Excerpt #1

The Beloved
You are mine
In the way hearts are
When they are freely given
Not seized
And I am yours
In the way I AM
Extravagant love, constantly outpouring,
Unconditional

The Woman
I trustingly stay open
And his words wash through
One “I love you” after another
Building from enjoyment to ecstasy
“I will never leave you,” he says.
He holds me in the palm of his hand
For once, I am fulfilled
And despite deep satisfaction,
I am safe

(to the Daughters of the Kingdom)
O Daughters of the Kingdom, rejoice at his heart!
For he will never leave me

The Daughters of the Kingdom
Her heart is one with his
They are intertwined
And they cannot be separated

The Woman
My Beloved is near to me
He has made himself found
In my presence
And I am found in his
                                           –– Pages 35-37 of My Delight in My Beloved

Excerpt #2

The Artist’s Shoulders

I see the artist’s shoulders at noon
Shoulders, bent but not broken
Under the weight of the world
And shredded, as we tend to be
Shoulders that take seriously the joke of skin
That’s what I see, but
Skin as a preferred medium is a hoax
So, I turn my eyes away
Still, I cannot unsee them
The shoulders, like a womb or a shield
Striped
I am somewhere between
Woolly and wooden
But I feel an awful lot like spit
I hate that I came
From the mouth of a man
Putrid as his lies
Glistening, mocking, unwiped
On these shoulders
Resolute, intent
On using every medium
Even flimsy skin
To recreate the beauty they have borne
From the beginning

                                                           –– Page 11 of Healing Beauty

Excerpt #3

For the moment, no achievement, punishment, or cunning mattered either to her or to the cargo she suspected she carried. Nothing mattered, she told herself. Just the mission at hand.

Come, Bathsheba

In addition to being quite slick, the surfaces that the Agent climbed up and wriggled across were rugged and sharp. She did not stop to examine the scratches on her torso or the bruising on her knees. Her only thought was to get away from where she had been. The currents, some warm and some cool, showed her the way. She climbed onward—arm after arm, leg after leg, rock after rock—heading northward, a safe choice with regard to avoiding the edge of the trench.

When the tentative fingers of first light reached down from above, the Agent’s knees were too bruised to bear much of her weight anymore. She felt no pain, but she could tell from her body’s jerking movements that she was beyond fatigued. She gave her knees a rest by propping herself up on her hands and feet. Her stockings were worn through at the soles.

As she gripped the rocks in front of her, she felt a slimy, familiar sensation. Although the Agent would have known them by touch, the dim light revealed to her the outline of hundreds of light green, hand-like holdfasts on the rocks around her. She looked up at the great, dense body of kelp in her path. A kelp forest meant that there remained approximately one kilometer to dry ground. It was time to head east.

She plunged into the mess of stipes and holdfasts and fought her way toward the shore. Behind her, the millstones snagged on every mass of kelp and every boulder they could find.

Bathsheba

Her hands were scraped and cramping, and her skin was yielding to rope burns. Still, she forged ahead––arm after arm, leg after leg–– through the kelp-infested shallows and up the steep incline onto the rocky beach.

Come, Bathsheba

Ripping the oxygen mask from her face, she unwound the ropes and collapsed onto her back. Her body slipped sideways across the slick, jagged rocks as the undertow drew the millstone attached to her right wrist back down into the surf. She hadn’t pulled it quite far enough out of the water’s reach.

Bathsheba

She had no strength to drag the stones any further. So, in one final desperate act, she dislocated her right thumb, slipped her wrist from the rope’s loop, and released the stone to its fate. Whether she had completed the mission or only just begun it, she hardly knew. She was a new woman, bare-skinned and swaddled in kelp, born again into a bright morning that did not know her and to a self that was equally unwitting.

Then, with the outgoing tide flowing around her, she lost consciousness. She lay supine and limp, disjointed like her right thumb. And for all the songs of the seabirds circling above and the water swishing in  her ears, her only lullaby rang out on the hills of her mind, an endless and comforting fog: Come, Bathsheba. Come!
                                                           -- From Chapter 2 of Amphibious

Excerpt #4

Pre-Creative Chaos

Sometimes we find ourselves in the heart of Babylon
And that’s okay
I mean, it’s not
But what can we do?
Was it that your city was invaded
Or that its rulers hired destroyers
To do the work for which they had no stomach?
Or did they announce brazenly their intention
And stand between you and your people
Taking advantage of humanity’s attraction
To all things apprehensible to the five senses?
No answer is satisfactory

So, at the end of the day
As we acknowledge how Babylon and the Holy City
Sometimes seem indistinguishable
And exile and residing in one’s own land
Have become one and the same
We must rejoice!
For dividing walls of moral high ground brought down
Level us into unity
How great is our need!
How utterly weak we are!
And over amorphous chaos, your Spirit hovers
On the cusp of an extraordinary creative act
                                                                        --From Page 63 of I Bought a Pearl