There is a room inside me—
a room the shape of love.
A room the shape of laughter.
A room the shape of tears.
It is furnished with softest blankets,
and there is country music playing,
and sometimes cello, and sometimes
the Canadian national anthem,
and sometimes it is quiet.
There is sweet tea and chai tea and
popcorn with butter and yeast and salt
and candles and bonsai trees that thrive.
We built this room together—
built it the same way we built sandcastles
on the beach in the Caribbean, the same way
we built tractors and front loaders
out of cardboard and straws and brads,
the same way we built an intimacy
out of breakfasts and trundling rocks
and looking for dinosaur bones.
Though you are gone, the room
is with me everywhere I am,
and I enter it whenever I need
to rest in the space of you here and not here:
here as I write this poem,
not here as I set the table,
here between holding on and letting go,
not here when I turn around,
here between heartache and healing,
here between forever and now.
Archive for February, 2022
Between When You Were Here and You Are Not
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, in between spaces, liminality, room on February 27, 2022| 6 Comments »
Strange Communion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dissolution, grief on February 27, 2022| 8 Comments »
Today I am suspended
in the clear winter air, hovering
above the field—no wings,
no strings. I float here,
as if I am air, unboundaried,
as if everything moves right through me—
song, sorrow, beauty, light, hope—
nothing sticks, nothing lingers,
and then, as if all it took
was for me to notice it’s possible,
I expand out in all directions—
into the startling blue and into the generous earth,
across the valley and beyond the plateau,
and it keeps going, this glorious, dissolution of self.
How is it I am free today,
unable to be weighted, uncontainable?
Is it because of you, grief?
Is it because you
have broken me open so competely
I can no longer pretend
I am not spacious,
can no longer believe I am separate from the whole?
Anti-Lamentation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, grief, music, piano, record player on February 26, 2022| 11 Comments »
There was that summer
when my record player broke,
the needle always returning
to the first song and playing
the whole record again and again,
through morning, through midnight,
and so George Winston’s Winter into Spring
played all through my summer.
Soft and pensive, each melodic phrase
hung spare in the air as if inviting
revelation or breath
before burbling forward like snowmelt.
How I loved that summer,
every moment of it kissed
with chords shattered into arpeggios,
silences and grace notes.
Sometimes breaking brings a gift
we didn’t know we needed,
the way a broken record player
steeped me for months
in the grace of a melancholic beauty
and made the haunting familiar.
The way a broken heart can bring up
a record of beautiful memories,
one after another, day after day,
and somehow heal us by making a masterpiece
of the wreckage.
News of the War
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, ice, news, ukraine, war, winter on February 25, 2022| 7 Comments »
The newscaster speaks
and beneath you
the floor becomes ice
and the world
is speeding
on balding tires
and the moment
is the highway
and all is fishtail
and the brakes
are useless now—
and the cliff so close
and you brace
against nothing
and the only way
to correct a slide
is to turn
into the slide—
Meeting Some Truths
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged avalance, loss, truth, winter on February 24, 2022| 8 Comments »
The truth was an avalanche—
an avalanche midsummer,
which is to say
it didn’t seem possible,
but it happened.
And I was buried
beneath the cold
immense weight of it.
Crushed but still breathing—
another impossible truth.
I know some would like to see
the uprooted world
already green and lush again,
but anyone who
has wandered through
old avalanche paths
knows it takes many seasons
before the fallen old growth trees
have moldered into soil,
many seasons before the new saplings
have grown into forest again.
One truth is, the healing begins quickly,
but takes a long time.
Even then, the forest is never the same.
One truth is, so much of transformation
happens beneath perception.
One truth is, we all live
in the avalanche path.
Four Poems Published in ONE ART
Posted in Uncategorized on February 22, 2022| 5 Comments »
Grief, love, and gratitude. That’s the essence of the last six months, the essence of these four poems published today in ONE ART–the first poems I’ve sent out about meeting the loss of my son. Thank you to Mark Danowsky for publishing them on this Twosday (2/22/22), a day that Finn would have celebrated. Poetry has been a saving grace–reading it, writing it, talking about it. Thank you to all of you who read these poems here–you get the first drafts, and I thank you for that. Only one of these poems changed substantively–for those of you who are noticing such things.
