On Moving Again

Liz Waldner

This evening, walking along the long field
My eye was drawn to a living shimmer in the sky:
Three aspens alone alive in a world of almost motionless 
Cottonwood and willow and Chinese elm trees.

The breeze that barely stirred the others
Sprang it free, spangling leaves like light on water,
An electric flutter, the secret energy
In the heart of the world revealed.  So free.

An aspen leaf might believe itself inordinately busy
(especially comparatively) and certain therefore
It will expire prematurely, useless, stupid, failed.
From where I stood, it was the most beautiful thing to see.

My life could be similarly pleasing to God.
I guess this could be service enough for me.

Behind Perfume, Only Solitude

Ink will come.  Lamp lung
breathes light at the edge
of an idea.  The edge
an idea, also the door

of the room 
that silence opens.

The pen sighs, a lens
for the shut-in light.
Breathe me, light.
Have the idea to have me.

Liz Waldner

2009

Adjunct

The tomato plant is like a seven-story city hewn from the rock of the desert. 
It weeps.

It volunteered. I hate tomatoes and the way the plant smells
but it is alive so I let it be.

And so it towers haggard over other better December vegetables,
its top blacked by the first frost

despite my bed sheet.
Either nobody wants me

or they want me to save them and believe
I can. This seems to be history.

Or math: mantissa, L. makeweight, part of an algorithm
of little or no importance.  Sad.

It works that way.  They get me to pull myself up like a weed
via my wish to be loved.

Liz Waldner

2009

Prayer

If I were in a book it would be the book
in which some lesser angel bemoans
the state of my soul

and is comforted for it
and is corrected for it

by some greater angel who knows
as the reader knows that it is not my soul
that suffers the indignities of ignobility: 
the inability to curb the petty smallness
of spirit, ungladness in the company
of fools, anger's decay,

in the sense that my soul itself cannot be
harmed nor tarnished though it can witness
my sorrow on finding that illness alters me
from the self I thought I'd more or less known.

Liz Waldner

2009

Poems

On Moving Again

More by this poet

Behind Perfume, Only Solitude

Adjunct

Prayer

Poems

Page submenu block

On Moving Again

More by this poet

Behind Perfume, Only Solitude

Adjunct

Prayer

Newsletter Sign Up