When I say Happy New Year,
I hear my grandmother’s voice
inside my voice, the way
she slapped the first syllable,
the way silence hung for a moment
before she finished the rest of the phrase.
HAP-py New Year!
Each time I say the words, she
is so alive in that moment—
the syllables themselves
wear her bright red nails,
her signature updo
and her rhinestone earrings.
HAP-py New Year!
I sing out again and again,
loving how she enters
each conversation this day.
There are small ways
to bring our beloveds back,
little rituals so strong they
defy the loss, so strong
that each time we do them
we become more and more
who we love. Her voice
becomes my voice and her
joy becomes my joy.
I don’t have to look in the mirror
to see she is here, her smile
my smile curving up from the inside.
Posts Tagged ‘grandmother’
January 1
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, death, grandmother, language, loss, new years on January 2, 2021| 3 Comments »
I Return to the Night after My Grandfather’s Funeral
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, grandfather, grandmother, grief on October 10, 2020| 6 Comments »
My grandmother asked me that night
to sleep with her in her bed.
Though I was thirty-something,
I knew little of loss. I remember
the great weight of her as she slipped
into the soft white sheets—
a mountain inside a woman’s body.
I wore a long flannel gown with tiny violets
and she a thin flannel robe, slightly pilled and well worn,
with tiny embroidered roses.
We hardly spoke. She did not cry.
Any night stitched with that much sorrow
will linger in the heart for a lifetime.
I did not hold her—nor did she seem
to wish to be held. And when I return
to that night in my mind, I don’t try
to rewrite it. She sleeps on her side of the bed.
I sleep where my grandfather used to sleep.
I listen for the eventual slow tide of her breath.
But I am not the same version of myself
who shared a bed with her then.
Now, when I lie down beside her,
I know something more of how vast
an emptiness can be. How it can feel as if
a whole garden has been ripped up by its roots.
How sometimes in the dark, though we know
there are stars, we simply can’t open our eyes.
Remembering My Grandmother
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged granddaughter, grandmother, softness, time on July 15, 2020| 3 Comments »
for Merry
I loved to sit on that green and white swirled couch,
loved even more to sit on it with my grandmother.
Everything about her was soft. Her wrinkled hands,
her sagging face, her bosom-y body she was forever
trying to slim. Her voice was cloudlike. Her laughter,
fine gauze. And her eyes ever met me with silk-strong love.
Why do I always return to that one afternoon
when she let me sit beside her, reading her poem
after poem, as if she had no garden to tend, no meal
to make, no hymns to practice for Sunday’s service.
Forty years later, in my kitchen, I’m still with her on the couch,
hoping we’ll stay that way just a little longer.
Decorating the Tree
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, grandmother, mother, ornament, parenting, poem, poetry, tree on December 17, 2018| 7 Comments »
And usually, at some point
in the tree trimming, when the living room
is covered in twenty-year-old tissues
and my fingers are raw from the needles
and the rest of the family
has long since tired of the project,
around then, I start to wonder
what it’s really for, all this bustle
and embellishment and then,
like today, I’ll pick up an ornament—
say the one my grandmother made
from a metal cookie cutter trimmed
in blue ribbon and angel hair,
and inside it sleep two baby figurines,
a pink one for me, a blue for my brother—
and I am weeping,
remembering how I would stare at this ornament
as a child, how beautiful it was
dangling so high on the tree
where all the more delicate ornaments would go.
I was small then, but I knew
my grandmother made that ornament
with me in mind and I loved her for her thoughtfulness.
She is gone this year, and I marvel
at how present she is in this room
as I sing “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”
with Aaron Neville and remember singing
carols with her in the church loft,
her soprano warbling and true.
And I climb the ladder to hang
the ornament high on the tree,
where the more delicate ornaments go.
And suddenly I see it is my son and daughter
sleeping in that ornament,
there where I thought it was my brother and me.
And I think of my mother’s hands
all those years she hung that ornament
reverently, and how the spruce needles
would have pricked her, too, and I
sing with Aaron about peace to men on earth,
and some of that peace slips into me,
so silently, so silently.
In the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, garden, granddaughter, grandmother, merry stoll, planting, poem, poetry on May 26, 2018| 6 Comments »
for Merry Stoll
After I learn that she died,
I go to the garden, grateful
that there are petunias,
cosmos and snapdragons
to plant. Salvia, pansies, and
verbena that will drape its purple
kindness down the sides
of the planter. I don’t
put on my gloves. I let my hands
enter the soil and feel
how good the earth is.
This is how I best remember her,
with a trowel or a scissors in her hand,
ready to transplant, to trim,
to harvest the blooms
into a bouquet for the altar
or table. Flowers hung
in her garage to dry. Flowers
in her bathrooms, her dining room,
her kitchen. It came easy to her,
which stem to place where.
Which color, which ribbon,
which grass, which vase.
She left beauty all over the place.
Once she sat with me
on her green and white couch,
and let me read her poems,
a whole book of them.
We sat there for hours,
and she listened and laughed
at Shel Silverstein’s antics,
and as I read, I felt like a flower,
like something just at the edge
of bloom. Her attention
made me beautiful.
