This week, I’ve discovered how truly liberating it can be to trust my senses. Everything seems imbued with artistic possibilities. The wind, the grass, the ponds, the soil, the birdsong, the plum trees and willow. Even the flimsy thread- bare fibers of a tarp rotting atop a compost pile in the PCEI garden.

It is art yet? No, but I’m getting close to something. I can tell by the rush of poetic fragments. Working from the inside out—that’s what it feels like I’m doing. Poetry functions for me like a sketchbook. It helps me latch onto what I think about what I see, or maybe what my heart longs to speak of.

I don’t care about deciphering the meanings, only holding fast to intuitive responses that percolate to the surface, when I give them half a chance.

Each day walking, I grow a new rib
more trusting 
of the wind, as it breathes
into white clouds and blue sky.

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Grasses sprout inside me as I swallow
this world, today, 
as each moment widens
into wind like the wine at Cana

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Thermals currents eddies—mere words.
The real mystery is how the wind rips my fingers,
plucks my eyes, erases me until nothing remains
except a stowaway lost at sea

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We ripen into the bloom of ourselves only
as we pass through winter’s door then 
scattering
like milkweed    
like bone ash in the wind.

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I paid no mind as you silkened the hillside
disguised as quaking feathered grass. Reckless,
I stayed 
too long at pond’s edge and felt the sting
of your icy spittle, your black mood rising.