So darn ugly, the quince,
pockmarked and shriveling,
lumpy and mottled,
sloughing their thin gray fuzz,
but from across the room,
I smell them, intensely sweet,
exotic and milky, rose-like,
honeyed, apple-ish.
They’re like a bowl of painful
memories I’d rather not look at
and yet find myself nose-deep
in them by choice, astonished
at how complex it all is.
Ache. Beauty. Repulsion.
Desire. What most moves us
is seldom simple. Or perhaps
it is simple as this: The world
is full of the strangest gifts.
Like the scent of the quince
floral and tart. Like that
memory I once ran from
that now is treasure
to my heart.
Posts Tagged ‘gift’
Strange
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, memory, paradox, quince on November 8, 2025| 9 Comments »
What Can’t Be Lost
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, gift, lost, mother, spoon on July 22, 2025| 4 Comments »
Again I search the drawer
for my small silver spoon
with the Space Needle
on the handle, the one
my mother bought me
when I was not yet two
and we lived in Seattle.
How I loved that spoon,
bringing it with me everywhere
I’ve moved—to college, grad school,
to the top of a mountain,
to a low river valley. I love
the shape of it, sure,
the way the bowl of the spoon
is pointed and shallow,
perfect for small bites
of vanilla ice cream.
Mostly, what I love
is thinking of how my mother,
who had so little then,
wanted to buy her daughter
a treasure. It’s been years
since the last time I touched it.
It’s disappeared many times,
my own young children as enamored
with the spoon as I, and so
I have found the spoon behind the couch
or beneath their beds or left outside
on the arm of a lawn chair,
sometimes even back in its slot
in the drawer.
So for years, I’ve assumed
the spoon will return.
To this day, I don’t think of it as lost.
How could I, when every time
I eat yogurt or ice cream or oatmeal,
I look in the drawer for the spoon,
which is to say every day I touch the spoon
with my mind, every day I remember
the way a mother bought her daughter
a treasure, I think of the love, and every day,
even when it’s not here, it’s so here.
The Bear
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift on April 30, 2025| 2 Comments »
for Linda Keetch
In a room where I have never been,
I walk in to find a small brown teddy bear
sits on a couch. Envelope in his lap.
On the envelope, my name.
There are thousands, maybe millions
of ways people show up to say
I am here to help you carry
the weight of your life.
This is how a light tan bear
who sits at eight inches tall
is big enough to embody
a forest-sized compassion.
This is how the soft plush of his belly
becomes a wide portal
through which love can reach
to meet us exactly as we are,
which changes nothing
and everything.
The Gift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amaryllis, beauty, gift, grace on December 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
How does the amaryllis bulb do it,
store so much life inside its thin brown
wrapping? How, from such a small
round package, does such a large
stem continue to rise? I don’t know
how it offers such abundance
from such a small space, but
whatever grace it is that infuses
the amaryllis, I want to believe
it could happen anywhere—
so that a country or a woman
or even a minute could be
a gift wrapped in nothing more
than its own dry skin, a gift
that surprises the world as it
produces extravagant beauty
day after day, perhaps even
surprising itself as, seemingly
from nothing, it begins to bloom.
As I Walked Out the Door
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift, language, resilience, Wendy Videlock, word on May 3, 2024| 8 Comments »
for Wendy
Into my hand, she pressed
a smooth rock she’d painted copper.
In all capital letters, turquoise and navy,
she’d written the word RESILIENCE.
Beneath it she’d drawn a lopsided helix.
I thought of her own spiraling with death.
Two years later, she volunteers
to teach in schools and dances
before breakfast every morning
with her husband in their living room.
She finds compassion for tough neighbors
and welcomes the wayward into her home.
She knows in every cell
the definition of resilience,
and so when she offered me
resilience on a rock,
I felt it, the full invitation
to be both grounded and vital,
to be both solid and springing,
the chance to be both the anchor
and the hand that reaches as if to say
come on, let’s leap, I’ll show you how.
Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino, 2004
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged complexity, container, gift, memory, wine on August 17, 2023| 14 Comments »
with thanks to Rae
Inside the glass bottle,
the wine from Sangiovese grapes—
aged in oak barrels for three years—
continues to age,
losing its youthful fruitiness,
becoming more heady,
more sour cherry, more rose.
A glass of such wine is like
a drinkable love letter to change.
So when the sommelier’s wife
gifts me a vintage from the year
my son was born,
I taste more than raspberry,
dried flowers, coconut and tobacco.
I taste deep red.
I taste rolling down grassy hills
and painting our faces with mud.
I taste sleepless nights and midnight fears.
Homework at the table.
Camping in the desert.
The vinosity of devotion.
Late summer swims in the pond.
The glass empty long before
I wish it were done.
Thirty Years Later, I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, love, step mother on July 8, 2023| 4 Comments »
for Shawnee, my step-daughter, on her 40th birthday
How generously she let me into her life.
How we sang songs about Cowboy Joe in the car
and read books out loud on the couch.
I remember falling on the floor laughing
about a silly joke that wasn’t really funny,
except it hit us just right in the right moment.
To this day we laugh about Chesterfield.
I remember river trips and watching her
snowboard in a straight line down
the black diamond run, her sure path
the only track through the powder.
There are gifts we never could expect—
like the way a girl can make a home in our hearts
and never leave, her life like a flower
that someone else planted, and yet
I have been lucky enough to be part
of the garden soil that helps her grow.
And my god, she is beautiful as she grows,
beautiful as with tender hands,
she plants new flowers of her own.
Listening to “Our Birthright”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dad, gift, New York, singing on March 21, 2022| 8 Comments »
composed by Jeffrey Nytch, conducted by Elizabeth Swanson
Sitting in the red velvet chair
in the first tier box of Carnegie Hall,
I was well aware
that for some in the audience,
this was just another song being sung,
one more moment of beauty
in a long string of moments of beauty,
but for me, looking down at that stage
full of singers, the pianist, the conductor,
I saw, too, the same space thirty-seven years ago
when my father and I sat in chairs on the stage
and listened to Vladimir Ashkenazy play piano
and my dad whispered to me,
This is only the first time
you’ll be on stage at Carnegie Hall.
So when one hundred twenty people
began to sing words I wrote,
their voices both thundersome and tender,
I lived into the chance to be who
my dad believed I could be,
the chance to live through music,
the chance to grow into a dream.
Hand Me Downs from My Best Friend’s Mom
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, homage, legacy, memory, self-knowledge on January 7, 2022| 12 Comments »
for Janet Kaye Schoeberlein, March 26, 1930-Dec. 28, 2021
When I was fourteen, Jan gave me her flannel nightgowns,
the long white ones with tiny blue flowers
that I had admired on her for years.
When I wore them, I wore
the classical music always playing
in the background in her home.
I wore the high tilting treble of her voice
as she sang around the campfire.
I wore her world class hiccups that always
seemed to arrive when she didn’t approve
of what was about to happen.
I wore desert river adventures
and trips to the theater downtown
and dinners with foods I’d never tried before.
And though I didn’t know it then,
I wore the past of her childhood in Germany,
and her memory of how she graduated law school
as the only woman in her class.
I wore her willingness to raise her young nephew
and her joy in raising her daughter
and the way she always said my name
as if I were a south American flower.
Those nightgowns, I took their shape,
loved the way their soft cloth swirled
around my body, wrapping me in eccentricity.
I still wear the other hand me downs she gave me—
Curiosity. Independence. Individuality.
Because she was so herself,
she taught me I could trust myself to be me.
She was the queen of oddness,
a model of uniqueness,
an archetype of being true.
To this day I feel these qualities
swirl around me, too—
the comfort of her integrity
the warmth of her generosity,
the way Jan was so very, very Jan.