I was sitting beside my mother on the couch,
knitting a blanket for my girl. My mother was
holding the yarn in her lap, a cloud of muted pinks.
Outside, the tall dry grasses were steeped
in golden evening light. A vireo rambled on
in its jumbled, warbly way. Mom talked
about her plans for dinner the next night
and I knit two, purled six, knit two, purled six.
She guided the soft wool through her fingers,
keeping just the right amount of slack. I felt
such a tide of love for her, I wanted to tell her
I’m sorry for every time I’ve been hardened,
sorry for every time I pushed her away
instead of pulling her close. I wanted to tell her
something loving beyond words, some
sentence true as the sweetness I felt today
sitting beside her in the grass in the sun while we
waited for a kingfisher or yellow warbler to fly across
the pond. But to name a feeling is so much harder
than naming a bird. So when the row was done, I
rested my head on her shoulder, closed my eyes
and nuzzled in. There was only softness in me then.
I’d like to think she translated what I meant. Just
as I knew what she was saying to me with each
unspooling of the yarn, I know how you love me.
I know your heart. I love you, too, my girl.
By the time we rose, we were held by the dark.
Even the swallows were quiet.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged birds, conversation, daughter, forgiveness, knitting, love, mother, naming | Leave a Comment »
With a white plastic five-gallon bucket
as a stool, she sits in the middle
of my garden’s gravel path and wrestles
the long notched rod through the stones.
She moves her arm slowly,
her back hunched over her task.
I see in her body her father’s body,
how he, too, would toil in the gardens
of others for hours, tool in hand, patient
and thorough. I watch as mom dangles
a slender white root in the air
to marvel at its twisted length.
I hear her triumphant ha!
as she adds it to the small but
growing pile of roots and leaves.
The bindweed will grow back
with admirable speed, but she makes
an enduring mark—not in the rows,
but in the heart of this daughter,
teaching me again how it is we find joy
offering ourselves in service to each other.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bindweed, legacy, mother, service, weeding | Leave a Comment »
How gently I move the volunteer sprouts
out of the potato bed and into another row,
careful to gather the fragile roots with a bit
of damp dirt, tamping lightly around the slender stem.
How fragile it all can be. I think of how tenderly
this morning my husband touched my face,
as if too well aware of how a single moment
can change everything. We folded
into each other then like two petals
of a single flower. In the garden,
I stare at the spindly transplants,
a new row of tiny, rounded green leaves.
A delicate ache rises in me, charged with
love for the spare beauty of what is here
and an awareness of how the simplest scrape
can make a whole world disappear.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged fragility, garden, love, marriage | 1 Comment »
It’s because to try to describe this feeling is
to render it instantly dull, flat.
It’s like when you see a rock on the bottom
of the river—all shimmering and bright—
but the moment you bring it to the air
to share it, what seemed precious
becomes cloudy, mundane, a dumb lump,
the stuff of filler in a suburban parking lot.
And so you learn to be quiet, to let your syllables
float away like dry leaves. What is heaviest
stays. Does not wash away. Is polished by friction, years.
Sometimes you meet others in the river. What shines
shines. Together you stare, stunned by the damn beauty.
Maybe you hold hands. Watch the light as it plays.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged connection, grief, ineffable, language, paradox, silence | 4 Comments »
Sometimes the worst doesn’t happen.
The flash flood doesn’t flow through the first floor
of your home. The bear doesn’t tear into your tent.
But sometimes the train comes around a bend,
hits a rockfall and comes off the track. Sometimes
the rocket explodes in roiling orange fireball of methane fuel.
Sometimes the car launches from the highway into the air
and crashes, skids, takes out a tree, a bush,
then launches again, only to roll and roll.
When the worst happens, it doesn’t take long
before the inner narrator spins tale after tale
of how much worse it could be. It can always
be worse. Knowing this, what a gift today
to drive up to the front door, the house still intact,
to walk into the home and greet both cats,
to water the succulents on the kitchen shelf,
reheat the soup from the night before, pour
hot water over the mint tea, hold hands
with beloveds, say I love you, say grace.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged narrator, optimism, perspective, the worst | 2 Comments »
Tonight I can’t see the shape of the moon
behind a cluster of clouds, but I see
the bright radiance seeping through the edges
and know the moon is there—
that is how it is when I speak out loud
to my father and son. Hi Dad, I say.
Hi Finn. I love you. I miss you.
And aren’t you so proud of our girl?
As I walk through the dark, scent of rain
in each breath, I can’t hear the shape
of their words in my ears. But I swear,
I feel it, the shine.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged communication, grief, invisible, loss, love | 3 Comments »
sitting on the couch,
our bodies lean into each other—
two aspen trees, shared roots
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged daughter, exhaustion, graduation, love, mother, ordinary moment | 1 Comment »
for every desk,
there was a doorway—
the threshold
now your teacher
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged graduation, learning, school, teacher | Leave a Comment »
for Vivian
Already she knows terrible things happen.
Already she knows the pleasure of scrambling
in the woods at night with friends and singing
too loud and making bad choices that are sometimes
exactly the right choices. She knows sobs and
silliness. She knows how much humans can hurt
each other. She knows how a touch or a tender
word erases nothing but creates its own plot of trust.
There was a time when my job was to protect her,
filling her pages with beauty and courage and honesty.
Now my job is mostly to love her, to give her her own pen.
Because terrible things happen. And she is the one now
who shapes her story. Every writer knows, we write
what we know—and what we can’t ever know.
I pray what emerges is the impossible—an irrational,
deep rooted love for this difficult, glorious world.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged daughter, framing, graduation, love, parent, story, writing | 2 Comments »
Knowing it will grow back tomorrow
does not stop me from pulling
the bindweed today. Once I pulled
bindweed as if the goal was to clear it
from the garden. Now, I pull bindweed
as if the goal is to love this act of being
alive, this ritual of pulling bindweed, my
daughter beside me, soft easy chatter
rising between us. There is no blessing
or disaster yet that has ended this
communion of tugging on the long white
roots. Somehow, in this season of
endings, the bindweed seems to promise
tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bindweed, daughter, garden, mother | 3 Comments »