Ellen Porter
8/11/07
The New Cosmology

These days of prescribed education
allow me no time for solitude out of doors.
Cancer and shattered breath leave me napping
rather than hiking the woods.

I wonder how I am to learn
if there is no mud on my shoes or
leaves, abandoned haphazardly from
trees along the hermitage path
in the curls of my hair.
How can I learn without birdsong
or the quick sighting of rabbits,
whiskers twitching in anticipation
of what, I do not know?

The lecturer speaks of adapting
religious thinking to the new cosmology.
Her ideas make my heart quicken,
and I wonder how I can reach forward and adapt
if I am enclosed in this particular room
away from the new fertile cosmos.
I feel arteries excited, running amok
with wonderful, terrible, glacial ideas.
But how will they stay in my heart and my memory
even another day
unanchored by dirt and grass and the new sap rising?


Ellen Porter
6/14/07
Community Retreat

The monastery is
chiseled away by
lectio and prayer.
There are no visitors this week
hospitality exchanged
for quiet vigilance.
The monastics
like a river
meandering the halls
In silence.


Ellen Porter
7/6/07
Grace

A circle of women
powerful drums and fire.
One sets the rhythm
hollow and deep.
Others echo
one by one
magnifying in night air.

This circle
sixteen strong:
two crones
bringing ancient energy,
thirteen middle years
solid, honest, honed true,
and a four year old
uprooting spring.

It is the child’s initiation
into the woman’s world.
She doesn’t know that
as she leans against her mother,
crawls in grass
inspecting blade by green blade,
as she attempts to join
the rhythm of the group,
she doesn’t know
she is being taught
the circle’s wisdom.

Her mother worries
she will disturb.
Her grandmother
takes her on her lap
counting out the drum beats
the child imitating rhythm.
The others smile
accepting as a whole heart
the healing that
this evening brings:
this surprising vernal grace.


Ellen Porter
8/16/07
Losses

This spring, when I first rose early
to embrace the great poets,
their words so comfortable on the page,
and to test my own ink,
I didn’t know that with the summer dawn
the morning bird would no longer sing.
I had grown fond of that song, expectant,
but it took me days to realize its absence.

Yesterday, my sister announced
her difficult epiphany:
she will leave Lake Erie and
return with leaf brilliance
to Pacific places, west and north.
With her going,
she will gain eyes to watch
her granddaughter move
from four to five
and the child’s parents
growing gradually, patiently,
into adulthood.

And in this house
an artist is dying.
I try to remove myself—
his diminishment echoing
my own disease—
my cowardice begging solitude.

Of all these losses—
spring dying to summer,
my sister’s westward magnet,
the potter’s final breaths—
it is the missing birdsong
that breaks my heart.


Ellen Porter
6/4/07
Psalm in Darkness

My spirit shudders
in deep darkness;
when will
the earth soul shine?

Day after day
I spar against the enemy.
I drench my shirts with sweat.
My eyes unfocus
with a faintness so close
I kneel down in homage
to the darkness.
My breath comes in panicked gulps;
my fluids burst, unbidden.

My spirit shudders
in deep darkness;
when will the earth soul shine?

Today I rise late
And miss the morning bird song.
The sun has outrun me to the horizon.
Trees leafed out
but plastic bags
littering their branches.

Perhaps the earth soul shines
and I have missed it,
my spirit grasped by
the crook of my arm
still sleeping?


Ellen Porter
8/27/07
Sometimes After Death

Sometimes death sets
the dark world spinning,
a catalyst.
Your body, blest and forgiven
just settling under
fresh turned, pungent dirt.

I thought it was finished,
that dark pod of
fear and sorrow.
But as you settle in the ground
new darkness fills
your empty hollow.

Now I cannot breathe earth’s atmosphere
but must settle for tanks of processed air.
And even then,
as I rise from my bed
I gasp like one following closely
on your silent heels.

And the sentinel pine,
struck by lighting
in yesterday’s storm,
left leaning,
its life or death
waiting decision
by one who understands
the anatomy of a tree,
but who never loved this particular pine
as I have.

And the friend whose
birthday we feted tonight
with singing, laughter, wine and candles.
Did she feel the darkness settle
where your chair should have been
pulled up at table?


Ellen Porter
8/4/07
The Snake and Condescension

Late spring and
acting like summer
the trail by the creek
stretches dusty dry and
cougar ready.

But today I choose the upper way
the slope steep enough to
test my legs and breath.

Suddenly,
halfway up the ridge
there is the death rattle
of a snake
black as cooled embers
waiting on the trail.

I jump back
some ancient guttural sound
of disgust and fear
issuing deep in my throat.
And then the moment of paralysis:
I watch its wicked eyes,
it waits to fathom its future.

Aloud, but quietly, I pray
to mother earth
to let her creature
give me passage.
We wait, and then
proud but forgiving
the rattlesnake uncoils
and slips into the
fragrance of white sage.