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Archive for May, 2025

Right Now, Mid-Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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Last Days

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 20, 2025| 4 Comments »




In the end, my father couldn’t
raise his arm to feed himself.
Couldn’t sit. Could barely open
his eyes. But damn, could he love.
He could still curl his thick
fingers around my hand.
Could still say my name.
And though I had never known
a moment when I was not sure
this man loved me, in those last days
I knew it more. Somehow, barely
able to speak, he drenched me
in his devotion. In those last days,
all was reduced to love. Or was it
all was expanded to love? Either
way. Somehow I hadn’t known
how love can take over a body.
A life. The purity of it. The gift.

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One Affirmation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on May 19, 2025| 8 Comments »


 
cupping the truth in my hands
until my own palms
glow

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Most moments

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , 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.

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One Unframeable

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 17, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
in a room of priceless art
I keep turning toward
my daughter’s smile

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Shining

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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One Role Model

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on May 15, 2025| 4 Comments »

leaf sinks to the bottom—
even the river too tired
to hold up everything

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One Missed Opportunity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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

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Opposite Sides

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , 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.

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Synaptic Plasticity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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.

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