I think of a year ago
and all I did not know.
I do not hold my innocence
against myself.
If there is a future me,
I toast her tonight.
May she look back at me
as I light this white candle
and whisper love into the flame.
May her thoughts be generous
as she remembers
how it is to live
with this heart,
both ruined
and burnished by loss.
As I toe the edge of the year,
the edge of the moment,
I imagine her waiting
on the other side, saying,
Jump, sweetheart, jump,
I’ve got you.
Or perhaps she says
nothing at all,
but stands there as I do now
looking back,
arms impossibly open.
Archive for December, 2022
At the Edge of a New Year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged future, grief, new year, self acceptance, time on December 31, 2022| 8 Comments »
One Hush
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged secret, wings on December 30, 2022| 2 Comments »
between cupped palms
it flutters and tickles—
this secret growing wings
Remembering
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, hot springs on December 29, 2022| 4 Comments »
All those nights
we’d go to the hot springs.
Once warm,
we’d roll in snow
and call ourselves
sugar cookies
then jump back
into steaming water.
Today, I do it again.
In the untouched snow
beside my shape
I see where your slender
shape is not.
I slip back
into the water.
Everything the snow
has touched
tingles.
Everything your life
has touched
is even more alive.
Saying Goodbye
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goodbye, grief, love, physics, quantum on December 28, 2022| 18 Comments »
To say goodbye to one person you love
is to say goodbye to part of yourself.
I must have them, you think. You think,
I can never be whole without them.
But in that gap of the fabric, that tear made of love,
is a place you can climb into at any time
and know the true shape of yourself, which is infinite.
Sometimes it takes the sharp ache of loss
to feel into the truth of our interconnectedness,
to know what the quantum physicists know—
how woven we are with each other,
with the universe,
how woven we are with all that is living
and all that is what we call dead.
Though it’s science, it’s also a kind of faith.
And it’s dark. And it’s sweet. And it’s beautiful,
and it’s terrifying, this thread that reminds us
just how much we belong to the rest of the world,
this thread we can’t untie even if we want to,
this thread that tethers us to one another, to eternity.
One Late Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged path, trash on December 27, 2022| 4 Comments »
carrying out the trash
this, too,
a holy path
Walking with KC on Christmas Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, conversation, family, heartache, paradox, sharing, walking on December 26, 2022| 4 Comments »
This, too, is Christmas, the quiet
walk on the quiet road in the quiet air.
The only carol here—
unending verses of river.
The only gifts we brought—
our attention, our trust.
This feast is for the heart.
There is a generosity to the sunshine
no candle could equal.
It’s a deep sweetness
to be wrapped in blue sky,
a deep sweetness
to share heartache, exhaustion—
something I would never wish for anyone,
and yet, this Christmas day,
the sharing of it,
such a beautiful present.
Every Christmas Eve
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, family, gifts on December 25, 2022| 8 Comments »
for Diane
surrounded by bows
and ribbons, we sit on the floor
and wrap into the small hours—
all the while we unwrap our hearts
and give them again and again to each other
Making a Wild Space
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged elk, love, wildness on December 24, 2022| 10 Comments »
title from a line by MK Creel in “Before the longest night”
The way the elk herd
owned the highway tonight—
standing in the road,
surrounding the cars,
making its presence known,
that’s how I hope love
comes into my life this year.
Impossible to ignore.
So much bigger than I,
fluid and ubiquitous.
Something that stops me
and insists I pay attention,
fills me with wonder
as it thunders and bugles
through the dark hours,
something that astonishes,
ordinary though it is.
Twenty Years Ago, Ten Years Ago, Last Week
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged advice, love, self-compassion, time on December 22, 2022| 13 Comments »
If I could go back in time
and offer advice to my younger self,
I wouldn’t.
I would let her fail all over again.
I’d let her falter. I’d let her lose.
I’d let her stumble
and struggle and bomb.
But I would lean in close
and let her know
I am deeply in love with her.
It’s so easy now to give her this,
this self-compassion in full bloom,
this thing she believed
was impossible.
One Ghost
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged camera, grief, loss, missiing, photograph on December 21, 2022| 4 Comments »
camera with no film—
taking photos of all the places
you are not
After Writing Love Letters Back in Time, I Realize
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestor, future, love letter, time on December 19, 2022| 7 Comments »
Perhaps someone in the future
is writing love letters to me
the way I have done for Chopin,
van Gogh, Neruda, Akhmatova.
Are we, the living, already ancestors?
Could these waves of love
have been sent back in time
to arrive today while I am walking
in the department store
and begin to weep
near the kitchen implements?
I feel it, this invisible current of love,
buoyant as salt water,
as it carries me through the aisles.
I begin to believe it, the continuum,
the mirrored stream,
begin to believe the waves
of love travel not through time
but are directly transmitted
from heart to heart
to timeless heart,
to receptive present heart.
