The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.
Can I weave a nest of silence,
weave it of listening,
listening, listening,
Layer upon layer?
But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish
Toward anything
that might happen or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
contained in one’s smallness.
Beyond the question,
the silence.
Before the answer,
the silence.
Awake at night
while others sleep
I watch meteors fall
in glittering array,
inscrutable patterns.
Multiple fiery tails
each minute
brush the cold black
sky, sweep the cave
of my heart.
I cannot decipher the
hieroglyph of meteors,
except one passage
repeated, descending:
In zero g, space fragments
drift, invisible to human eyes.
But mesmerized by gravity,
meteors burst through
Earth's atmosphere and blaze
a firetrail across the sky:
It takes unbearable friction
and the annihilating fall
to ignite their glory light