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Posts Tagged ‘college’

Reunion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 28, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
And though it has begun to rain
and the Bernedoodle jumps and squirms
between us and though it has been
thirty three years since last I saw her,
I want to linger in the yard when I hug Susie,  
and for a moment I am again eighteen
and we are snowshoeing up a fourteen-thousand-
foot peak. The winter sun is brilliant; we
are laughing and I’m exhausted and so alive,
and I am standing in a suburb as golden
leaves whirl and Susie is in velveteen pants,
her hair streaked gray, and she is not at all the same
girl I remember and also exactly the same,
meeting me with a smile, offering to carry
what is mine, speaking of gardens and knitting
and tea. And we’re on the summit of Mt. Elbert
and I wrap my arms around those girls we were.
I thank them for loving each other then,
how that love opens a door to this very moment
to create an intimacy that needed no tending,
as mullein seeds sometimes wait decades
before they bloom. I release Susie and bend
to nuzzle her puppy, a marvel of zeal and scruff.
Is it rain on my face, or tears? I take that young
girl I was by the hand. She walks inside with us.

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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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In Matthias Hall

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

Years later I wake in the night and remember

the way he banged on my bedroom door.

He was drunk and he begged me to let him in.

 

I was in my dorm room bed, and my best friend

was visiting. The interruption angered her

and she hissed in the dark, Don’t you dare.

 

I told him to go away. He didn’t.

He pounded and begged and shouted.

Please, he said, before I heard him crumple

 

at the base of the door where I believe

he fell asleep. By morning, he was gone.

It wasn’t only my door I had closed,

 

it was my heart. I didn’t understand then

that I was too frightened to let him in.

I didn’t comprehend how our fear

 

makes us small. Years later, I want

to open the door. I want to meet him

before the drunken night and tell him, I hear you.

 

I want to thank him for bringing me his heart.

I want to tell myself, You are capable

of sharing difficult feelings. I want

 

to write a new night and walk with him

through the dark, the only pounding

our fragile hearts.

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