SLIME MOLD
I'm a little slime-mold cell
I cannot hear the dinner-bell
Or the starting gun
I don't have an ear or brain
I don't know if I've missed the train
Or the fun
So I lie in a state of relaxation
With my brothers in slime
Most of the time.
Then WHAM! I'm alive with anticipation
Of procreation
Or recreation
Or (I can't say it! You'll laugh!) artistic creation!
And all of us cells at a signal from somewhere inside
Start to slither and slide toward each other
And throw ourselves into this project we can't understand,
That something bigger than us must have planned
And then we are it!
We are the something
Tremendously bigger than us; we are each other.
No longer brothers but one, towering high,
And then without even a sigh
We settle back into slime.
So, friend, if you're feeling disorganized and scattered,
If you're feeling like nothing (especially you) ever mattered,
Remember that you and your fellows can reach the sublime,
But meanwhile you're biding your time,
Here with the slime.
-Nancy Schimmel
UTAH
On this ancient sea
Where even the medusas
Have turned to stone
And stone has invaded
The mollusk's house
Where stiff red breakers
Keep the silence
And the sea lilies are held
In a last graceful curve
Here, where the ocean is too old
To dance with the moon
Great ships lie stranded
Waiting
For the deep, slow molten tides of earth
To lift them free
-Nancy Schimmel
To Heaven I present a restless face,
Where I am near to Hell, ‘tis cool and calm.
To cuts I am a sting, to grief a balm,
I am a road but all tracks I erase,
I say hush, hush, yet I am never stilled,
I break, and break, and break, and yet am whole,
I reach and reach again, but have no goal,
Though all comes to me I am not filled.
I roar, I reach, I am not satisfied,
I pound great rocks to dust and chase the moon,
I dance tall ships and always call the tune,
I change with every wind, yet I abide,
For I birthed all that fly, or swim, or creep,
And I can rock a weary world to sleep.
-Nancy Schimmel
WHAT WOULD THE TREE BE
What would the tree be without the kissing deer?
And the deer
Without the ardent wolf?
Slow as a slug
Would we recognize her?
Just so
Our mind’s edge
Was worked by the stubborn flint
Just so
Past and future
Were born in the moon that pulled our blood
Just so
The dreaming eye
Was shaped by the fire
That kept the wolf away
Without rock, tree, fire and moon
Without the wolf that sings to the moon
Without the dream of the running deer
Just who do we think we are?
-Nancy Schimmel
MT. TAM
air a thicket of buckbrush and manzanita and sage
then the sweet scent of ceanothus
heavy with humming
small, fuzzy, aerodynamically impossible bodies
wings beating, beating the heavy air
till it is stiff enough to hold them up
folding heat’s voice into the day
chapparal souffle
bakes under the summer sun
falls at four o’clock
when the fog comes in
-Nancy Schimmel