Silo

Grain,  seeds,
which the crop,
which the weeds?
Keep it all ,  y’  never  know.
There  at my  labor stands the silo.

Height, weight,
my spine against
the skyline.
Four stomachs, y’ never  know.
Dare not let  it go, it’s in the  silo.

A  word  bears no  mass.
A glare worn  once, it won’t fit twice.
But in my receipt
They take on shape,
A stone in muscle
Massage therapy can’t break..

Sustenance, potential, anger is a  silo.

—WT

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Here are a pair of poems to celebrate New York becoming the seventh state to recognize same-sex marriage.—Wren

Cardamom Apparitions

Now Blindness asks, What’s in a photograph?
That bending scent–your garden, ripe with dew…
Your softball scar! My gawky dyke giraffe!
Some laughter echoes, tracing down our youth.

The card’mom ghosts that clung to kitchen air…
House renovations–rainbow gingerbread…
The peachy rinse that clouded your roped hair…
Accordion folds…your grin, the sheets, our bed…

Apartments old and brittle; photographs.
So clingy to the touch…Prints left behind…
Your book unshelved, you cradle it–new calf.
Between the slips you visit wilder times

without me. I turn off light’s waterfall–
Your skin my album…my state…sweet recall.

—WT

Apparent

The difference is apparent.
At your party I am angled toward the wall,
the one that wears the door.

You serve straight privilege like punch.
But I said what I said–no rewind;
I don’t ask for a cup.

Attracted opposites show pictures
of the little blessings in pink and blue
that just happen because they’re in love.

—WT

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A storm has been here.
A storm is coming.
Air currents argue
east or west,
hot or cold.
The sparrow,
like everyone,
knows it’s not over.
But a stomach is to feed,
and she flaps mightily,
David meets Goliath in the jetstream.
A wing is belief.
Two wings are proof.
But she loses height
in this fight that is not about her
or her hunger.
The air tosses and flips her,
backward as often as ahead.
Still, the sparrow belongs to certain truths.
Her wings are not for the still ground.
Her wings are not for the dizzying surf.
Each feather, tailored for its place and  purpose,
is a streetmap of hairs and filaments;
Nature’s plan here is not a casual one–
A wing is belief that flight is possible.
Sandwiched by outer space and gravity,
sparrow is a creature of the air,
which for days has been ugly and angry.
But the sparrow belongs to certain truths.
And the sparrow, like everyone,
knows it’s not over.

—WT

This is an old poem. It was made into the short film of the same name about thirteen years ago. Nice to rummage through old files and remember!—Wren

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He points out porpoises off in the chop.
I would miss them in favor of the
ocean of umbrellas
and the kid torturing sand crabs.

Porpoises capering black against the foam
but it’s the colorful plastic that draws the eye—
bikinis and boogie boards.

He points out porpoises and
soon I count eight
fishing by frenetics.

It’s just that simple,
eat and play.

Us on our vacation,
we wrap in plastic colors and forget our
purpose.

He teaches me to
romp in the flux,
read each swell for
a jump, dive or ride.

we aren’t fishing.

© Wren Tuatha

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Some chatty garden moth, playing in paints,
performing for others, going too far.
He’s sorry now, frantic for a plan that
forgives even his dripping sins.

But what a masterpiece he’s made of himself.

He is broken light, a bent butterfly,
and he dances doodles in front of me, beauty off kilter,
unready to land, unable to feed.
Am I supposed to look away? I can’t
fix it. I can’t fix it now.

Am I supposed to move into my next
moment, as if I hadn’t seen light, broken,
prisming through sulphur air until his leaded colors
pool on the pavement? Others step around

without slowing, as if his mess were
spilled beer on the street, their favorite beer,
regrettable, but available at the corner store.

Drips of brilliance, beaded childhood colors, a
painter’s sweat. The one who painted him
broke him. Tempera thick colors on gossamer pieces. I can’t
fix it now. Love off kilter, I wish he looked like
beer to me.

