Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam's Well, a novel; and The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she offers writing workshops, coaching, and collaborative projects YourRightLivelihood.com with Kathryn Lorenzen, Bravevoice.com with Kelley Hunt, and TheArtofFacilitation.net with Joy Roulier Sawyer. CarynMirriamGoldberg.com.

Betwixt Redux

The prevernal kayaks, the ones we haven’t used in yearssince we found a timbler rattler coiled under the plastic seatlean against the unbudded trees, highway-barked and waiting above the parked cars they’ll plunder, six months from now,with green hedgeballs, each the size of a small brain, wind-flungwhen the wind coils up its spring force, summer-spent, and charges back in, a mirror of what it does now no matter the soft translucentgreen of early leaves the size of fingerprints and the creeping vincaso exhausted by the effort, it sleeps in purple freckles visible in this light, not visible in a few hours when the paleof the sky drops dark and the roar to the west of highwaytakes on a new urgency near what we call our place but could just as well be named a laboratory of seasonal tides,a perching station for bird regeneration, a mist-filled ankletmorning that dissolves in something hotter, harder to nameback down into the breathing animal of what orbits us around again.

Insomnia With Cause

Knowing what it is doesn’t help,maybe the opposite since the magnetictarget isn’t moving. Everything else is: the heads of lettuce in the producesection of the front lobe, the weaselof the heart, the folding chair of limbs repositioning itself for a better gripof sleep. The kaleidoscope of the mindwhere I’m signed up for the show, no intermission, only frequent bathroom breaks, while the voluptuous dark crowds the windows, says, go to sleep or not. Just like the weighty clouds that won’t rain no matter the humidityor slippage of logic into perfectly roundedanswers that never fit int o square holes. Nothing to fix, no one to solve what hurts,especially the wide-awake one pacing this bed, these floors, hungry for a dream.

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