“Entering Sacred Ground”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
Dandelions lined against our rock wall
grown waist-high where I walk
by them, too busy each morning
for the smaller chore of pulling them
because I’m stuffing my anxieties,
the overnight escapees, back into their cell.
Pappus fluff of their heads blown
off in unmarked days. But goldfinches
moving north, a pair, bright and dun,
bow twenty minutes the long stalks
to pick seed and give the world back
to me, unknotting the blindfold I tied
again, by the quiet of my unturned gaze.
— for Joel and Laura Andrews
My lover backpacks me as I wade
into the tidepools, toward sleep,
where I squint and wait for dreams
to come. In the night, we turn
as she carries me toward home
in the broken day. We invite the dark
inside with its gifts of rest, peace,
and warnings by a crack in our window.
At dawn, a pair of jays unburden
their hearts of ancient music
which renews, which renews itself.
Air’s apparent emptiness is filled,
by their punctuating complications
of song. Everywhere, something
has been laid upon something else.
Even the light I have remembered
at last — the light bears itself
and remains, even as it burns out
on the faces of everything, still
persisting in its warm exceptions
inside the vast, and, perhaps, empty
paces between stars, those beacons
roaming and roaring over the great black
back of the whale gathering itself to breach.
— Good Friday, 2024
Michael Dechane: “I spend so much time roaming the imagined land- and seascapes of my interior, that carving wooden spoons, riffing off NYTimes recipes, and battling the encroaching bamboo on our property keep me in the world with everyone else! These poems, each in their own way, praise or offer some note of thanks for how the physical world and other people tether me to the here-and-nowness of my life. Wonderful as all those romps and spelunking expeditions in my deep places are, what helps me the most in my life, over and over again, is a goldfinch finding a pliant perch; my lover’s face waxing compassion; the shape and expressions of a stranger’s hands. Find more of my work at michaeldechane.com on IG @wordtender or facebook.com/michael.dechane.”