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Archive for January, 2022

A Fearful Heart

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 31, 2022| 6 Comments »

 
 

 
 
Worry comes in like a fruit fly—
slips through the tiniest crack,
a crack I didn’t even know was there—
or it comes in the front door
with something I love—
and soon, worry is everywhere,
laying its eggs in all that would ripen.
Almost instantly, worry multiplies.
Of course, worry would have red eyes.
Worry doesn’t much care the season.
Winter is as good as spring.
And it circles me, buzzes me,
annoys and undoes me,
resists my attempts to be rid of it.
Invites me to learn to live with it.
I never notice when it is gone,
only when it’s here again.

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All that Dances Through

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 30, 2022| 6 Comments »




Though grief prefers a solemn shuffle
and mirth prefers to shimmy and skip,
they often come together
on the dance floor of the heart.
They’re not picky about the music.
Really, all they want from me
is a dance hall spacious enough
where there’s room for them both
at the same time—
a place where mirth can whirl
and grief can shamble.
When I’m small,
they push against the inner walls
and kick me in the ribs,
and they dance, and they dance.
I feel every step.
Is it true I can hold it all?
And I am what is still
as grief lumbers and mirth leaps.
And I am what is still here
long after the dancers leave.

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On the Upward Swing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 30, 2022| 6 Comments »




Barely a waning crescent,
the moon still shares enough light
to travel over two-hundred thousand miles
in less than two seconds.
It shines through the bedroom window,
its glow an ephemeral silver quilt.
It takes only the slenderest curve
to remind me the shape
of the whole. It takes only the barest
suggestion to know the enormity
of what is missing. Thank you
for these small proofs.
It takes so little momentum
to swing the pendulum
toward trust.

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My Son’s First Word

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 29, 2022| 17 Comments »




He pointed at the grass
beneath the cottonwood tree
and said “dado.”
Shadow? I asked.
Not ball, not mama,
not cat, not dad.
Shadow.
Already at one,
he was aware of both
what is and what isn’t here—
how sometimes the light
is intercepted.
After Finn died, I dreamt
a young boy taught me
how I could help my son’s
transformation by
guiding his energy
through the shadow
of a total eclipse,
a golden corona flaming
about the circumference.
All night, certain I was awake,
I pulled luminous swirls
through the dark center, and
Finn’s energy disappeared
into the heart of the shadow,
into the light beyond.
A shadow is nothing,
of course, which is to say
it is also everything. The way
my life is now steeped
in the shadow of his life,
the way the shape of him
follows me everywhere I go.

*

this poem has been published in ONE ART

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Apology

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 27, 2022| 12 Comments »

Apology


I wanted to shine a bare bulb
on that moment when I thought
I was right and you were wrong.
I wanted brash. Wanted glaring.
Wanted blatant, flagrant proof.
Now, in this moment of darkness,
I don’t care about right or wrong.
Don’t care about fault or blame.
I long to bring you starlight,
candlelight, firefly light—
the kind of glow that touches
everything with tenderness—
even our most prickly parts.
And whatever light lives inside us—
the light we house but do not own—
I want to discover that now
so in this darkest moment
we might find each other,
might find, even, ourselves.

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I Want to Listen to Your Absence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 26, 2022| 7 Comments »




I want to listen to your absence
the way I listen to the night—
the way the dark somehow
invites a deeper listening.
I want to hear, for instance,
the way silence fills in
where your voice has been,
or the way the room seems to know itself
by the pound of missing footsteps,
and in this way, I find you
where I cannot find you.
I am thinking of how the night opens up
between the calls of the owl
and how I listen in that interval
not only with my ears, but with my skin.
I want to listen for you with my lungs—
as if every breath is attentive
to the syllables of grief, of love.
I want my heart to angle in
to hear what the silence has to say.
I don’t want to hear what I most want to hear—
I want to hear what is really here.
I want to listen and learn from the listening.
I want to hear what is true.
I want to listen into your absence
and lean into it the way I lean into the night—
something so much larger than me,
something familiar and always new,
something so present, yet unable to be touched.
Something I am still learning to love.

*

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The Poet Reads for the First Time Since Her Son Died

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 25, 2022| 16 Comments »



with a line from Charles Simic, “The Prodigal”


Glade of light on the empty stage.
She steps into it, eyes blinded.
Someone in the audience
clears a throat. Someone
scuffs a sole. Many invisible
someones make no sound at all.
She has faith they are there.
She is holding a stack of papers.
Her chest contracts, rises.
So much that happens goes unseen,
a secret cinema.
She opens her mouth
and the words fall out like leaves
releasing themselves from a tree.
With each sentence she is more bare
until only her trunk remains.
She is an aspen arriving in January,
skeleton exposed.
What no one can see
are the roots. What no one can see
is she is standing on trust.
It has taken her fifty-two years
of bursting into color and
wildly waving her branches
to finally learn how 
to stand still.
The other trees stand with her,
and though it is winter,
their roots grow wider, deeper.

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I Would

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 24, 2022| 6 Comments »



 
 
Driving over McClure Pass,
stunned by the pink sunrise
draping the snowy West Elks,
I remember dozens of times
we drove this route and love,
it makes me miss you. The way
car washes make me miss you.
The way pumpkin spice lattes
and green tractors make me
miss you. The way breathing
and walking down the street
make me miss you. And I think
of how much it hurts every
minute you aren’t here.
I think of the tears, the fits,
the fights, the long nights,
the whispers, the tenderness,
and my love, I would,
I would do it all again.
 

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Sunday Morning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 24, 2022| 6 Comments »




A soft poached egg
and a slice of pumpernickel toast,
a cup of English Breakfast
and my oldest friend and I
sitting at the round table a sunlit room
laughing and talking—
there are moments so ordinary
as to be perfect—moments
we feel so completely ourselves
we don’t try to hold on to the minutes.
Such moments don’t try
to put themselves in a picture frame,
don’t pretend to be necessary or grand.
They ask us for nothing except
that we spend them like change,
as if we had a lifetime supply.

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Though You Are Far Away

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 24, 2022| 4 Comments »

The way two cats curl their bodies
into each other, a yin-yang
of feline, I want to curl
my heart beside your heart,
no space between us. Something
about their connection is contagious—
I find myself almost purring.
When one rises,
the other nuzzles her
until she settles again.
I want that. Your heart.
My heart. An ordinary
communion. A swirl of us.
A whorl of us. And no
matter how far away,
no space between.

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