I am going to be on a two-week writing seclusion to finish a large project, and to maintain focus, I won’t be sending out daily poems for that time. When I return to email, I will send you a giant bouquet of poems (probably mostly haikulings!)
with gratitude for you–I am so grateful you join me in this poetry practice.
The heart is perhaps more bonsai than redwood— constrained by the size of its container— still, it branches, it grows, learns to thrive inside, no less remarkable, no less evergreen.
After midnight, the shadow is with me drinking tea— mint and lemongrass. It doesn’t mind a spill. What’s a mess to a shadow? If there is a question that must be asked, the shadow doesn’t speak it— no, it understands, perhaps, the only reason to ask a question is to let the universe know a willingness to not know. The shadow doesn’t worry about what comes next. That’s the concern of the flesh. When I sleep, it untethers itself from my breath and slips into the night. It doesn’t curse the light for bringing it back. It simply joins me as I do whatever I do, stays close to me, like a dream, like a friend.
When I say Happy New Year, I hear my grandmother’s voice inside my voice, the way she slapped the first syllable, the way silence hung for a moment before she finished the rest of the phrase. HAP-py New Year! Each time I say the words, she is so alive in that moment— the syllables themselves wear her bright red nails, her signature updo and her rhinestone earrings. HAP-py New Year! I sing out again and again, loving how she enters each conversation this day. There are small ways to bring our beloveds back, little rituals so strong they defy the loss, so strong that each time we do them we become more and more who we love. Her voice becomes my voice and her joy becomes my joy. I don’t have to look in the mirror to see she is here, her smile my smile curving up from the inside.
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, says the song, and I would give you the cup, friend, would fill it with whiskey or water or whatever would best meet your thirst.
I fill it with the terrifying beauty of tonight’s bonfire—giant licks of red and swirls of blue that consume what is dead and melt the ice and give warmth to what is here.
I fill it with moonrise and snow crystal and the silver river song beneath the ice. With the boom of fireworks and with laughter that persists through tears. With Lilac Wine and Over the Rainbow and Fever.
I toast you with all the poems we’ve yet to write and all the tears we’ve yet to weep, I hold the cup to your lips, this chalice of kindness, we’ll drink it yet, though the days are cold, the nights so long.
On a day when the world asks too much of me and I don’t know how to give it, I think of the squirrels at the feeder when I was a girl.
Dad hung the feeder on a squirrel-proof wire. Dad set the feeder on a squirrel-proof pole. Squirrels found a way.
Surely there’s some squirrel in me, some chattering tenacity, some bushy tailed resolve. If I can’t be courageous and brave, then let me at least be stubborn.
Surely inside this aching heart is a scamperer willing to try again, to try again, to meet disappointment and failure and exhaustion and try again, again.