Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hope, pussy willow, softness, vulnerability, willingness on April 3, 2020| 9 Comments »
Sign of Inner Spring
Every year the pussy willows
astonish me with their willingness
to be soft in a time when the rest
of the world is stick-ish and harsh and bare.
Sometimes softness is the key to survival.
I search for it in myself—the courage
to shed the hard shell I thought would protect me,
to shuck the hard shell that no longer fits,
and I marvel as something new emerges,
soft as pussy willows, something essential
I can bring to the world,
this vulnerable, practical hope.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged calendar, Corona Virus, fiction, reality, self, writing on April 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Dear Other Version of Myself,
In my calendar, it’s April second
and you are going to an event tonight
at a bookstore in another town
where the people will gather
and hug each other and taste
each other’s wine. You live in a world
that no longer exists, and every day
I try to reconcile it—how you
had plans to go camping next weekend,
how you were going to go to the theater
with no mask, no gloves,
no sense of your body as a weapon.
Every day, your life, which once was my life,
seems increasingly impossible.
Every day, these two worlds are farther apart—
the one in which you were getting on a plane
to visit your mother
and the one in which I put on rubber gloves
to go to the post office box.
I remember how seldom you washed
your hands for fear that someone you love
would die. I remember what it was like
to hug my friends with no worry
of harming them, to go to a restaurant,
to plan for a day past tomorrow.