daydreaming

you be flotsam,
I’ll be jetsam,

and together
we’ll be details
of the sea –

each the other’s
favorite
minutiae

© Sarah Whiteley

fragments of recent dreams – a writing exercise

a hummingbird – gently insistent –
tangled itself into my hair
and peeked from beneath to titter
into my un-understanding ear
***
they showed to me the uneven patch
you had mown in the grass – the short
beside the long – before the star super nova’d
in your chest and you fell to green forever
***
strange gray paint on the pillars
of that house in New Orleans –
I leaned on your rusted red bike,
said the universe wants me to tell you…

© Sarah Whiteley

the dangers of stargazing

this morning,
before morning really,
before the light had begun
to line the eastern sky,
I walked – feet testing
the crispness of those
first fallen leaves
(someone must, after all,
be the first to fall)
while Orion hung
so impossibly bright,
so brilliant even from beneath
the glare of the streetlight,
that I had to (truly had to)
walk along with head tilted back
ridiculously celestially absorbed
in that darned belt
everyone’s always pointing out
why? I was just wondering,
does no one point out the bow
so perfectly poised
that any arrow loosed
would pierce the heaving flesh
of the great bull before him?
when I wandered face-first
into the very earthy wonder
of a spider web
take heed, my friend –
there are dangers even
in stargazing

© Sarah Whiteley

I absolutely did do this rather recently and after I’d pulled the spider web off my face, couldn’t help but laugh at myself and wonder if this was the Universe’s ever-so-subtle way of reminding me to find ways to be more grounded.

I felt a river rise within…

I felt a river rise within
perched upon the bridge’s edge
poised upon the moment
and there you stood
while drops of me
slid and dripped
beneath the pre-green
of a sky considering twilight
one breath whole
and the next breath broken
as the chaotic coursings
of wet on your window
you left me on that brink
to plead alone with never
and a rush of rain
descendent

© Sarah Whiteley

I have been having trouble sleeping for weeks,… months actually. This isn’t a reflection of my outward life (I don’t believe it is anyway) as I’m relatively content. But I’ve experienced cycles of insomnia before, and they just seem to come and go without any indication of why. This time I’ve started taking a sleep aid (don’t worry – it’s natural) and while it is beginning to work, one of the side effects is vivid dreams. And oh are they vivid! You might be thinking “well that’s pretty cool!” and it would be except for one little thing. The dreams are achingly, unbearably sad. They aren’t nightmares or anything like that – no dinosaurs chasing me around trying to eat me for dinner. But they are disturbing in their own way. A writerly friend (Hi, Martin!) suggested that I maybe begin to write them down. And here I am just a few moments later and this just poured out as if it had been waiting for me to give it words. So in an effort to purge some of these things and hopefully find a more peaceful rest, I’ll be writing some dream-themed pieces here and there for a time. So if the tone seems a little off from my usual style, this is why.

as if moths

as if moths
could somehow
supply meaning
she gazes upon
the half-light
of ghost-wings
hitches of breath
leaving them
unstirred beyond
the disheartened dust
of pale sill
on a night
too damp
for flight

© Sarah Whiteley

sitting behind you on the bus

because I was full
of the nape of your neck
I had no room for morning
no time for anything more
than following the lines
of your back
into abstraction

© Sarah Whiteley

*

soft now
and you unknowing
in rings of green
I will string you
and like a child
in dandelions bedecked
I will drape here
the cool bloom of you
where my fingers
may twine and trail
restless
in the loops
of your hair

© Sarah Whiteley

false hope

you were never
and are not
and yet then again
that crumbling moment
when the sun subsides
and a farewell fire
clings to the bellies
of the clouds
–you are dappled like that
the glow about the edges
of the end of my day
though I am capsized
it may yet
be this way again–
or dust

© Sarah Whiteley

the winter moods series – first winter

first winter
without
the chill spills
from rivers
within
the skies sigh
withdrawn
in green dreams
of honeysuckle

© Sarah Whiteley

This is the first in a series I’m working on that pairs short poems with paintings. The series is called Winter Moods and you can see the companion painting to this piece over at tied to sky.

at peace

it’s been a year, my dear,
since I shut the garden gate behind
and shooed the wounded dreams away
to trail mournful after happenstance
and the ungraceful slant of those days

no more than small disturbances now
they rustle upon the edges of my feathers
and along the bending tips of my grass
there are no buzzings of bees here
but life, in cat-soft callings ’round the corner,
beckons of fingers held in absentia
and sings of the raveled strings
the intangible things that keep me tethered here
and bound to breathing

mistake not my thanks for fidelity
for I am adroitly adrift
and drift on I shall as vagabond leaves
those flutterings of a different sort
left me out of sorts and circling then
with all its brass-caged “ifs”
I leave their scattered clamorings behind the gate
I rise, I glide, I shifting sift
like last light’s slow-measured lilting
through branches that waver quavery
in the dreamy greens of settling dusk

a year, dear, and I am softer than the silence
unfolding from the star-tilted skies
and sweeter even than the honeysuckle sliver
of the moon that follows me home
and nests in the corner of my window

© Sarah Whiteley

And wham it came upon me – that urge to write. I think for now the lull has passed.