FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Jo Marie Thompson
The House
You walked for years to this house
knowing your work awaited,
yet mysteriously unable to arrive:
the map lost,
the door chained,
the price too high,
the neighborhood in rubble.
Stomping past promises, dreams
plans, family, betrayals and suicides,
assaults, careers and callings,
animals, chances, books & statues,
deities, death and more death, gurus, rivers
poets, wars, medicines & metaphysics,
canyons & their trails, the striving activists,
mathematics, horses aplenty, inheritance,
marriage, the state of New Mexico.
Even wholeness did not hold.
Finally, though possessing
no carpenter skill,
you began to build.
Stone after stone,
rafter on rafter.
Feathers rained down.
Toads watched,
glossy eyed and silent
from the slick logs of the
trees you had to fell.
At last, the doors were hung
the windows tight and
the stove in place.
You stalked to your desk,
snug by the wall,
alone in an empty, airy room.
The Work could begin.
Day followed day, season on season.
The cool air tangible inside,
gaze fixed on paned windows while
outside, fantastic scenes coarsed on --
arisings & vanishings, rivers & drought,
flames of the rarest sort
consuming impossible treasure,
Gods at battle, ladders to nowhere,
everything happening and
nothing taking place.
And still waiting; still and waiting.
The Work did not come.
Until one broad day in the
countless teeming of days:
a quiet breath, a turning,
and there in the far corner --
your very own likeness
and yet wholly Other
in a shimmer of wings and
a shrouding of cloud, shrugging
and with a weary smile:
“Now, may we begin?”
Jo Marie Thompson
Kevala Retreat
January 28, 2021
The House
You walked for years to this house
knowing your work awaited,
yet mysteriously unable to arrive:
the map lost,
the door chained,
the price too high,
the neighborhood in rubble.
Stomping past promises, dreams
plans, family, betrayals and suicides,
assaults, careers and callings,
animals, chances, books & statues,
deities, death and more death, gurus, rivers
poets, wars, medicines & metaphysics,
canyons & their trails, the striving activists,
mathematics, horses aplenty, inheritance,
marriage, the state of New Mexico.
Even wholeness did not hold.
Finally, though possessing
no carpenter skill,
you began to build.
Stone after stone,
rafter on rafter.
Feathers rained down.
Toads watched,
glossy eyed and silent
from the slick logs of the
trees you had to fell.
At last, the doors were hung
the windows tight and
the stove in place.
You stalked to your desk,
snug by the wall,
alone in an empty, airy room.
The Work could begin.
Day followed day, season on season.
The cool air tangible inside,
gaze fixed on paned windows while
outside, fantastic scenes coarsed on --
arisings & vanishings, rivers & drought,
flames of the rarest sort
consuming impossible treasure,
Gods at battle, ladders to nowhere,
everything happening and
nothing taking place.
And still waiting; still and waiting.
The Work did not come.
Until one broad day in the
countless teeming of days:
a quiet breath, a turning,
and there in the far corner --
your very own likeness
and yet wholly Other
in a shimmer of wings and
a shrouding of cloud, shrugging
and with a weary smile:
“Now, may we begin?”
Jo Marie Thompson
Kevala Retreat
January 28, 2021
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