*
December 17, 2022
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, fragile, life, love, mom on December 18, 2022| 9 Comments »
Mom makes the chocolates
while I chop nuts and make dough—
we listen to carols and sing along
as we have since before I remember.
The kitchen smells of mint and sugar
and I try to press the memory
between the pages of the day.
Perhaps it is a blessing
to know how fragile it is, this life.
I let myself fall all the way into the moment,
the sun long gone, but the house
still pulsing with love, still warm.
Dear Ludwig,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Beethoven, love, piano, role model on December 16, 2022| 5 Comments »
Before I knew of you,
I knew your music.
When I turned the flat metal handle
of my pale pink jewelry box,
Für Elise would play as a ballerina
in a white tutu would spin and spin
and I would hum along
until the music slowed
into garish metallic plinks.
Part of me envied Elise—
that someone would write her
such a beautiful song.
Now I know you wrote it for Therese,
a woman you wanted to marry,
but in transcription
your handwriting was misspelt,
and the error lasts to this day.
And Therese, she had no interest
in marrying you.
Oh, Ludwig, I, too, know
how the heart sometimes longs
for what it will never have.
I know how our words are twisted
till they plink, till they plunk.
I know how mistakes
sometimes stay with us forever.
What I meant to say is Happy Birthday,
Thank you for daring to love
even when it hurt.
Thank you for transforming your pain
and rejection into music so relevant
that 250 years later its played
as cell phone ring tones.
Thank you for teaching me
as a girl how to hum along—
for giving me the reason
to turn that flat metal handle
again and again and again.
Aftermath
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anger, beauty, fire on December 16, 2022| 11 Comments »
For years, I have run
from this anger.
Tonight I stopped running,
let the anger catch me,
let it burn in me,
a wild conflagration,
it terrified me,
and then I watched it leave.
For the first time in years,
I am not running.
How still it is.
Whatever has turned to ash
was not essential.
What is left is so raw,
so beautiful.
When Mom Suggests I Could Rest My Head in Her Lap
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fish, memory, mom, rest, time on December 14, 2022| 8 Comments »
I resist. There is so much to do,
but soon my eyes are closed
and Mom is pulling her fingers
through my hair the way I love
and I am ten again, or four,
or twenty-five, or two,
lying on the plaid couch
in our old house
with my head in Mom’s lap,
her fingers in my hair.
I wake up drenched in forever,
this timeless stream
I sometimes can see for what it is—
like a fish that leaps for a fly
and sees, oh! an infinite world
beyond the world it knows.
Is it any wonder, this water
clinging to my cheek
as I rise from the couch
and swim back into the night.
No Longer Empty Handed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged sexuality on December 14, 2022| 30 Comments »
after the poet pointed out there are dozens of well-known euphemisms for male masturbation and none for women
How could I not start to think
of circling the black hole,
polishing the pearl,
rubbing the rose bud,
loosening the tight knot,
spreading the soft butter,
frosting the sweet cake,
stirring the soup till it’s hot,
dancing on the vortex,
getting sucked into the eddy,
diving into the deep end.
What does it mean
that we don’t have language
for a woman who pleases herself?
Consider the tectonic shift,
the solitary wiggle,
the single squirm,
the one-handed time warp,
churning the cream
climbing pink mountain,
traveling to the temple,
spinning the dark silk.
No choking chickens,
no spanking monkeys,
no beating meat,
no wanking.
More like swirling the universe,
mining for diamonds,
finding hidden treasure
wading in the whirlpool,
the reason I can’t answer the phone.
Dear Heather,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, humanness, longing, loss, parenting, time on December 13, 2022| 11 Comments »
on William’s birthday
There was a time before we lost our sons,
a time before the long walks in the frozen woods,
a full-bellied time when we cherished how they grew.
Today the snow came again, at last,
though it was more sifting than deep drift.
I notice I want more.
It’s so human to want more, I tell myself.
More snow, more time, more love,
more memories of making fires in winter,
tasting summer s’mores, feeding hummingbirds,
making cookies, speaking silly languages,
skinny dipping in the river, singing to Rusted Root.
It feels right their birthdays should feel heavy—
heavy as the snow that didn’t fall today,
heavy as the bodies they didn’t grow into.
Oh, the weight of love—light as the sunshine
that slanted through the room between squalls,
substantial as the tractors our boys are not driving.
I think of how much we’ve grown in their absence—
which is to say how much we’ve grown
in the company of heartache, the company of love,
how powerfully loss has stretched us.
Somehow, these boys linger in our being.
They arrive through song, through silence.
In this after time, we feed them with memories—
some true, some more than true.
Each time we say their names, they grow.
It’s so human to want more, no matter
how reconciled we are to what is. Oh,
for more time, somehow, between forever and now.