I will.
That should fill
the task list of the day.
Just say,
“I will.”
Then make that happen.
Make your will into a thing
Let it sing.
Give it ground.
Cast your boundaries around you:
east and south and west and north.
Go forth
and do your will.
TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
If we follow the patterns set out for the Fool, she usually meets the Empress before encountering the Emperor. Perhaps my own Fool’s journey took let the Subconscious take the wheel on that one–I have so many poems to edit and revise and work up that it will be more than a summer’s work to get them into workable order for publication. I need the Emperor’s good structure and boundaries. So tomorrow, let’s invoke his soul-mate the Empress: fecund and fertile, nurturing and warm, she supports the Fool’s creative nature, offers the soil and sustenance to build and make. She embodies the archetype of the mother: fertile, nurturing, supportive, and happily creative. Tomorrow’s poem will be in her realm.
I am taking these prompts very deliberately this season, to be not only the spark of poems, but to take me deeper into contemplation, to gauge and assess where I am on my own Fool’s Journey, to look for the challengers and the allies, and those who fill both roles at once.
Gratitude List:
1. Cool breezes in the the classroom window.
2. Laughter. It’s sort of like a cool breeze coming in the window.
3. The wisdom and contemplation of poetry.
4. Rainbows
5. When they “get” it. There are some days when I feel as though I am beating my head against a wall to get some new concept across. Sometimes, even in a different class on the same day, everyone seems to get it, like I have opened a line from me to them, and they just absorb the new material like sponges. Today, with the very dry subject of citing sources in MLA 8 style, for instance.
May we walk in Wisdom and Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 
Emplate
It’s still too cold to wade.
I dip down in the river anyway.
Wash of rain from a sullen Sunday
swelling the small falls.
No reason to be here
except that I cannot be there
for a few more minutes,
photos wrapped in string
and conviction convincing me to continue
to sleep with the scent of your pillow
under my limbic adolescent desire.
We all hope for hope to save us
and she won’t. She does not need us.
We mention the muse in passing,
our turn signals tuned
to the rigid clicking rhythm of the highway.
I could go low.
Perhaps polish is less important
than process,
experience more exquisite
than filling the gaps where nothing
could get through the days
of paperwork and panic,
each moment marked with threat
like a sadistic subject
for a masochistic story.
May I rewrite you now?
Arrange the narrative arc
from fire to wind to water to
where I would love you to land?
This is a tired plot.
Dipping toes in the garden
does not make it grow, though
when your eyes turn to me
I am lavish under your gaze
and I would dig and dig
if you gave me a shovel
to satisfy your sense
of redemption.
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