a spore
slipped in unseen.
the tainted meat
still reeks
for him to hush her
outbroke apocalypse
years to sleep.
these juices
won't run clear.
scabbed back on the spit
she dreamed plague rats    
shat the antidote
to his disease.
this pox
needs quarantine.
the dime store devil
mask she wore
for armageddon
felled
like the fever
he left her
to feed.

- Hillary Hays

He thought he could tame hurricanes, and name them
after daughters, downgrade her rages into storms,
covert her fury to depression, and, blundering
towards landfall, ride securely behind blindered eyes.

He should have known that there could be no safety in her gaze,
no peace, no refuge from the swirl of founderings and tears,
their years apart had seen to that.

He should have guessed it was always hatred that had laid him
in her curse, or worse, that rocks and poems beckoned him
towards wicks she'd deliberately left untrimmed,
gone dim and guttered in
the shuttered tower where she kept
her plaintive darkness and her verse.

By Robert Richardson, My Father
1997

If I try very hard I can read your voice.
I can feel it, lodged in the white,
leapt from the space where words are exempt.
It hovers, resonant,
draped beyond the rim of monitors
and my uncertain reach.

You are text to me,
text and not text.
Breath in a vortex
of fibers and light.
And through hours
after nights spent,
our lines...
a tent drawn taut against the split,
I know the sound of you.

Soon, I'll come to the room where you sleep -
so your father doesn't see,
doesn't hear the click of keys,
the shift of feet,
the way we cover our mouths
to keep from letting on.
Or how we dare to speak
past the muteness of weathered houses
and walled-off lives.

I think we have found the secret.
How to touch past skin.
How fishermen feel the rainbow swim
below, until a surfacing.

That hidden things aren't hollow after all.
Just here and there, a door, a ladder to,
a knotted sheet tossed from a tree.
We need no more than carving tools
to leave our names in Beech.

Our hieroglyphs on cellar walls,
once faint, the blood-paint flaking there -
come back to life to tell us this
is where we were
before.

- Hillary Hays, 1996

Desire

in my dreams
I hold my lovers
next to me all at once
and ask them

what was it I desired?

my hands are full
of their heads
like bunches of cut roses
blond hair, brown hair, red, black,
their eyes are pools of bewilderment
staring up at me
from the bouquet

what was it I desired?
I ask again

was it your bodies?
did I hope by draping
your flesh over me
I could escape
boredom
loneliness
gray hairs shooting
towards me
from the future
like thin arrows?
did I think I could escape,
by taking your breath
into my mouth,
did I think I could escape
the responsibility
of breathing?

what did I desire in you?

sex
knowledge?
power?
love?

did I expect the clouds to
crack
and blue moths to fly out of the stars?
did I expect a voice
to call to me
saying
"Here at last is the answer."

what
I yell at them
shaking my lovers
what did I desire in you?

their ears fall off like petals
they shed their faces
in a pile at my feet
their bewildered eyes
pucker and close
centers of fallen flowers

the last face
floats down
circling in the darkness
at my feet

what did I desire in you? I whisper

the stems of their bodies
dry in my hands

-- Mary Mackey

"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."
- Mother Teresa

Mother's wisdom here helps to keep me right-sized and with peace as I sift through all of your profiles and taste of all of your lives. Invariably I come to feel diminished, wasted, an untried potential in the face of each of you who live in remote or exotic realms, who with conscious hands daily build the kinship of sustainable community bonds, who create art which resounds with heart, who tread so tenderly upon a planet in true dire need of such gentleness, giving of yourselves to ease the suffering of sentients of every shade, hue and shape - you manifest such things as I never could, and it hurts, and I want to be there where you are, living as you live, but my life such as it is, having an adult child with severe brain injury induced by routine childhood vaccines, and another child recovered from milder "autism", alongside other assorted skeletons which seem to dictate my inability to wander this Earth in an intentioned, loving way - I find myself here, in a dim basement apartment, missing the mountains, crying for Sea, and longing for The Secret which so many of you seem to have mastered to also take abundant root in me. 

And then an unexpected warmth washes over me, and I ask, "How would Spirit see all of this?" And is ever the vast scale and scope of a project or commitment as important as the vastness of the love with which we honor and sustain that commitment? Yes, my heart tells me that to manifest love for its very own sake, no matter the scale, and never for any ego-strokes we might obtain - this is small greatness. And that the commitment I have made to my children, in particular to my adult vaccine-injured son, in my endless giving and grieving and summoning of grace when he has been seized with inconsolable rage, and when no one ever rushes to my aid to say, "Gosh, Hillary, you are truly amazing!" This too is small greatness.

So I may not dwell in your exotic realms and I may never take part in building a sustainable tribe, but here, now, I am a Being of Love and Light and I am Enough. And I am no less precious.