© Wren Tuatha

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This poem appears in the spring ‘08 issue of Loch Raven Review:

Big Talking Rocks

I’m moving the muscles to breathe in
cold water. They feel like bone in the effort.

We had the same brand of toothpaste
on the night we didn’t speak of the
dimming between us.

Snow that doesn’t stay.

You would kiss me poetically
then pull a story out of me like a
magician’s scarf, red then yellow
through my throat.

I undressed to expose skin
printed with stories I should have
withheld, psychic tattoos with ink so
shiny you were afraid to

touch and be branded.

I’m moving the muscles to speak of
big talking rocks, monoliths like
grandmother trees, who have
stories in whispered radio waves

because they stayed.

They speak in hugging colors and
purring hum smiles because they
watched while mammoths, raccoons,
wrens and Americans

skittered in circles that never avoided
their fate. Their muscles made them do it
while big talking rocks wrote the
mythology of staying long enough

for restlessness to have its season.
I brought the brand of toothpaste
you use. I have enough for the season of

snow that sticks.

© Wren Tuatha

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Sweet Thistle, purple and
green. It looks almost
furry in the
brilliant
rising light. It
makes you want to
take it in hand,
despite all you know.

Muppets are such liars.

–Wren Tuatha

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Bigger than Birdseed

A day, a measured unit. A twirl of the world.
It had its bells and whistles, its come/go/ebb/flow.
I threw Friday words at
you like birdseed…in my ATM way…
and moved through you, running the bases of my
lists, hours before the violence that
silenced your orbit.

I saw your body.
It didn’t care anymore
about the goodbye
I would have wanted.
It didn’t want an
apology
anymore
for my failed
promise, made at Lammas, to
always keep you
safe.
It lay relaxed, honest drapery,
exposed meat and entrails…
TV cops would have dubbed it
an undisturbed crime scene.
Undisturbed.
And I stand/sit/stare/stammer,
looking for Saturday words
bigger than birdseed.

—WT

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I wasn’t born on a picket line, but I grew up there. My mom trucked me off to protests against Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant and in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Well, at forty-four, I’m living downwind from Three Mile Island and I never got the ERA. But the all-night bus rides, the songs, chants, buttons and solidarity I experienced as a child in the crowd are gifts that no corporation can negate. I learned about collective power, which I’m still practicing today as a fifteen-year member of Heathcote, my Intentional Community. But I also learned about my  personal power—not my power to always make governments and corporations listen and act responsibly, but my power to co-create culture with every little decision I make.

I co-create when I choose my toothpaste based on where it was made, under what working and environmental conditions, and with what ingredients. And I co-created nearly twenty years ago when I stood in the office of Louisville Alderman Steve Magre and experienced him looking me in the eye, telling me, despite documented hate crimes, that there were no homosexuals in his district. I told him the obvious, that I was a homosexual in his district. I let my goat poop on the City Hall steps and I didn’t clean it up. Compost happens. It was not my place to negate her co-creation.

So for a month and a half now, we’ve been going about our lives, agreeing to perpetuate the status quo, going to the store, working our jobs or looking for them, going out to dinner. Co-creating that life can stay familiar and comfortable, that this week’s soccer game or new set of tires or office conflict matters. We keep our schedules. And a couple of times a day we check in on the oil spill.

Clearly we have been benefiting from technology without truly requiring that we be able to keep ourselves and the planet safe. The marketplace consumes every new product offering without asking if it was made by children or slaves or whether it will make us sick or our planet uninhabitable. We just say, “Ooh, shiny!” and plug it in.

What now? This feels like an environmental 9/11 moment. After the planes fell, we mused at how things could never be the same. We wondered what would come next, not appreciating that what comes next comes from us, the co-creators of culture. So our collective rubber band slowly sagged back into our individual-focused lives.

I as a co-creator never got around to insisting that my government stop making enemies around the world in my name, while benefiting corporations. Let that one slip away, I did.