For all who love, for all who have lost or will lose a loved one, I hope these poems find resonance. We are not yet done with our loving.
You can find them here on the fabulous ONE ART site.
Journey of Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged advice, brain, grief, impermanence, Joi Sharp, journey, love, path, wisdom on February 22, 2022| 6 Comments »
with thanks to Joi Sharp
When my teacher told me
Everything we love can
and will be taken from us,
I did not know how she
was preparing in me
a synaptic path.
I understood her words
in the way one understands a journey
by reading a map.
Now, ten years later, with every breath
I travel this path of loss
as so many others have before me,
and yet there is no trail, no signposts,
no destination, and the path changes direction
from moment to moment.
But the path does not feel foreign.
Every turn of it is paved with truth—
Everything we love can and will be taken from us.
Those words now offer
the strange comfort of prophecy
as I wander these trails of impermanence,
stunned with gratitude even as I weep,
alive with loving what doesn’t last,
astonished by the enormity of love—
how love is the red thread that pulls us through,
not a thread to follow,
but a guide that never, ever leaves the path.
The Mystery of Grief: A writing time on Feb. 26
Posted in Uncategorized on February 21, 2022| Leave a Comment »
you meet this grief every moment.
You find inner doors you never knew were there
…You would never ask for this, and yet
and you swing them open, not to rid yourself
of the ache, but to grant it full access,
to know the grief completely,
to let it rewrite you, remake you, rebirth you,
to let it teach you what it means
be alive.
-From “Condition” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Dear Friends,
What lies on the other side of the gates of grief?
The great spiritual and poetic traditions of the world affirm that there are profound gifts of compassion, courage and communion waiting to be gathered.On Saturday, February 26, let me be your guide through the valley of shadows in exploring the alchemical process of Writing Our Way Through Grief. Together, let us be myrrhbearers: bringing the balm of beauty born from a courageous willingness to say yes to the whole of the heart, and out of that, creating a healing circle for all who follow us.
It’s a sliding scale–from nothing to $80. I hope you will join me and the amazing Kayleen Asbo, founder and curator of Mythica Foundation, in this journey toward our common humanity.
The Softening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, grief, mother, softening, son on February 21, 2022| 9 Comments »
I carry it with me now, everywhere I go,
this softness, this limp unstuffed toy, a puppy
with a thin square body made for snuggling.
I carry it in my purse where it mingles
with my wallet, my glasses, my lipstick,
my loss. When I’m walking, I reach in
and let my fingers rub its soft, worn fleece.
When I’m watching a movie, once it’s dark,
I pull it out and let Skinny Puppy settle in my lap,
as if its brown embroidered eyes could see.
I know it’s just an object, but it’s a well-loved object,
some small proof that my boy was here,
that he loved, loved hard, loved long.
I remember how he carried Skinny to school,
clutching the small brown scrap to his belly
when we would say goodbye. I remember
how long after the toy trains and model tractors
and even the complicated Legos had gone away,
Skinny still slept on his pillow.
It’s been worn down by love, this old friend,
and made even softer by the loving—
like me, an old woman who has become
frayed, sentimental, slightly tattered,
distressed, but so shaped by love, and softened,
yes, softened. Even more myself, only softer.
Becoming
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged feeling, love on February 21, 2022| 6 Comments »
The hurt you embrace becomes joy.
—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, , trans. Coleman Barks, “Silkworms,”
To wake and not want
to change anything.
To let the heart feel
what it feels.
To be disarmed,
defenseless
and so alive.
There are days
love claims us
so utterly
we unfold
into the moment,
whatever it holds,
certain we were made for it.
Nothing has prepared us
for this.
Everything
has prepared us
for this.