Blessings to All...Hillary     

Bent Mountain is a nice place to get lost at dawn,
its fog and no white lines to follow. Strips of tar skip off the edge, go down
around in circles. The uneasy gaps in language form spaces
between our teeth, and you whisper it was 250 miles west of here
that I spoke my first word: Daddy.

Well I wanted to talk of history. Of something so distant,
like the color of my mother's eyes, red as the stomach of a dying buck.
But the fog kept us quiet. We smoked cigarettes in unison,
called the clouds green sheets, said something between us died
beneath the weight of eleven years of unnamed county lines, and dogs
you discarded to dirty prisons, to live out last two starving weeks,
before the ovens.

It poured pockets of gray coins for hours, and Bent Mountain
finally lost itself for being too close to the sky. You wanted to know why
I was cold. "Just get me a beer," I said, so we split one on the shoulder.
You put your finger to the wet beneath my eyes, called it Conch Shell,
said you could hear the tide coming in.

It was never hornet stings or wet boots that drove you home
to mother, waiting up, her dim glass lantern run out of oil, or me,
woke up scared by shotguns sending young deer down
mountainsides, their breasts beating against rock
all the way to the lake below.

You showed me once from the dock, that sinking thing,
the sound of it going under, mouth to the sky.

Hillary Hays, 1984

Listen, the birch trees are whispering -
offering paper that I might write your name
in gold, the color of the coming autumn,
a fern for a sail, a message I might float
downstream where the bears drink long
and think of honey unbothered by bees.

It is you I am calling, you whom I cried to
all through those last snows and that first frail thaw -
It was you, in the thunder, when I felt the shock
of gentler lips grace my brow, and I heard a voice
raising light through rain clouds, in trembles,
"You're Home now, Home. Come see..."

So will you tell me the story of two people
who solo, traipsed in tandem, kissing trees,
tracking scents, through sap and dream,
getting closer, calling longer, coming near.

- Hillary

Nuit melancolique et lourde d'ete,
Pleine de silence et d'obscurite,
Berce sur l'azur qu'un vent doux effleure
L'arbre qui frissone et l'oiseau qui pleure.
- Verlaine

I know you died trying to see beyond your pain.
There was a smile always out of reach.
There were memories with teeth, like sullen orphans
you could never seem to save,
or the war-time lover who never meant to stay -
you settled, acquiesced into your grave,
and found the hiding places for the keys
to cabinets where oblivion nightly waited
to whisper you to sleep.

I remember your scant and paling skin -
the way you scarcely glanced above the rims
of reading glasses or childish glee -
near the end.
And how I wanted you to watch me going for a swim
or after, when wringing out my suit,
I wished that you would feel a need
to brush the tangles from my hair.

I was too young to know exactly where
your grief began, or how the women on the street
refused to greet an unwed mother in 1946 -
and still you held my mother's tiny hand,
traversing every buckling in the tar
which seemed to like to catch your heels -
and steered through each reproachful eye
towards the only place the two of you could be -
an orphanage on a simple street,
so much in need of paint and trim,
where shutters fell like ghosts of children
at the slightest wind.

I don't know where you met him, Paul.
The salesman who never seemed to speak aloud -
not even to his sons,
and not about the former wife
who fell to hearing voices
and was done.

I don't know when he brought you out of Jamestown
farther north, to a lake with a native name,
to a house where pine trees kept good shade
so that your fair complexion
need not grow too red.
To the dock where your daughter almost drowned,
to the gift shoppe in the center of town,
where I would linger long and wait
for china cats and trellises
you'd place atop my birthday cakes.
But did you ever smile? I don't recall.
Your withering wanted all your will
and you complied.

I came to you once, to the hospital,
before you died. My mother wished I wouldn't see
how frail you'd got, how thin your gown,
the IV heavy on your arm -
as if it could keep you here.
Again the image of the keys
you weren't supposed to find -
but Paul had passed and mercy had a mind
to grant you sweet relief.

Or when, remembering you that way,
I should suddenly dream your soul at peace,
just past a sea of pastel-colored shanty tents,
where some sought shade from Heaven's sun -
and almost felt alive again -
then into the pines, not too far, a house
so like the one you knew -
and through the open door, I saw you, smiling,
and for a moment in your arms -
that you should say I'm beautiful,
and that I must not die the way you had,
and that you are no longer sad,
but that you miss your child.

Or when, in telling your daughter of this dream,
she should say, "Thank you
for letting me know my mother's okay."

You have not been forgotten, Jean.
God Bless and rest in loving peace.

Hillary Hays
1998

Melancholy, heavy, summer night,
Full of gloom and silence,
Lulls against the blue brushed by a soft breeze.
The tree that trembles and the bird that weeps.
- Verlaine