Ellen Porter
2/12/08
With a Lover’s Eyes (after Rumi)

Snow falls and
with a lover’s eyes
I delight in the
carpet of white
the prism of colors
within the sunbeam.

With my intellectual eyes
I check the temperature
and verify it is cold
and I see the road is slick.

My love sees your green eyes
the smooth plump skin
around your arms and waist
and I hunger for my
lips to find yours.

With intellectual ears
I notice your forgetfulness,
the hesitation before naming.

And still I love—
lover and intellectual—
thrown in bed together
with the Beloved Friend.


Ellen Porter
1/04/08
Wondrous Wise

Closest friendship:
two women speak their hearts
with measured words and few caresses.
We do not lie together
but experience our bodies
and souls as one.
The Beloved is wondrous wise
in permitting this
chaste and miraculous love.
The Beloved is wondrous wise
in teaching us to love Her
as we memorize our love for each other.

Ellen Porter
7/17/07
Whorled and Defined

Early every morning
before the sun even suggests its promised
pink and gold and blue
the color of a faded wild eggshell,
I open her book and read her impossible
prose, her poems describing a world
I have never seen, really seen
with deep down vision, three dimensional
as a spring columbine, blossoms
hanging like Chinese paper lanterns,
bobbing in the gentle, greening rain.

Early every morning
I open the book and read
trying to see with her magical eyes
trying to hear with her fetal ears
sensing the heart-thudding pulse
of a new awakening world.

But I will never write a poem
as tender as hers:
the flash of humming birds,
the eyes of a best-loved dog,
the flowering of spring, summer, fall meadows,
the black water ponds.

I will never write a single line like hers,
and so I open my fist gripping the pen,
unfold the fingers and fling away the sticky web
of forced imitation.
Then unburdened by the impossible and
free to see with my own astounding eyes,
to smell the personal fragrance of my own garden,
to spread ink across the fine blank sheet,
I am surprised by gestational syllables,
as word by word,
my soul’s own midwife
delivers a poem
unique as fingered prints,
whorled and defined.


Ellen Porter
12/22/07
Winter Solstice

longer days now
to seek my love.

Will I remember the grove
where we lay
camouflaged with burnished leaves
branches black now, shining with ebony rain?

I will go into the mountains to
seek that little forest
rest my head against stone
in solitude
weeping into my hands.

Ellen Porter
2/20/08
When I am Fifty-Nine

There is no company
when one assumes
unnecessary responsibility.

I push open the heavy
day care door—
made heavy to keep
children in or out—
and she tells me
to pull on my hood.
And when I reach
the open walkway,
its squares slippery
with ice under
new-fallen snow,
she tells me to take
tiny steps, to keep
my center of gravity.

I don’t have the freedom
to look around for
cat prints in the snow
or birds hidden in the
crevices of trees.
Listening to her warnings
I lose the beautiful
winter walk and
her tender company.

But I clasp the banister
in agreement to her persistence
all because I love her and am certain of her love for me:
A hefty price for love turned
frantically to fear.


Ellen Porter
1/11/08
Who Said a Good Girl Will Harbor No Addictions?

In the early morning hours
before sun starts the world spinning
in color
I take three or four books down
from the board and brick shelving
and nibble at a few poems from each.

I had finished with the
collection of Mary Oliver last week
and went on bravely to Audre Lorde
who is indeed a wonderful poet
but does not make my heart
lurch, my mouth fashion a smile, my galloping brain
slow to murmuring.

After days of pre-dawn desperation
I give in and pull a volume of Oliver
not even dusty yet from use.

I open to the beginning
inhale deeply like a swimmer
preparing to leap from pool side
to cold, liquid relief
flinging my body headlong with the first lines:

the sun, the grass and delphinium,
the dear, light-pink color of morning.

The dive, the submersion, the long glide
and then I rise to wind and water’s edge
gasping ocean air in cool resuscitation.

Ellen Porter
1/08/08
What Is It You Seek?

All my life
I meant to seek the Beloved
and undirected I searched in odd
and unlikely places.

As adolescent,
I was drawn toward love
and mistook lust for charity.
Lust with a boy’s hand
on my breast and my
hand on his eagerness.
But I did not find God.

And as an older adult,
I urged myself toward
union with the Friend
kissing and caressing
those who,
while satisfying my lust,
never brought me to the vision of Her face.

And now,
celibate in a monastery,
I need only hold quiet
doing nothing but contemplation
hearing the echo of God’s footfall,
seeing the shadow of Her great body
slipping a hair’s breadth away.

Ellen Porter
2/7/06
Varieties of Blue

Marigold orange, seacliff blue
flowers in a cup and saucer on unplaned redwood.

