RUTH MOWRY
Caravanserai
Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks
and passes of my body, a traveling
miracle, while I read the news,
all of which barely reaches me –
economies of elections, wars, and
minerals harvested from asteroids
in the celestial commerce of billionaires.
Numb with armchair trade,
I remember the seduction
of the Silk Road. Quieted, I hear
spirit through the flutes of my bones –
the music of the steppes, the tinkle of pots
on your back. I smell the fust of Turkish
rugs on the floor and know
I would walk a thousand miles
to curl up on felt-covered stone with you
and these other traveling strangers, harbored
inside trusted walls, away from danger.
In the morning we finger sunrise apricots
in a copper breakfast bowl
before recommencing our planetary journey,
a mouthful of sweet chai, and I ask
what you know of the soul’s trade –
its breakdowns, its tinkerings
its thieves and swindlers? And you say,
tonight we will come again to a caravanserai,
a courtyard of companionship, a warm stop
on the long road. Nothing else matters.
The earth's economy
Just when I thought the day
had nothing left to give,
when heat was ladled across
the shallow dry plate
of the nation, working or not, alive
or not, my country
road home from work
an affair of sour radio news and roadkill –
the furred skunk, possum, cat,
squirrel, raccoon, in the
special economy of the outward-
facing nose, lost in final scent,
the surrendered open mouth,
forehead pressed back in frozen
tragedy, tension gone, time done,
appetite dissolving into skull –
I find myself at the kitchen counter
in a different Americana, tearing
kale ruffles from their spines
for a chilled supper of greens with lemon
and oil, Dijon, garlic, cucumber –
live, wet and impossibly cool from the
earth garden just outside the door,
where the farmer’s wife one hundred
years ago also opened her apron
like a cradle, gingerly receiving
into thin billowing cotton pockets
as much as she could carry
as much as she could carry
Evening flight
If I could look down from above
on croplands bordered by tree fences, bare branched,
a shadow of dust like a flock of finches
behind the farmer’s slicing disc,
my car a small crawler on a thin groundway
of gray, dividing green and brown fields in two
If instead of the whispered mourning moon of
the saxophone from car speakers
I could only hear the muffled, distant nicker
of a horse from her open stall
If my thoughts were these dun birds, flying,
and all the great world below
tree hollows and rummages of berries
If in the coming winter
all became clear – leaves blown gone,
the globe sheeted white, dried grass heads
floating over her like candle flames above paraffin
If the world were seeds
and my thoughts birds upon them,
unlocking them, one by one
with my mind-heart’s strong, cleaving beak
If I could write from here, and break
the world in two like that
so it could germinate through me,
become a whole thing again,
I would.
Ruth Mowry grew up in a Baptist preacher’s home and always wondered if there might not be a deeper spiritual calling than the religious teachings surrounding her. In the middle of her own family life with her husband and two children she returned to university to complete her undergraduate degree in English, and discovered poetry writing. This exploration coincided with departure from church, and it was through that separation and writing that the spiritual work began afresh, so maybe it is not surprising that writing has become her spiritual practice.
Today much of her writing launches from the rural Michigan setting where she lives with her husband, finding in nature a replenishing life source for the spiritual journey. Ruth’s poems have been published in a few print and online journals. She blogs at washed stones.
