I know they will die,
the dahlias, the zinnias,
the petunias, the geraniums,
will die come autumn,
and still I buy them, still
plant them and sing to them
as I do. Looking up
from the garden beds, trowel
in hand, I see it in everything—
the spruce, the ants, the swallows,
this hand—all that lives will die.
And staring at the basil, pungent
and green and ephemeral, I feel
so darn lucky to unfold
for whatever time I am given.
To bloom while I can. To be marigold.
Calendula. Mother. Begonia. Gratefulness
floods me like low summer sun.
I turn my face toward that light.
Archive for May, 2025
Annual
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annual, flower, garden, gratefulness, mortality on May 31, 2025| 8 Comments »
The Mindfulness Bell
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bell, driving, frustration, mindfulness, presence, resistance on May 30, 2025| 8 Comments »
“You might consider your own minor annoyances and turn one into a bell … let it be a bell to remind you to come back, and remember, soon all of this will be gone.” —David Keplinger, Another Shore (May 30, 2025)
And so today when the very slow driver
in front of me starts going ten miles
over the speed limit right when we get
to the passing lane, I imagine
my frustration is a bell. Instead
of calling him an idiot, as usual,
instead I think, Ding. Can you be
grateful to be alive right now?
Ding. Can you bless this body?
Delight in this canyon? Find joy
in the burgeoning green of spring?
Ding. Ding. Ding. Can you come home
to this moment and realize all belongs?
Even slow drivers who speed up.
Even your impatience. Ding.
Here’s your chance to imagine whatever
provokes you becomes a mindfulness bell.
There will come a time when you think
oh, what a lucky woman you were
to drive these roads at all. Could that time
be now? Ding. Ding. Oh that idio—. Ding.
Please, let him pull over. Don’t honk. Please.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
The Secret of Contentment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged contentment, knowing, wonder on May 29, 2025| 8 Comments »
To be the seed and not
wish to be the flower.
Or to be the flower and
not wish to be seed or rain.
To be the rain and be grateful
to be the rain. Which
is to say, to be the self
and delight in being the self.
But when I say self, I mean
to know the self as seed.
As flower. As rain. When I
say to know, I mean to
ever be in wonder.
Watching the Goslings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, goslings, hopelessness, tenderness on May 29, 2025| 2 Comments »
Those milky, down-fluffy, bumblesome
bodies stumbling in tall green grass—
just seeing the goslings, I feel it, a rush
of tenderness, an inexorable
softening. Not that I brought
my hopelessness here on purpose.
Just that I seem to always carry it
with me these days. Not that the baby
geese make anything better.
Except they do, opening me to the story
of life beyond myself, beyond my kind.
Suddenly I sense it everywhere,
the great story. There, in the bitter
scent of the chokecherry; there,
in the stonefly climbing the coyote willow;
there, in the eagle that would eat the rabbit.
Everywhere the story of what it is
to be alive. And in me, a tenderness
for all of it, a tenderness that grows and grows
until I can be tender even with my own
hopelessness, my own bumbling. No antidote
for humanness, but oh, this tenderness.
Revival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, evening grosbeak, falling in love with the world, joy on May 27, 2025| 2 Comments »
For so long he lingers on the edge
of the feeder, as if he knows
I am willing to stand here for hours
to marvel at his bright yellow forehead,
the white patch on his wings—
such an ecstatic thing to watch
this first evening grosbeak
to ever find a way to our yard.
Aren’t you beautiful, I tell him.
He raises his head. I swoon
with raw joy, with full-bodied
love for this bird, for this day,
for this world with its wings.
Was it really just this morning
I was weeping?
While Staring at My Flag on Memorial Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flag, memorial day, mother on May 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »
I think of those who died fighting
for our country, and how
when a child dies, a part
of a mother dies, too.
Tonight, as the low sun streams
through the red and white stripes,
mothers of soldiers, I honor you.
How Do I Ever Forget It?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, evening, light, sun on May 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »
That moment that opens
when the evening light
makes the whole field glow
so everything is luminous,
every blade, every leaf, every stone,
even the weeds, even the carcasses,
even the ones who are watching—
not to forget we can also be cruel,
can kill, can lie, can betray,
but oh, we can also be as receptive
as a field in the golden hour,
letting light pour through us until
we, too, are that radiant, that generous,
that willing to be in service to beauty.
Six Weeks After I Break My Foot
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ache, pain, stillness, teaching on May 24, 2025| 2 Comments »
It still hurts. Not like it did at first,
of course. But still. One slight change
in angle can cause a sharp zing
that brings me to stillness.
Perhaps this is the day when
I don’t resent the pain.
Perhaps this is the day
I embrace how pain belongs
to this life as much as joy,
I imagine pain is like the strict
third-grade teacher I didn’t
love at the time, but years later,
I thank for holding a line.
