IN THE DIRECTION YOU WANT TO GO

IN THE DIRECTION YOU WANT TO GO

                      susan ambrosino

You'll never run off with some clothes

A debit card and your Toyota Prius

Tearing across the country

To some out-of-the-way desert spot

In the wild west

Instead you spend much time walking

Carefully through live trees

Dodging roots, stumps, low branches

With the thought you'd like to change your name to

Moves Through Branches

Or

In Pursuit of Nothing

It doesn't matter how long your walk will be

As long as it's enough to renew the history of many years.

If you need to get back to the house

For a glass of white wine

Or apple cinnamon tea

Never thinking about the connectivity of events

It's ok

You just go home.

The world bends

Can be worked like clay

If you talk to it

If you let it talk to you

Like it did when you were twelve

A newborn woman forever skating

At Coffman's Pond during Christmas week   

The world an unexplained innocent opening.

Your own private mountain

Starts with one stone every day

One that just fits in the palm of your hand

Drop it in the center of your yard.

You never know if what you say will make a difference

So you just go home

And go about your business

Wondering why it is you are still here

Steering the wobbly wheelbarrow of your choices

In the direction you want to go

Thinking you passed through grace by special selection.

You set yourself up

Blindly planning your life without knowing

That it was fine to be exactly who and what you are

Taking each day in small amounts

A type of slow graze that led you home

With doors suddenly opening

You standing surprised

Gazing into what you thought was the wrong vestibule

Thinking yourself in the midst of strangers

Living another life

With a future to fret about

And the need to invent sins for the confessional.

When you were six

The building across the street burned to the ground

You watched from the kitchen window

The amazement of flames and smoke

Fire trucks all night long

Then missed school the next day

Went to the RKO movie theatre

Ate popcorn

That's what mattered the most

The popcorn

With lots of butter and salt.

Being afraid of dying is silly.

When you're dead you don't know it.

It's like the unborn being afraid of life.

And you can only hope the little pains of daily life

Go on and on.

THE CERTAINTY OF LIFE

THE CERTAINTY OF LIFE

         susan ambrosino

Sometimes all it is you're doing is

Planting geraniums

Folding clean laundry

Lifting grocery bags from the car

Beating eggs into a bowl of flour

As you suddenly realize

You've moved somewhere else

Away from the world you inhabit

Into the space of your mind

Where you've learned to understand the silence

Passing through the world

Knowing its inability to judge you

Has saved you

And you nearly let go

But you don't

Instead you slowly return

To the non-porous certainty of life

To continue making a cup of coffee

Knitting a baby sweater

Deadheading your perennial garden

Or scrubbing a pot.

CHILDREN PLAYING IN THE GARDEN

CHILDREN PLAYING IN THE GARDEN

         susan ambrosino

Working in the garden teaches patience.

A child playing piano does better in math.

Soft, furry animals are responsible for the disappearance

of lettuce leaves in the garden.

None of the purple mums from last fall came back.

You don't own nature.

It owns you.

You don't own the creatures who chop the carrot greens unseen.

Like you don't own a child

Can't make him play piano.

Anything that comes to you comes free.

It's easy to stand in the open doorway

Watching the pale tendrils of leaves

Moving out from last year's old wood

Watching empty flower pots

While listening to one small cheeww, cheeww, cheeww

In the maple tree

Smelling a modest rain from the night before.

Nobody knows what will walk or not walk

At the end of time on the forest floor

Wondering about the thunder or the sparrow

Or the daffodils that are always there.

Like the summer you spent on a farm

When you were nine

Hiding behind the hedge along the porch

While the mulberry tree near the barn dripped purple

The spooky, old, rusty car in the back lane

Seemed like a phenomenal mystery

And the crumbling stone wall along the property edge

Was a shelter

Dividing the world of children

From the adults

Who would never understand them.

Though the winter is long

They keep cozy warm

Waiting for the right time to bloom.

BURNING BRIGHT

BURNING BRIGHT

     susan ambrosino

Do you think that when it all goes up in smoke

You will be one of the few who survive ?

Do you think you're one of the enlightened ones ?

Do you think you will rise from the dead ?

From the ashes ?

Do you think you will be remembered ?

Do you think you will have a gravestone ?

With flowers ?

Descendants coming to look ?

To think of that woman who lived so long ago

And died just like the rest ?

When you are gone

Will it be the same as before ?

When you look away from the forest

Will  it still be there ?

Will it change ?

Your bedside table lamp keeps burning

Beside your night time glass of water

Your library book left open

A bookmark picturing a tree placed

Upon the page

As you lie in bed

With a burned face

Dirty feet

One earring missing

Hungry, thirsty, tired

But too alive to sleep

Just because wild grasses grew in open fields

Weeping willows drank from shallow ponds

Blackbirds sat on fallen branches

Meadow hillocks moved in waves

Silken air breezed over your skin

Old stone walls tumbled softly to the future

Dirt paths led you off

To vast blue sky

Wind

Sun

You can't sleep

You're too alive.

LINES WRITTEN AFTER READING BILLIE COLLINS

LINES WRITTEN AFTER READING BILLIE COLLINS

      susan ambrosino

You spent the morning reading through poems

Written by a poet

For whom it is impossible to determine

Which of his poems is his best.

Then the tiny mouse of desire inside you

That longs to write

Squeaks a final gasp and runs

Back into a hole by the baseboard along the floor

To hide again in safety

Lick her wounds

Pant until her breath calms

So she can venture out again

Into the castle of poetry

And make another attempt

To cross the vestibule.