finch talk

the finches had much
to say today –
about the dampness
of the day,
the amount of seed
remaining on the sill,
the early dark and
the lateness of light

winter prattlings,
cold weather natterings –
so different from
the ardent liltings
they will trade
between the buds
in the spring,
but enjoyable
to ears all the same

© Sarah Whiteley

My apologies for my absence lately. Some large projects have been keeping me rather busy which means that finding time and mental space to write has been difficult to say the least. Unfortunately, reading the blogs I subscribe to has also fallen by the wayside recently. Of course, not having internet at home since before the holidays has complicated the issue. However, that particular problem should (fingers crossed) be rectified this weekend and I will hopefully be able to start catching up on my reading and my writing soon.

My best friend and I have a hiking motto, birthed during our first adventure together through three miles of calf deep mud and down a hundred foot cliff (one of us with only one working hand at the time). That motto is “straight through the middle!” Meaning that sometimes the only way to get to where you are going is to keep moving forward. In news of the major life adventure variety, I am making arrangements to leave Seattle after many, many years and relocate to Colorado in March. The Universe has basically been yelling at me for a while now that It Is Time! So with much nervousness (and much exhilaration), I’m holding myself to that motto.

I will miss my quirky crows, my beloved Cascade Mountains, all those rainy hikes, porch beers with neighbors, and of course my best friend. But there is also so much that I am looking forward to: new hikes, new neighbors, new adventures, and finding new inspiration all around. So if I start writing about changes and leavings and whole families of dust bunnies found while cleaning out closets, you all will know why.

With much love and gratitude,
Sarah

I have not named what it is I am grieving…

I have not named
what it is I am grieving –
letting go becomes
unfeasible in such a state

perhaps it is simply
for a space which carries
both the gravity
and lightness of leaving

a place where inhaling
and exhaling
become something other
than separate acts –

disparate sides
of the same smooth stone,
palmed for the easy comfort
of its rounded weight

© Sarah Whiteley

a July night on the porch

all night, the rats scatter
from the ivy under the porch –
warm-furred realizations of words
like skitter, like dart

all but the one, who watches
from the narrow tract of light
between parked cars, as I wipe
the dampness from my beer
and speak again of leaving

© Sarah Whiteley

uncertainty

I am in that space between
staying and leaving,
everything between seasons –

as if without demarcation,
Summer must linger
uncertainly at the door

wondering whether she has
found the right place,
or if the threshold

is somewhere further
down the road

© Sarah Whiteley

A big congratulations to the Wandering Wonderful giveaway winners! Christine, Garrett, and Charles have each been selected to receive a copy of my newest poetry chapbook. I’ve sent off individual emails this morning and copies of the book should be in the mail shortly.

the departed

your departure has the weight of ash

no longer carrying your fate,
I return to my old shape

days hold their same complexities
but night has become startlingly simple –

rucked sheets, wooden bed-frame –
there’s no need to believe in anything else

how is it that you ever fit
inside these walls? inside this time?

I was never a promise –
my hands, my breasts, my breathing –

are sovereign and whole

© Sarah Whiteley

the reason why

if I needed a reason
to pace the floor,
pass by the door a fifth,
tenth, fourteenth time,
to check the gas,
to raise the windows,
to create just a little more
space for the dark
to slip into

if I needed a reason
to count the passing dogs
with impatient owners
hurrying them home,
to touch again the spines
of books whose pages
have kept their silences
firmly to themselves
and failed to distract me

if I needed a reason
to press my ear
nearer to the air
we shared,
to wait fruitlessly
on footfalls in the hallway
to pass, to pause,
to toe the crack
at the bottom of my door

if I needed a reason
to twist and spin
myself into a thread
thin and taut, fraught
with all the things
we wait to occur
while all our actions
compounded, amount to
a paralyzing passivity

if I needed a reason
to box up all these hours,
to cut these ties
and stop the gainless pacing,
to close my eyes,
and finally close then
the window blinds –
you didn’t stop by to ask it,

and that’s the reason why

© Sarah Whiteley

this is where I begin to feel
the pull of other roads
and if I lose you in the unwinding –
still, it is better than
the knots of not leaving

there is a necessity now
to disentanglement
and that yellow blaze
down the middle is not
the regret we expect –

but only the way forward

© Sarah Whiteley

2.6.2015

tonight, it’s the Blues

that slow-doleful prayer for understanding –

a measure of salt for the cheeks on a night spent by the window

with a glass of something that burns (on the rocks, of course)

and that solitary pine for companion

tonight, it’s the Blues, yes

but tomorrow, I’ll be Jazz

making things work

tonight just the hint-est of moons
and my own breath to obscure it
the cold makes my hands hurt
as I fumble in my pocket
feeling for the surety of keys

someone today, in no doubt naïveté,
informed me I must not have wanted
to love him or I would have
found a way to make things work

as if somehow by forcing the faucet
to open all the wider more than air
would descend into that cracked sink
in spite of the break in the water main

I didn’t have the breath left to tell her
ain’t nothing that easy, but either she’ll
write that chapter for herself or bleed out
shaving off bits of herself to make things fit
that just weren’t meant to be

© Sarah Whiteley

remembering you forgetting me

here, just now, I’ve recalled
how mine are companionless hands
and how the heart curls inward of late,
cradling the curiosity of contrition
in spite of knowing with certainty
I am far more whole now
than I was while trying to fit
bits of you into places
that could not trust the intrusion

dearest love (for you remain thus),
yours will ever be the heart
to which mine responds in kind,
and though we are far beyond bearing
this distance is as none at all
I will rise and break at each cold day
remembering you forgetting me
but hearing more in your silence
than what forgetting conveys

© Sarah Whiteley