Moon Shell

Moon Shell

[meganvanpatten]

You called me brave once

You called me brave once

reading aloud a piece of writing

in which you’d forgotten

I was mentioned.

Brave.

That word. There it was again.

I’d heard it once before.

But this time, it rang so loudly,

echoing between these perplexed hemispheres,

that I thought perhaps it had deafened

the ears of its last speaker.

For never in my life,

had my skin chilled with such sincerity

and earnest gratitude.

I almost believed you.

[meganvanpatten]

House of Mary

Of all the doors I’ve walked through, how many thresholds have I crossed? I seem to recall these places, moments, chemical imbalances altering my reality - elating sensations of my being shifting some how. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, in fact I know it wasn’t, but the freshest slice in my mind amounts to a high, damp mountain - across the seas from which I came, in the disturbing presence of a holy history I convinced myself wasn’t true.

Regardless, there was something. Possibly just the eerie superstition of humanity; the conflict of believing in something out of fear, how odd that comes so naturally - fear over syllogism.

Anyways, what I meant to say was, I released him. I blessed his passage through this life and onto the next. I prayed, for lack of a less affiliated term (or perhaps it was a prayer given my locale), that he find the meaning he so desperately needed. I placed the only thing I had on my person upon the wall of prayers, my tour group sticker. And of course it made me wonder, who was this Mary? What did she have to do with me or any other league of the human race?

I remember this moment, feeling more connected to the greater lineage of man, from the dawning of time to the babies born in that very instant across the world. We were family, distant cousins, but born of the same kin nonetheless.

[meganvanpatten]

How to recognize love

Because I want to see this through.

More specifically,

I want to know your thoughts on it all.

This life,

its hems and haws,

and how we might travel on through it together.

Because your laugh shakes me,

and your tears make my heart ripple.

Because I saw those eyes once, 

and how they formed a constellation

with your dimpled smile.

Because you taught me how to recognize love

without words.

[meganvanpatten]

With the change, there comes something particularly needed by the human spirit — an affirmation of that eternal change in nature which rules out stagnancy, and the appearance of the entirely new within the pattern of the old.

Henry Beston

[meganvanpatten]

Art, at its most potent, springs from the artist’s longing to bridge her private truth with the truth of the universe and transmute it into a public form that beckons forth the private truth of the viewer.

Maria Popov

[meganvanpatten]

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions.

Martha Graham

[meganvanpatten]

Everything important he taught me. Through very few and such kind words.

[meganvanpatten]

Little ribbons

A poem a day (I tell myself)

to inspire honesty

to celebrate imperfection.

Little ribbons

to decorate these pages

(which are often soiled by retrospection).

Let them run wild,

on the spirit of great adventure

and gratitude.

[meganvanpatten]

But every transformation is invariably a loss, and the transformed must be mourned before the transformed-into can be relished. The mystery of the continuity between the two — between our past and present selves — is one of the greatest perplexities of philosophy.

Maria Popov on Patti Smith’s M Train

[meganvanpatten]

I always dream in color

When you got up for a glass of water,

you kissed my calf.

It was so dark, so slow —

and I always dream in color.

[meganvanpatten]

On the run

I took off on the run,

snaking through systematic galaxies

looking for a place to hide,

a stranger’s story to believe in.

Dropping in on schools of thought to teach me,

I stumbled through this world of worlds.

Lost in an intimate moment

with someone I knew to be dead,

the crinkle of a dust jacket pulled from the shelf

brought me back to life.

The patron did not see me,

she walked onward, 

glancing sideways at the titles.

There were others here, like me,

perched in corners, heads down,

but not in respite,

at least I didn’t assume so.

[meganvanpatten]

I am sometimes tempted to regard the truest culture as the compensation of the unsuccessful, something that … can remain with us when all else is taken away.

John Cowper Powys

[meganvanpatten]

Whiskey confession

When my eyes didn’t even fill,

I wondered what I was doing there,

sitting next to you

as your whole heart opened.

Spent and sad,

it was easy to reject the whiskey confession.

Easy to think

I couldn’t go back.

[meganvanpatten]

3 poems by Mary Oliver

I KNOW SOMEONE

I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly. Flowers are sweet. They have short, beatific lives. They offer much pleasure. There is nothing in the world that can be said against them. Sad, isn’t it, that all they can kiss is the air.

Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.

I DID THINK, LET’S GO ABOUT THIS SLOWLY

I did think, let’s go about this slowly. This is important. This should take some really deep thought. We should take small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

NOT ANYONE WHO SAYS

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be  careful and smart in matters of love,” who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,” but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all but were, as it were, chosen by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable — only those know what I’m talking about in this talking about love.

[meganvanpatten]

Ancient winds

Fill your lungs with these ancient winds,

deep breaths of those before us,

their sighs and exclamations

still circling the earth,

keeping us moving,

keeping us connected.

Will we resist or sail?

Eyes peeled,

absorbing lights

(some inside the eyes of others)

[meganvanpatten]

Under future moons,

these words will feel strange

how the ink keeps them here

wouldn’t it be wonderful

if instead

they evaporated

dissolving into nothingness

just how I wish

the inspiring emotions would.

[meganvanpatten]

Feng shui

From this corner,

there is more before me.

More space, 

more empty space to fill with hefty thoughts

scattered papers and notes.

Empty space ready to brave

the impact of finding the right line,

nights of wasted scribble,

and mornings of research over coffee.

More room for entangled limbs,

honest mistakes,

and fumbling plays to get out the door.