Notes from the Shack

The Yab-Yum shack is my word temple. Is my crooked studio on the beach which I raised with salvaged lumber and materials gathered from around town where people didn’t need or want them any more. For some time I could find no poems, so instead I became a gatherer of objects. Nothing precious, quite the opposite actually, mostly refuse, driftwood, rocks, drifted pieces of lumber, glass net floats, fishing lures, wild plants I’d hope to transplant in my yard. I jokingly said that I spent a year and a half resurrecting this shack so I’d have a place to get away to and write, but in that year and a half I spent more time driving nails and double checking calculations and realizing how poor a carpenter I was than I did writing.

I am writing again and this turtle blood is evidence of the places I’ve been, the memory stones I’ve turned over and the glimpses of things underneath. I hope you can walk away from this page feeling a bit more calm and assured that there is time in this life to sit in stillness and silence and hear what speaks.

______

a home for poems
a word temple
though crooked
never built quite right
not a reflection of the poems
written within

_____

when the wind’s just right
old marine fuel
gasoline and two cycle oil
rises out of the floor
ghosts of this shack’s
former life

______

someday i will be crooked
able to stand upright
in this doorway
i once had to duck through
door frame
an awkward parallelogram
sloppy cuts with
dull saw

when it’s raining
the door won’t close
hemlock planks swollen and stubborn

when it’s cold and dry
the door swings open
freely
spirits of yabyum
go wandering

read more poems from the shack, to be featured in the forthcoming collection, What I learned from the Shack.