The Bones

The Bones I sometimes sit staring At an empty page with With angst in the hollows Of my stomach, frightened That I won’t be able to Fill the space with sage Words and colorful imagery Afraid the fountain has run dry And the muse has skipped town Leaving me mute and empty The fear lasts a moment or two And then I harken back to Writing Down the Bones and What genius Natalie Goldberg Laid out on paper thirty-odd Years ago in my writing infancy Put your pen on the paper and Write anything that comes to you Don’t lift your pen for ten minutes Just write, just write, just write No thoughts of punctuation or topic And it still works for me most times Colors and textures bubble up Momentary flashes of subject matter Waft up to be inhaled and manifest Into storylines or poetic notions And I am grateful to that woman That Jewish Buddhist Nun for Writing the book that gave me The confidence and tools to dare The gods to keep me quiet when When I just have to write down the bones...