It is all my attention can contain
pulled and wheedled, an impossible shrinking of opposites.

She draws me unwilling to the subject of films
a story of love, a tragedy I must, she says, endure.

She does not know how close I am to implosion
cancer forcing simplicity.

I cannot bear artistic pain
(the depression, she assures, will only last a day.)

Spinning slowly, losing, dizzying downward
I grasp for the marigold orange, the cerulean blue.

I do not have a day to spare.


Ellen Porter
2/23/08
Vegetable Soup

I did not sit
in meditation this afternoon
but took a knife to
a pile of vegetables.
Pared carrots sliced in coins
brussels sprouts peeling open
like little cabbages
celery the color
of sea anemone
trees of broccoli
white chunks of potato
and a wandering turnip.
No meditation except the
chop, chop of my knife.
No transcendence
but a wonderful soup
to keep my begging bowl full.

Ellen Porter
12/30/07
Transformed By Sadness

When I study the poems
of the Japanese
my being is transformed
by their ripping sadness.

Early in my life
I must have suffered loss
so great I don’t remember it,
yet I recognize deep sorrow
as if it were in me
firstborn.


Ellen Porter
1/07/08
Unnamed Apologies

Today’s nights
shorter now than solstice days
shuffle toward
morning sun.

Words find no
comfort today
in ink.
They rasp, industrial
as a wasp’s
many roomed paper nest.

Without rejections
(for nothing is submitted)
poetry stumbles awkward
across blue-lined paper.
I, too,
(were it my journal)
would refuse
to publish.

Ellen Porter
4/11/07
Touched With Ice

You say you are publishing
my poems
and you break your
benevolent silence to tell me.

The silence is as much
my reluctance as it is
your nature.
Each of us creates
from that vibrant pool
of stillness
our tongues
touched with ice,
not burning coals
on the days of our birth.

You have taught me
the discipline of
writing every day.
I reach for words
as the sycamore outside my window
plunges upward toward the light.
Sometimes I remember the fiat
and other times I watch its backside
slip away unheeded.

But now you say
you are publishing my book.
The inner pool trembles.
Our silence shatters,
heads together,
plotting.


Ellen Porter
3/6/06
Toward This Moment

Almost a year
fighting for my life
knitting compromises
accepting the worst
while cradling hope.

And suddenly
(it is not sudden at all
but a silent creeping
toward this moment)
I want to die.

I want to die
but not struggle toward death.
Put down hopes and fears
one by one
like so many boots lined up
on the mudroom floor
and walk away
barefoot and light as sun
slanting through an empty parlor.

It is time to stop
to nod politely
at those beckoning
toward the future
to close my eyes
and wait long moments
for nightfall.

Ellen Porter
8/31/07
These Burdensome Threads

Today’s melancholy
threads through my fingers, my toes
wraps me in a shroud
so snug and smooth
I cannot wiggle against
its constraint.

I don’t know from where it rises
leaving me paralyzed,
this grief.
I only know it holds me
faster than God
faster than creation, itself.

Yet in this interminable moment
I survive these burdensome threads.
I do not plummet to final darkness.

I cannot weep
and so I wait
not struggling but dissolving
into prehistoric soup.
And then each segment of myself,
floating free,
melancholy abandoned,
refashions me in new design,
part holding to part, and me waiting,
cupped in this binding:
a chrysalis, a cocoon
a possible, perfect reformation.


Ellen Porter
3/14/07
Time Change

If it were
solstice or equinox
my body might
understand.
My blood and breath flow
backwards or ahead
of their own volition.

But this artificial
tampering with time
to mediate daylight
or darken morning skies.
This my body fights
with deliberate rage.
As dark and light
vie for ascendance,
I sit with coffee
in oblivious, dying stupor.

Ellen Porter
12/20/07
Therapy

My visitors
have spoken of dying
as if it were a science to be learned
not a mystery, unfolding.

And as a science text
that roils my brain and numbs my bones,
this riddle sets my belly quivering,
uncertain of its labyrinthine path.

Bundled for winter
I break into chilled air
ride through blackened snow
just to hear your therapeutic voice
dissuade my tentative neurosis.

We rip the science and
strew it like new snow.
You hand me back the mystery.
In safe haven,
in solitude,
I can deal with the death rune alone


Ellen Porter
2/3/06
There Are No Promises Left

What is the poet to write
after the peach has fallen
the sunrise has promised warmth
the creek has spent
cold water on ancient rock?

Once the beauty has been given
the memory darkens
and there are no promises left.
The pencil draws across paper
out of discipline
but the soul is hidden
the mystery gone.