There’s an inherent tension between our (Western?) individualism and basing our choices on the common good, choosing to actually only take our fair share of the pie. If we really do that, what do our houses, neighborhoods, cities and families look like? Intentional Communities have been kneading this dough for decades.

Now, with the Gulf of Mexico on its way to being a dead zone, I’m standing still with the question, what comes next? What culture do I participate in today and tomorrow? Do I get in my car?

Of course, my personal responsibility for the disaster as a car owner doesn’t lessen my ire at BP executives and management. I want them to all go to prison, and not the civil one with tennis courts. I want them in poor people’s prison! Or better yet, I have a fantasy of helicoptering them over the middle of the oil slick and dropping them into it. If they make it to shore, I’ll wipe them off, if I’m not on break.

Yeah, that feels good. So will going to BP corporate offices in Washington, DC and chanting my head off! Several people on Facebook and on my path have questioned the usefulness of protests. The oil’s already in the water, lobbying to ban offshore drilling is more useful. Nice head talk.

Protesting has a logical, “head” component. Organizers are using strategy. But for the people in the crowd, the protest is a heart or gut expression. Let’s make room for those expressions, too, or they will find their own, less helpful medium.

My friend C.T. Butler, co-author of On Conflict and Consensus and Food Not Bombs and solo author of Consensus for Cities, is writing his memoir of the early days of Food Not Bombs, the decentralized international organization he co-founded with five other activists he met thirty years ago, while protesting at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant.

I asked him what he thinks the point of a protest is. “Lots of things, networking, people get education around an issue. Participants experience the event and meet like-minded people. For the organizers, they get their message out, fund-raise, create mailing lists…”

“Does it change things?” I ask.

“No,” He states groundedly.

“What does?”

“Money.”

So if you need to let your gut do the talking for a while, join me by attending the protest in your area. While you’re there, get on a mailing list. Don’t whine to me about being on lists. This is important. Donate to organizations for those great lobbying efforts. I know the economy’s bad and money’s tight. I’ll bet you a month’s pay that BP is sparing no expense on their lobbyists right now, even as the spill drains their coffers.

And in those frequent restless moments, ask yourself and your friends, “What now?”

—WT

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Goose

Don’t send a soccer mom to do a drummer’s job.
Ritual demands more.
Vibe to the score, don’t police it.
Tune to the slipstream, don’t minivan it.

I am my mother’s allegory/alimony/mystery.

The mysteries choose wisely.
When I pulled the sword from the stone,
I left with the stone.

And my mother, ripe/right to spare me
the life of the poet queen,
had words in rows for the stone’s return.

Duck, duck, duck, duck…

Drumbeats fall like medicine;
Medicine falls in phrases.

Don’t let your mother book your gigs.
Don’t let your mayor paint your Madonna.
And, God, whatever you do,
don’t let the accountant write the play–
“Lesbian Mudwrestling Playboy Bunnies on the
Harleys of Hawaiian Midgets” does
not need to be done to death to be old hat…

I am my mother’s protest march.
No bullshit goes unmagnified.
No magnifying glass can lie.

And the press is not left enough, thank you.

Duck, duck, duck, duck…

Live your life like Jesus
but don’t send his groupies to Congress.
Their Bulging Bibles have whole chapters
missing from mine…

…Are we on the canary draft now, or the gray?

I am my mother’s politician.

One womb, one vote. And the
Mysteries choose wisely. And the
drumbeats fall like food stamps
in the wind. And the medicine falls like
empty stomachs that can’t vote.

Goose, goose, goose, goose.

—WT

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Purple Dawn on the hill
would open orchids
with mental jaws-of-life,
boldly blazing,

But a quiet moment
has Venus flytrapped her,
mirroring her brovada,
leaving her limp.

Wilted! Just add water
and she’ll daisy dance,
teaching Crayola-cheeked children
the sublime cartography

of tripping on joy,
of squashing trailers,
of walking on hot coals
with matches between your toes.

It’s a vision worth
open eyes
every time she climbs down
here.

—WT

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