Beautiful mother, you bounce rainbows on your lap
and pull sunbeams to your chest. You give birds a nest
and fish an ocean. The forests are your lips whispering
be still, be still, even when lightning burns your limbs.
Pregnant green with rain, your fields stretch wide
and far, freeing the harvest from worry. You create melody
in crunching leaves and write orchestras at dawn.
Your waves wash love, your air breathes life into wildflowers.
The paths you offer always belong, always get there.
Mountains, deserts, plains, and valleys, you give shape
to feelings and texture to truth, and your body opens
the eyes of the universe. You are a living library
of joy, dangling untold volumes in creeks and crickets.
With the ladybug in your smile, the rose in your lapel
you arrive eternally within time yet not, quilting seasons
into memoirs of existence. You cuddle up in clouds
and pad yourself with fog, all snug and cozy till color comes.
Soaring above the blue as you bore beneath it
you anchor vistas, unravel identity for all to witness.
Day or night, the stars are your family
twinkling I love you, for they too remember what you are.
Beautiful Mother, your shadow in the canvas of the moon
expresses a site now bigger---it tells of a universe
coming home to where you are
coming home to where youíve always been.

Sweat dripping like honey in noontime sun
I climb the Sleeping Lady alone
summoned by her blue-framed breast
by my hunger to know her
to become more like her, like myself

Her limbs draw me toward our daily hideaway
lizards lounge, warm my palm, retreat
I scramble over tree bones and sing
my pores absorbing the song between songs
her summer skin chanting
prodding me to take off my thoughts and join her.

Her heat kindles each vein
rushing me onward
until I reach our hairless chamber
high above cafes and pay checks
its mound open above the trees
fenced by chaparral and sky
cooled only by the passing shade of hawks

I remove my boots, my shorts, my top
I remove everything that holds us apart
and offer my body, damp and salty
giving my skin to the altar of her parched flesh
her death scratches my back
ants turn my legs into freeways
and I try not to bite back
wanting to forgive as she does

touch tract home and car exhaust
as tenderly as birch and fog
allow my earth to open up
bowels torn out, millions
evicted for our roads, her blessings

Today, she is the hem of my creation
and it is her example I follow
relaxing as my horizon melts
into a different expanse
eyes closed from the outside only
swirls igniting each lid with gold and discovery
widening, my flesh grows tiny, flattening into a drop
that spreads its bowl around me, her, and everything
we are and are not, hushing my quiet mind
swimming now, a limitless sun

Throughout old Europe and the Mediterranean, the snake was revered as the sacred manifestation of female power, either as the Great Goddess herself or as her prophetic companion. With her ability to shed skin, the snake seemed never to die, and thus came to symbolize the regenerative life force of creation. Anata the Infinite is the Hindu serpent mother, and she is also Kundalini, the primal female energy coiled and waiting at the base of the spine. When awakened, this divine force unwinds, traveling and vibrating through the energy centers along the spine, opening us to powerful insight and truth. As the personification of living wisdom, the snake is the gateway between life, death and the infinite cycles of transformation.

we are the tree of knowledge
redwood, oak, apple
snake coiled around root
wound into a garden of spines
nursing from this mother ground

bite snake bite
bite until the apple is only seeds
let its red flesh turn your belly into stars

snake sheds her skin
rounds her tail with teethed-tongue
swallows sunlight and shadows
sees the cycle spin again
be born and die forever
snake equals woman equals man equals body equals earth
and these bodies, her bodies
lift in fixed impermanence
cloud shapes that drift
scatter brief handfuls of beauty
making love, making life

another infinite revolution
peels away the sacred marriage
creating and destroying
as nature wants
living this eden
of most magical skin