If there is a way to appreciate struggle
in this very moment and not wait
for the future when I see the struggle
has been good for me, well, I don’t
yet understand it. But I do know
that stillness has never come so easily
to me as it does today when, again,
I feel the ache and discover just how
lovely it is to sit here, to not move an inch,
to watch the green swallows as they fly.
Right Now, Mid-Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bookmark, college, daughter, mother, story on May 22, 2025| 2 Comments »
I am placing a bookmark on this page
in which my daughter and I drive
highways and turnpikes and green
curving backroads, singing
our way past tree farms and smoke
stacks, past sheep and cornfields,
grand estates and collapsed barn roofs,
this page on which, in every moment,
we are driving right up to the blank
edge where the story is still seeking
its setting and the narrator is still
seeking her voice and the page is
still seeking the fingers that will turn
it and those fingers are still so soft
as, with total trust, they hold my hand.
One Affirmation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged truth on May 19, 2025| 8 Comments »
cupping the truth in my hands
until my own palms
glow
Most moments
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged falling in love with the world as it is, parts of self on May 18, 2025| 13 Comments »
it feels as if I’m leaning forward
in my chair on the off chance
I might soon get to leap to my feet
in standing ovation. As if I expect
life to be wonderful. And so often
it is. Like today when my girl and I
made up new slang for friendship,
or when the rain let up and
the highway was once again dry.
Now that I write it, some cynical
sliver of myself chimes in,
Really, Rosemerry? You’re always
at the edge of cheering
for life? And I turn to that
cynical sliver and leap up and cheer
at the realization that at last
I don’t mind the inner trash talk.
In fact, I love this smirking,
sarcastic vein of myself, and I nod
at her with all my over-the-top earnestness
and clap as she doubts me, I
clap and I clap and I clap.
One Unframeable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, daughter, focus on May 17, 2025| 2 Comments »
in a room of priceless art
I keep turning toward
my daughter’s smile
Shining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple tree, light, long marriage, love, sun on May 16, 2025| 13 Comments »
Have you seen the way the sun
spills only the teensiest fraction
of its light into the crabapple tree
and yet that is enough to transform
the petals from plain flat white
into radiant luminosity? Sometimes
love does this, too—I am thinking
of the way a woman can wake up
beside another human for thirty-some years,
perhaps she thinks she knows that person,
perhaps she really does, and then,
one morning, she sees them anew,
shining, gleaming even—not
just some trick of the light but
some magic love offers us,
the chance to witness how our
partner is changing, to marvel
at their ongoing becoming, to know
afresh just how lucky we are.
One Role Model
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged letting go, river on May 15, 2025| 4 Comments »
leaf sinks to the bottom—
even the river too tired
to hold up everything
One Missed Opportunity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chance, conversation, love, opportunity, parenting, what matters on May 13, 2025| 3 Comments »
that would have been a great time
for me to tell you I love you,
that time when I jabbered on
about the shapes of glasses,
about the weather, the color of the tile
Opposite Sides
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, opposition, relationship, swimming on May 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »
If you were in Europe and I were in Boston,
it would take eighty days to swim to you.
Sometimes it feels as if you are in England
and I’m standing on the Atlantic’s opposite shore.
Sometimes it’s all I can do to dip my toes in the water.
Sometimes I swim out till I start to fear
what swims with me. Always I turn back.
This time, I want to swim. Want to swim eighty days
if that’s what it takes, regardless how big the waves.
Want to swim eighty days no matter how cold.
Though the waves are big as our country.
Though I am exhausted and afraid of what I might find
on the shores of you. What I long to find: you,
swimming toward me. Want to meet you
at forty days, both of us ungrounded,
both of us vulnerable, both of us ready
to swim toward safety together.
Synaptic Plasticity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brain, dancing, grandmother, memory, Mimi, synapse on May 11, 2025| 5 Comments »
The way the eagles return to the same nests,
this is the way the mind sometimes returns
to the same memory—as if the mind wings across
all other branching neurons to ever arrive
at the same comfortable place. There are,
of course, many other places to land,
some of them perhaps more beautiful,
more sturdy. Still the mind returns to that
one moment. As tonight when my thoughts again
migrate to the summer evening when my grandmother
and I danced in our old white living room,
a waltz on the radio and her leading me in
the one, two, three, one, two three steps
that she loved. And her hair is white
and pinned up high. And her lips are red
and her nails are red and she smells like
cigarettes and Toujours Moi. There are
millions of other moments we shared,
so why do I always alight here first?
Perhaps for the thrill of her sharing her joy
which so often she did not share.
Tonight, as on that night, the long summer light
streams through the window, weaves into
the nest of memory as if to strengthen it the way
an eagle might weave in new sticks, new lichen,
new grass, so that the next time the mind
wants to arrive here, the memory will be waiting,
even softer, even more home than before.