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Posts Tagged ‘daughter’

Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 5, 2025| 9 Comments »


 
 
You would be jealous, I think,
of how your sister is learning trig,
speaking Spanish, playing bridge.
You’d probably tease her, but really,
what you’d be thinking is, She is so cool.
And she is, sweetheart. She’s fun
and silly. Like you. Only like her.
We talk about you, of course.
Just this weekend, we remembered
how once you said if a 99-pound person
ate a one-pound burger, they
would be one percent burger.
I wonder what percent of your sister
is grief? And what percentage love?
Tonight a girl asked her if she had any siblings.
She said, yes, a brother. When the girl
asked her how old you were, she told her
the truth. That you were seventeen
when you died. What a terrible gift
to learn how to say the hardest things straight.
I can’t help but think if you are watching her,
you, too, must be in awe of who she’s becoming.
Oh, how we learn to grow from whatever soil
we’ve been given. I do not pretend to know
how this works. I only know she
is learning to transform ache into beauty,
nightmare into dream. I only know
I long for her to know love from you
the way a garden feels loved by sun, by rain.

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Somehow Inside This Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 16, 2025| 4 Comments »

 
Every day has something in it whose name is Forever. 
—Mary Oliver, “Everything that was Broken”
 
 
The snow falls forever
into deepening drifts
and forever the mother
and daughter are fitting in
pieces of a puzzle that is
forever unfinished
and the cat purrs forever
in the lap of the girl
who is laughing forever
about the smallest
of things and the song
on the radio lasts forever
and the mother harmonizes
though forever she forgets
the words, and her tea
is forever not quite warm
in this sweet buried day
that she prays will last
forever though she knows
the other name for forever
is now, and now the snow
has stopped falling
and now the cat is asleep,
but how is it that
as the mother goes
to brush her teeth those
strands of forever have
stitched themselves into
her being and she carries
them into her dreams
with infinite other threads of forever,
even as forever carries her.

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One Expanding Awe

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 2, 2025| 4 Comments »


                  for Vivian
 
 
when she can’t stop
falling in love with the blush of sky
I can’t stop falling in love with her

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Tale of Two Moments

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 24, 2025| 2 Comments »



Holding my girl
on the couch,
came a moment
so tender because
I remembered
I will die—
what grace when,
minutes later,
lost in the bliss
of her warmth,
came a moment
so tender because
I forgot.

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One for My Daughter, Made of Water

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 14, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
the river must follow its channel,
but every cloud can tell you
water also flows up

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Celebrating Timothée Chalamet’s Birthday … Again

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 28, 2024| 1 Comment »

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
                  —Mary Oliver
 
 
I could not have imagined
how every year my daughter
and I would bake a chocolate beet cake
for Timothée Chalamet’s birthday—
nor could I have foreseen
how it would thrill me—
this sweet ritual in which we celebrate
the life of an actor who brings
us joy. Joy needs such a meager
door through which to enter and reveal
itself. A door I can’t imagine
with a handle I can’t find
except by loving the world
and the people in it.
I would have thought loving
made the heart more full.
And it does. But it makes
the heart more spacious, too,
a place where anything could happen,
even what is real: a daughter,
a mother, and hours in the kitchen
singing and stirring, the scent
of chocolate, earthy and nutty,
floating in the air like a song.
 

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Kinetic Joy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 21, 2024| 5 Comments »


                  for my daughter
 
 
It’s perhaps like billiards,
in which the cue ball collides
with another ball, and the kinetic
energy passes on to a second ball—
that’s how it is when you,
in your joy, collide with me in a hug,
and your joy passes on to me,
my every molecule vibrating
as your bliss becomes my bliss,
your joy becomes my joy, until
I’m dizzy with it, spinning with it,
rolling around the room with it,
in fact it’s what I was made for,
to be moved by you, by your joy.

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Falling Asleep with My Head in My Mom’s Lap

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 16, 2024| 11 Comments »


 
 
Mom slips her fingers through my hair;
my eyes close, and I am again
a sigh of a girl, a wisp made of trust,
and I don’t know where she goes,
the middle-aged version of me
who works, who carries, who forges on.
It’s not that I ask her to leave,
she just disappears as I curl deeper
into the den of dreams, my body limp
as a kitten picked up by the scruff.
Maybe I purr. I nuzzle in deeper.
I forget to remember there is anything
else to do. It’s a lifetime before I wake.

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One at The Nutcracker

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 15, 2024| 3 Comments »


 
 
so bright the light you carry—
watching you dance
I, too, am glowing

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Oh! de Perfume

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 10, 2024| 4 Comments »

I want to bottle it,
tonight’s drive
with my girl,
both of us singing
full voice,
so when I forget
how good it can be
in this world,
I can dab it
behind my ears
and inhale again
the joy of singing
through the dark
that brazenly,
that together.

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