desert
with the same hurt hip that visits daily
in my forties, and each next step became
the uncertain place that pain makes
its bed frame since the accident.

For a few steps, I relied exclusively on the right,
placing my left only momentarily where I knew
its sole would not slide amongst altitude’s tiny granules,
and landed gracelessly with several hard gaits on its companion.

There’s a shooting pain in this sort of imbalance
that no poem can soothe, because it is outside the words
and inside the music of movement in the space
surrounding what I call myself and my body.

I stopped moving halfway down that hill
and I started to meditate instead of hike.

I took my eyes from the bottom of the crest
and focused on the rock right in front of me.

I changed my mind’s calculation
from counting the steps to get to my car
to noticing that I am in this step.

I told my left hip, I am here for you now.

I sustained a simple, humble change
of awareness in each step,
and the pain dissolved quickly
in an unexpected surprise.

Surprise because I was just
trying to finish the walk without falling down
and I had no eyes for easy steps
where each side supported the other.

Wherever else uncertain,
I am sure to take this walk again,
and I may not always find such easy relief,
but I can dig my heel firmly into faith
in the restoration of balance
over an uneasy terrain.

 

(With kudos to Thich Nhat Hanh For his Walking Meditation which inspired my walking meditation today.)

Poem: I Probably Shouldn’t Go Through My Kid’s Stuff

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Dominique Larntz * May 25, 2012


It’s questionable to go through my kid’s stuff
but Twitter and Facebook matured
right along with him
and when I found his pixelated picture
on the Internet after 16 years
of indirect mothering,
my heart started walking into rooms,
forgetting what it walked into them for.

I found out I kept trying to make him proud
through things like salary leaps
and being kind to complete strangers
because I didn’t cradle him
against my chest with the permanence
to reassure us both that life longs for us
to spend our days peacefully,
in deep union with one another
and in a spirit of compassion
for ourselves and others
and any space between.

Poem: Transplant

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Dominique Larntz * April 30, 2012

Transplant

The dry soil absorbed me as quickly
as the drops of Lady Gray tea
slopped from the side of my cup
while I leaned the opposite way
to feed the lemon thyme Shauna
gave me for my birthday–
the perfect fit to replant
in the stands we made
just outside our front door.

My eyes kaleidoscope
on the radiance
of the escaped sky.
In its heated airways,
Summer is sending its missives
each day now, announcing itself
by thrilling our skin into moistening
and making intimate embers
where we are bare.

I know Summer will bring baking heat.
I will tend the garden,
tend myself and my frailties,
the skin that burns too fast,
the sense a transplant has
that it wants to wind its way
back down to sea level
and find a way home to the ocean.

I am as impermanent
as anything else
and the desert
is one of the most
skillful teachers
to plant the idea
that we all root
in foreign soil
for a while.

 

Poem: Invocation

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Dominique Larntz * April 2, 2012

Invocation

By now we glimpse blossoming colors
opening into the sweet morning air.
May you delight in their dazzling array–
even in this desert, while the dew
sticks to your shoes as you walk from
your front door to your car door,
if those are the only moments you have
to observe them today.

May you rejoice as Winter’s dormancy transitions to renewal.
May you love as the flower opens–
fully, sun-facing, extending trust.

Time again for rebirth, fragrance, eggs, and colors.
May Spring enter your life wholly.

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