May 12th, 2012 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
Bones and stones and shells,
accretions of each in each
because of water.
Let me stand, to my tender belly
in water,
where filaments of bone wave
inside glimmering fish
between strands of sea grass.
Gulls break shells
for flesh that melts like mine,
whole sea yolks…
whole lives, in water embodied,
fed, carried, dissolved…even stones…
in water, reflected by the sky.
March 3rd, 2012 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
For A.C.W.
A warm winter wind
kneads these plains
with its palm,
so colonies of the soil
yield, even in winter:
greens for geese, seed for sparrows.
Some birds sip
from a world of puddles
and browse on the mud.
One waits mid-air,
and a thermal lifts her:
an invitation met by wings–
arched, admitting flight.
January 23rd, 2012 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
Orozco Mural
Guadalajara, Mexico
Shadow that is
not absence of light
but the shape of darkness,
you hold your hand in fire
and cry for yourself, the boy.
You hold my hand in fire
to fill the space he left behind
with the smoke of my skin.
But it has rained.
Rain has drenched
both fire and darkness.
I have found a place
of caves
that open
like windows in clouds.
For shelter. Then, I step out.
December 27th, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
The arroyo follows water
that passes through.
Mineral-red, intent,
it wants only
the way of water
that does not gather.
Along it, sprays of chamisa brush
resist browsing creatures,
resist need of rain,
grow fists of gold blossoms-
the daughters of stoics
with their shoulders to the sun.
From the juniper-clustered bend,
coyote watches its joke,
its scat cairn,
without a care for audience.
She will hunt at dusk
where sinkholes evaporate slowly,
lapping with her tongue
beneath the tamarisk
And now, early snow settles low
with strewn pebbles.
Daubed with arroyo red,
it will wash the desert again
toward the Rio Grande.
The snowmelt will flow
from Taos to Matamoros.
Ravens laugh.
Their throats of madrona wood
and tumbling stone,
they ride wind currents
every day,
up and down the arroyos.
December 21st, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
There are many things that don’t happen.
If a shoe doesn’t come untied, who notices?
Once, I saw a vine that did not creep,
but who knew?
So when a day comes and goes
uncelebrated,
when a voice falls without rising,
when love makes no appearance,
why is it like a breath
taken away?
Maya Angelou wrote:
“Lose something every day…”
and I say:
Let your laces go,
let the voices roll on,
and let love hide
like a guilty dog.
There are many things that don’t happen.
October 7th, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
a spoon lies on its side,
warm from its bath,
well,
before
a day that is
a crowded drawer.
it is a spoon’s sunrise,
warmth in its belly,
awake,
a gleam
that knows
its origins.
a spoon’s length,
warmed in its veins,
breathes,
a brushstroke
of breath
made visible.
a spoon turns
for the moment,
seeing,
an eye
in a water drop,
of a round world.
spoon on my palm,
its own balance,
its ease is
an even stream
of water
where i live.
October 6th, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
The first time I fell in love, I was lying on an operating table. I felt nothing from the ribcage down. Rather, the sensation began in my eyes and blazed to the center of my cardiovascular system, under the expert watch of an anesthesiologist. He, in baby-blue scrubs, was holding my head between his palms.
It wasn’t, however, the glory of his blue eyes nor the intravenous alchemy he worked that threw open the gates of bliss. It was the first sight of my newborn daughter. It was, in fact, the moment I saw her wide, unfocused eyes taking in the bright and populated room into which she was born. She wasn’t so much startled as alert, not so much shocked as attentive. I will never forget this one image: her shining anthracite irises above the white cotton in which she was wrapped. Nothing had ever come close to mattering this much.
The anesthesia wore off in post-op and, although quantities of morphine were dripping into my arm, pain tore through me again and again for another two hours. Between the worst strokes I peered through the lucite walls of Sarah’s bassinet, situated at my bedside. Someone laid her next to me, in the crook of my other arm and, after months of feeling her grow, of feeling her her shifts, stretches and kicks, the developing definition of knees and toes, there she was.
This is not when love began. Sometime while still undetectable to the human eye Sarah became the focus of my care and tenderness. I know its not unusual, and I’ve read of fathers loving their children long before birth. They, too, are given over to inexpressible transformations at first sight of a newborn son or daughter. Perhaps for some it is not the first time feeling that way, but for me it was. It was the beginning.
Since then I’ve been back to the operating table to birth Sarah’s three siblings. Each time I’ve told the anesthesiologists I might fall in love with them, but more likely I’ll fall in love with my newborn. They have not been disconsolate. I’ve explained that the passage to love was opened by a seven-pound girl who was rapt by her own passage to this world.
She doesn’t know this is still the girl I see in her 30 years later. She has a lot on her mind, building a career and finding a companion. As her mother, of course, I wouldn’t recommend she first fall in love while lying on her back, especially numb from the ribs down, and she’s learned to examine my advice carefully. Sarah, attentive as ever, has also grown wise. There’s little doubt I was only the first for whom she will open love’s door.
[Written in the spring of 2011]
October 6th, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
A nest in autumn is built for winter
against our dispossession in the season.
Our mates turn their eyes from the fields
to the study of warmth, a family of faces,
where dough rises more slowly
but its product is contentment.
What a time for wind storms,
before our acquiescence is secured
again, for one more year.
What a time for gales
when the fields lie low and the shelter
of leaves is blown
away.
September 25th, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
the garden is still unimagined
but alive with un-reliant weeds.
it’s not my house, here, alongside it,
not my eyes in its windows.
long tools in the shed hang with rust–
teeth, still from grinding,
not ancient, not natural, not asleep.
so, my friend, pile aspen logs for the stove,
though no one here is to be warmed
but to a cold sweat.
the world is still frigid.
i sit by a hearth like this,
its eyes of stone and arms of smoke
and want only loneliness in the pines
or the warmth of love-light,
often, from each of your hands.
tonight, deliverance is this bear
who knocks the clay pots, then tears the screens,
smashes the panes…
let it in. let it in.
there is food here, bear,
for your body and your soul.
unlike me, you know what it is for.
i’m ignorant of its purpose,
even this soul of mine—
its abandoned garden.
note: the bear is a bear, not a personification.
July 26th, 2011 by Deborah Kay Hirsch
Creek water runs
as muscle belly, rolling,
extending from metamorphic joints,
flexing deeply in whorls,
lathering where it meets much
resistance.
A woman breaks its surface
with one white toe
and nearly tips.
She trails one hand
on the gleam of creek skin,
over form in its passing.
It is a breach
in her Sunday picnic,
is love or its messenger,
this summer tributary:
insubstantial, muscular as a tongue.
