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BART, Oakland, poetry, psychic awareness, subway

MacArthur BART Station,
Oakland, CA, 1979

Deserted, sunny, the courtyard
in front of the subway station,
diagonally I started across
towards the entrance,

a black man, no one I knew,
walked out; our gazes met
and an image flashed
between our minds:

arms wide, we ran to each other,
lovers reunited at last
in an embrace,
then collapsing in laughter;

movie moment over,
strangers off to separate destinations,
unknown lives;
even now the memory
stirs wonder and delight.

Today, Yesterday, and the Day Before

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Love, nature, poetry, trees

Dead air between us,
I can’t hear you, feel you.

The sycamore says
I am held captive in a cave
by the spell of my old certainty,
my first certainty:
all will go wrong,
none will love me,
the sun will turn red
and then black,
the leaves on all of the trees
will twist and turn and fall
in the dark wind.

So now I sit on a stone,
my feet put down roots;
I draw up honeyed sweetness
from the earth
and burst into leaf and flower.
I sing a song,
the dark wind passes,
and you call to me.

The Dead Come Back With Things to Say

Tags

death, poetry, psychic awareness, soul

They show up in dreams as I shop for flower
pots, or peer down from above, crowded
by golden angels, or arrive in my study
like silent thunder. Tell my mother I’m fine,
they insist,

or, Tell my children not to cry, I’m in Heaven, or,
Say I’m with them all the time. The messages
I sent to families met with silence, even anger;
my courage faltered. The dead review
their lives and see

things in new ways, though they lose interest
in earthly doings and come rarely.
Last night my husband came from a place
or time so distant, he was the faintest
signal, light

from a burned-out star. He couldn’t
speak at first, but finally in a whisper
said, I’m sorry. In life he’d thought
I didn’t love him, and gouged me
with words

and withered me with silence, but now at last
he knew I cared. My old friend Kathy,
gone twelve years, came too, an angel
in a long robe, gray-blue, with curly hair
and wings of paper mache

the color of antique brass. She blessed her children,
leaving them at last. She had asked me to tell
them she was there, but I never did. She forgave me,
glided past the steeple of an old church and said,
I am at peace.

Silk Flowers

Tags

ocean, poetry, psychic awareness, scarf, silk flowers

Today a day when everything turns wrong:
carved bead lost, perhaps forever,
apricots stolen from the tree,
heart I didn’t mean to hurt.

Yet other things come right:
minds meet across miles,
your question carried on a breeze,
my answer unfolds
like a scarf you’ve never seen before
in the bottom of a drawer;
wondering if it came from me,
you catch silk flowers as they fall.

Blue Haze

Tags

emotions, Love, poetry, psychic awareness, Pt. Reyes, Relationships

When I walk through your apartment at night
in my mind’s eye,
I see all the times you’ve thought of calling me,
my name written in the air
over and over
in pale blue light,
a haze of longing and uncertainty.