Today, the garden is just starting
to find itself after winter. I cannot help
but weep into the holes I have dug.
It is tender, this moment, and fragile
this life. I feel like making wild pledges—
to honor her legacy—to find
and share beauty everywhere I go.
I feel determined to keep my word.
Moon River and Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grandmother, moon river, poem, poetry, song on May 20, 2018| 8 Comments »
for Merry
Though she could barely carry
a conversation, she could still sing,
so I would sit by her nursing home bed
and sing Moon River and her eyes
might not even open, but
her lips would start to move,
wider than a mile, I’m crossing
you in style someday.
Her voice was wobbly, perhaps,
but her notes were true,
and she’d smile as she sang.
Old dream maker, you
heart breaker, wherever you’re goin’,
I’m goin’ your way.
She’d been nowhere but
this bed for years,
but I could see behind her eyes
she was aiming toward some
imperceptible future,
a drifter, off to see the world
beyond this one.
And I would hold her hand
and she would squeeze it.
If she could hear the tears
in my voice, she didn’t say so.
We’d sung together since I was a girl,
show tunes in her kitchen
and hymns from the choir loft in the church.
Her soprano, a beacon of my childhood.
Now, in a room far from her,
I light a candle as she drifts away,
and sing as if she could hear me,
there’s such a lot of world to see,
my voice cloudy, as if any moment
it might start to rain and that
rainbow’s end might appear,
and for a moment, we could
look at it together before
she goes around the bend, alone.
Slowly, In Three
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anapest, daughter, generation, grandmother, legacy, memory, waltz on February 11, 2016| 3 Comments »
recite this aloud, please, for Mimi, for Vivi, for me
Mama, she says,
can we waltz?
and we do,
we step one
two, three, one,
two three cross-
ing the room,
and again
I am five
and my grand-
ma and I
are alone
in the house
and my feet
are on hers
and we’re danc-
ing around
and she hums
with the ra-
dio, hums
with low light,
and we waltz,
and we waltz
there’s a blaze
in her eyes
as we one,
two three, oh
how I miss
her tonight.
Dear Mimi,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged generations, grandmother, heritage, poem, poetry on March 3, 2015| 3 Comments »
Last night while I was washing dishes,
I said to my daughter, “How do you like them apples?”
and she said, “What does that mean?”
which means she never knew you.
Funny how when I said it, I heard your voice,
not my own.
I told her, “Oh, that’s something my grandma
used to say. It just means, How do you like that?”
I didn’t cry then, thinking of how you never met,
but I did cry about it later. She wears your name,
just as I do, you know. Rose. There is sorrow and honor
in that one long-stemmed syllable.
I know you would love her.
She likes to dress up, even wears the shiny blue sparkling
clip on earrings I saved from you. Someday
perhaps, when she is a mother,
standing beside the kitchen sink,
her hands warm with soapy water,
she’ll be telling a story and finish it up with
“How do you like them apples?”
And if her child looks at her
in that curious way, she’ll reply,
“It’s just something my mother used to say.”
Love,
Rosemerry
My Grandmother and I Go Tubing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grandmother, inner tubing, memory, poem, poetry on April 29, 2014| 3 Comments »
For millions of years, the river has surged
through the canyon. But in the ninety years
since my grandma was born, only once
did we find ourselves together on the water,
our feet dangling from the black rubber tubes,
the current pulling us through the ancient rock walls.
We did not notice the history around us, nor how
this day would become our history. We noticed
the chill, the white spray of the shallow rapid ahead,
the bump of the smooth river rocks on our bums,
the small gray dippers slipping beneath the surface.
How could we have known then that this
would be our last time, even though it was the first?
We were untethered, free floating, no thought
of the future, no thought of the past, curious only
about who floated faster and who laughed loudest.
We paddled with our hands and promised
not to splash each other, though we did anyway.
And we made up songs along the way.
It was that kind of day, the kind that seems
to wear in its folds the scent of forever.
Thirty years later, steeped in winter,
though forever is lost something returns—
a scrap of tune, a quickening of the breath,
my grandmother’s face still so full of life,
the black tube absorbing and giving back
the warmth of that old, old light.
Unutterable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, granddaughter, grandmother, love, poem on March 22, 2013| 1 Comment »
She slumps at the table. It is shiny,
and like everything else here, it looks new,
everything else except the bodies, gnarled
and sloppy, hunched in and frail.
I cry in an instant, when, from across the room,
I see her, her face sunken,
her eyes closed, as if she is dreaming
she is somewhere else, beyond this room
with its scent of cabbage and medicine.
I do not want her to see me cry, but I walk
toward her table as fast as I dare, coming
to stand behind her wheelchair and kissing her on the head.
I say her name, I say it soft as the kiss that lands
in her short white hair. I say it soft as if the syllables
will break, or perhaps as if I will break in the speaking
of them. I tell her my name, not sure she’ll remember it.
Please, don’t let her see me cry. She opens
her eyes and finds me, and though English
does not have an elative case, we translate
with our eyes. She says my name, with what?
Surprise? And her signature gratitude. I notice her hands,
swollen and blue. And I kiss her head. And I kiss
her lips. Perhaps words will come later. I kiss her again.