Ellen Porter
9/21/07
Almost the End

Almost the end of September
and the air is warm and soft
as a baby’s new skin.

I leave the hammock up
swinging in its prodigious garden
daring the weather to last,
to forego Autumn’s chill.

I climb in and it is
mid-summer again.
I read half a chapter
and then flirt with sleep.

Life is like this.
It seems warmer than it really is,
a sauna on a chilly evening,
the sun broken free of clouds
and the fickle shade of maples.
It plays at being tough
and then offers up a modicum of sleep.

I would be willing to stay forever
in these last September days,
learning their gentle lessons
again and again.


Ellen Porter
12/16/07
Driving To the Monastery

A year
maybe two
we have chosen this empty road
looking for deer.

The car, embarrassed by failure,
still slows a bit to stare
at shoulder high reeds
a tangled fence fashioned
to keep the does imprisoned
to keep the hunters out.

I suddenly see a movement:
a calf-colored brace of ears,
and cry pointing, a deer!
We press our faces to the windows
hardly breathing against
excitement and foggy glass.

In one miraculous leap
the deer denies its prison hold.
With a rustle like wings
it rises and disappears
into another welcoming
twilight field.


Ellen Porter
9/23/07
How Can One Be Lonely
(after Hafiz)

How can one be lonely
when the Beloved is so near?
Ellen,
Take Her name, Beloved,
on your lips and sing.
Sing of your tender
heart-breaking
loneliness
and She may draw nearer
humming a sweet harmony
to your painful, weeping
song.


Ellen Porter
12/17/07
My First Mentor

Twenty, thirty years ago
when we first met
we met with eyes
then warm and lively hands
and then our hearts
the confluence of two rivers
mingled through endless time.

You dispensed your wisdom
gleaned as mother of seven sons
and I gathered it ripe,
like golden apricots,
in increments I could bear.

Oh, I loved you.
But then, dragging behind me
a sin too heavy to share, I turned away.

Years later I heard you were visited by cancer
and you would not survive.
I came to your home once more
to beg my apologies
and to receive your grace.

Now you are gone from tender touch,
but I feel you guiding me, still
laughing, chuckling, weeping
from beyond this dusty earth
before creation, after death,
this eternity.


Ellen Porter
10/06/07
Roswell Cancer Institute

your walls
decorations in color and form
prove a desperate and welcoming blur

I walk your corridors
find your doors
and with each step
realize my illness
more and more

in your gardens
I walk
in autumn, enlivened
I walk
vivid colors of fall
the prototype
of pictures
echoing off your walls


Ellen Porter
12/3/07
The Long and the Short of It

Sitting alone
concentrating on my impending demise
I forget the comfort of a group
talking about other things.

We sit around the table,
we ten, and speak of
the perceived horrors of living
with the larger group—community—
the group of one hundred and twelve nuns.

It does not raise horror in me
but a sense of liveliness,
a desperation to address new issues
to delve into our souls for nascent mysteries.

I come away, not in despair
but with a softened spot in my soul
where the old ways become woven
with the new
and fertility erupts.


Ellen Porter
11/30/07
Toward Dying

I wander further along
the path of solitude.

In this November cold
I vow to stay indoors till spring.

Chilled air strains conversations
until, exhausted, I lean toward dying.

But there is one who tends my liveliness,
never staying too long.

She wraps me in tenderness,
and I am not alone.