I dug in the garden. For hours.
Hands deep in the dirt
where once your hands
dug, too. Pulled carrots.
Potatoes. Onions.
Held them up to the air
and marveled at what grows
in the dark. Asked you questions.
As always, you didn’t answer.
Or perhaps it’s truer to say
I do not know how
to interpret the language
of rain, the message
of the white seed that landed
in my hand, the significance
of the hummingbird moth
drinking from bright red nasturtiums.
But I am learning the language of silence.
Same language the earth speaks.
Same language we spoke while you
were still forming inside me. Such
an intimate tongue. Such generous
conversation. All day I practice
speaking it with you. All day
I practice listening.
Archive for September, 2024
On This Day Twenty Years After You Were Born
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birth, garden, grief, language, silence on September 12, 2024| 15 Comments »
The Morning Before What Would Be His Twentieth Birthday, I Dream of My Son
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, dream, grief, mess, mud on September 11, 2024| 9 Comments »
He is young, and it’s raining,
and we are playing on piles
of mud with his sister
the way we often did.
There are channels
of rain water beneath us.
We’re covered in mud.
Mud on our clothes.
Mud on our faces.
Our eyes shine bright
through the mud.
I don’t remember he’s dead.
Our laughter weaves
through the rain
as if it has wings.
And we splash.
How I love
the mess of it all.
When I wake,
I’m too clean,
but all day I feel it,
the way the dream mud
has stuck to my thoughts.
I do not try to wash it off.
Poetic Lineage
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, inspiration, interconnection, shel silverstein on September 9, 2024| 11 Comments »
Thank you Alice Ungerer,
for raising young children
alone in Alsace
after your husband died.
It could not have been easy,
especially during the German occupation.
Hard enough to raise one child,
much less four, even when
the world is at peace.
It’s no surprise your son Tomi
grew up to write political satire
considering how the Wehrmacht
requisitioned your home.
Is it strange for me to tell you, his mother,
I’m grateful he wrote erotica, too?
Did you know? Did he tell you?
Not that I’ve read it,
just that I know this is how he met
a Jewish man who grew up
poor in Chicago, son of immigrants
who ran a bakery that failed,
a man who became a cartoonist
for an erotic magazine.
Not that I’ve seen his erotic cartoons,
but they must have caught
your son’s interest because
he urged that man, Shel,
to start drawing for kids.
For kids. An erotic cartoonist.
Can you imagine?
Your son dragged him kicking
and screaming into the office
of Ursula Nordstrom,
an editor at Harper & Row,
who thought your son was right.
And Ursula encouraged Mr. Silverstein
to make books for kids like me,
poetry books in which terrible things happened
but playfulness was always possible,
even when the little blue engine
who looked up at the hill
crashed, even when the little girl
who didn’t get her pony
died, even when the man
who fell in love with a bagpipe
ended up lonely and alone.
And because your son encouraged Shel,
I read those books and laughed
and learned that poetry was fun
and the process was full of pleasure
even when the stakes were high.
Even when I write about the girl
who didn’t think she was good enough.
Even when I write about how the whole cherry crop
was ruined in one minute by hail.
Even when I write about the woman
whose son took his life.
Oh Alice Ungerer,
dear woman I will never know,
your life is so integral to mine.
I don’t know the color
of your hair or the aches
of your heart or what made
you leap up in joy, but
your choices have touched my life
so profoundly, and I thank you
for how my sensibilities have opened
into a longing to turn
toward the dark underbelly
and find a way not just to look there
but to play. I don’t know if you
can receive this, but I thank you, dear Alice,
great grandmother of my words.
When Augusta Showed Us a Two-Minute Video of Starlings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, interconnectivity, starlings, trust on September 9, 2024| 6 Comments »
Though I don’t have wings
and though I cannot fly,
with my whole body, I felt it,
the longing to be so aware
of all that is around me
that I, too, might move through the world
like a starling, veering and rising,
turning and dropping, whirling
and doubling back in an elegant
response to what my neighbors
are doing. Does the starling
harshly judge its neighbor
when it flies the other direction?
Does the starling worry
it’s not good enough
to be in a murmuration?
Is it jealous of how its neighbors fly?
Does it wonder how
to get out of its own way?
Such human questions.
How would it be to wholly trust
we are all moving together
in some great mysterious dance?
Now I can’t stop thinking
of what Augusta said:
When we move together,
we like each other more.
It takes just one thought
to inspire a change in course.
What might happen now
when I walk out my door?
For When I’m Rushing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged busy-ness, peace, stillness, sunflower on September 8, 2024| 5 Comments »
Amidst the sunflowers
in full flagrant flowering,
I, too, begin to sprout
fat orange petals
and feel my head heavy
with growing seeds.
My mind becomes sun-drunk
and I gold and I spiral.
This is why you might see me
standing still in the garden
amongst the thick stalks,
though there is much to do.
Some animals freeze
as an instinct to survive,
and that may be true of me, too,
but I am not still out of fear.
Stillness saves me
not because I hide,
but because peace
seems to find me more
easily then and the body
unclenches and becomes
a blooming thing that lives
for the sake of blooming
right here where it’s planted.
While Singing “Parting Glass”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, harmony, silence, singing on September 6, 2024| 10 Comments »
for D
I spent years
practicing how
to make my voice
disappear
inside hers
so we’d blend—
and though
it’s been a year
since we sang,
it’s only weeks
since she’s gone,
and how strange now
to open my mouth,
to listen for her,
to hear only
myself. And I
can’t stop singing
because it makes
me feel closer
to her to hear
where her voice
would be,
almost like
silence
is now harmony.
What the Gardener Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cantaloupe, garden, love, melon, opening on September 5, 2024| 7 Comments »
When I say I love you wholehearted,
I mean the whole cantaloupe, sweetheart.
I mean the strange webby skin and
the sweet, firm flesh and the absolutely
freaking messy center. I mean the way
we have to wait so patiently until it’s ripe.
The way I can smell it across the room.
The way it bruises so easily.
I mean I am speaking of love. I mean
I am well aware there’s no word in the world
as delicious as the sticky juice as it dribbles down
the chin. I mean I understand the potential disaster
in underestimating the need for warmth,
how quickly a frost can end it all.
I mean this is no kohlrabi love, sweetheart,
but I don’t know if you’re the melon
or I’m the melon or we both are, I just know
there’s no way to know what we’ve got
until we both split open and break so
completely there’s no knowing which
goop is mine and which is yours
and this is the way we survive—
not by staying whole, but by opening
wide and giving it all away.
Once grief was bonfire
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, fire, grief, transformation on September 4, 2024| 7 Comments »
consuming everything I touched.
Every surface. Every person.
Every minute, every thought.
Nothing went unlicked by flame.
Everything charred. Seared.
Scarred. Ash.
It scared and unmade me.
I’d never before
been so nothing.
Had never before lost
every wall, every line,
every idea, every mask.
Such a merciless,
astonishing teacher.
Tonight, grief is more a candle.
Sometimes, I feel the heat on my skin,
smell the acrid singe of my hair.
But for now, familiar with
its gentle light, I’m more attuned
to shadow, more at home in dark.
Now, this small flame of sorrow
reminds me who I am,
who I’ve loved, and
how I would not give up
a half Planck length of love.
Not that loss is easier, no,
but god help me, I’ve learned
it’s a gift to burn.
What if, instead of grief,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, flowers, grief, pollination, survival on September 3, 2024| 13 Comments »
we call it pollination,
a process through which we realize
the gold of our hearts must spill out
and if we are to survive as a species,
it requires we somehow exchange
this gold with each other—all our hearts
splayed open, all our hearts needing
what the other hearts have.
It’s messy. Vulnerable.
And this is how we go on.
Your grief. My grief.
The quiet buzz of conversation.
This splitting open. This spilling.
This sharing with each other.
In the Meantime
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, ephemeral, flood, rain, service, weather on September 2, 2024| 13 Comments »
It is only a matter of time before
the next monsoon brings a surge
of frothing red water hurtling
down the gulley, and yet my neighbor
landscapes the flood path
with meticulously placed rocks
and raised beds with bright flowers,
and every time I drive by I want
to cheer for her foolishness,
cheer for all who make beauty
certain it will be destroyed
and relentlessly choose
to be in service to beauty anyway.