this infinite book of life
and me still re-reading
chapter one
Posts Tagged ‘life’
One Stuck
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, life, stuck on February 9, 2021| 2 Comments »
Forecast
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, life, loss, Neruda on October 11, 2020| 6 Comments »
Nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
—Pablo Neruda, “October Fullness,” trans. Alistair Reid
And if we can keep nothing of what we have
then let us love more right now. Naked as sunlight
and unapologetic as ripe apples. Let’s invent
new compassions and conjure new kindnesses
out of what seems to be dust.
And if life is only a borrowing of bones,
then let us use them well while we may.
Just today I ran through the corn maze
and marveled at the joy of being lost.
Bless these borrowed femurs and spines.
Bless these borrowed skulls.
And let us love more right now.
Though the forecast is for loss.
Learning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, learning, life, shadow, tree on July 26, 2020| 2 Comments »
Today the shadows
teach me to love
what is dim,
the sweet respite
of obscurity
when the sun
is too much
and a tree
yields its shape
so that I might slip
my clumsy heat
out of the bounds
of the vertical world
and find instead
a cool dark pool
on the ground,
as if I’m a boat
that has discovered
at last
a slim calm eddy
in which I might rest.
This is perhaps
the way we start
to meet our deaths—
sliding into the relief
of these dark, quiet
channels.
After Hearing the Heartbreaking News
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, life, sadness, shoes on May 8, 2020| 15 Comments »
Tonight, life wears me like
an old pair of shoes. The kind
it can slip its feet into
without untying the laces.
The kind of shoes a mother
would probably throw out
thinking of the act as a favor.
Life is tired, tonight,
of running. Doesn’t want
to dress to impress. It just
wants to know that it goes on,
especially tonight when
events seem to point
to the contrary. And so
though I am down at the heel
and shabby, life slips into me
as if life depended on it.
And we walk in the moonlight,
cry. And howl. Then take another step.
And then another.
Making Apple Turnovers with my Daughter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cooking, directions, life, parenting, time on April 30, 2020| 4 Comments »
My own fault for not reading all the directions
on how to make puff pastry from scratch—
how after the shaggy dough phase, you shape
and then chill. And then roll and fold and roll
and shape the dough. And chill. And then roll
and fold and roll and fold. And chill. Then roll
and slice. And chill. And fill. And chill. So often,
mid project, I find myself thinking I would never
have started this project had I known
how long it would take. Flour on my pants,
on the floor, on the table.
Six hours later, nearly midnight, my daughter
and I baste the chilled triangles with water,
sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar,
then put them in the oven at last. We are tired,
but the house fills with the sweet scent
of baking apple, the home-rich scent of crust.
What is life, but a big project we are in the middle of?
A project I’m in no hurry to finish.
In fact, these days are like puff pastry dough,
guiding me to take it slow, slower, to rest
between steps. I haven’t read all the directions.
For now I am laughing. It’s so much more
than I thought I was in for. But I’m here,
hands ready. I’m willing to work, to clean up the mess.
- photo by Finn Trommer
Re-Seeing the Obvious
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, life, miracle, poem, poetry, pregnancy, what is living this life on November 12, 2019| 2 Comments »
When pregnant, it was clear
I was along for the ride with a miracle.
Sure, I could eat organic broccoli,
walk and eschew caffeine,
but that was just taking care
of the vessel. Life itself
was doing the real work.
Imagine my surprise today
to realize I’m still along for the ride.
How did I ever kid myself
that I was in charge?
And oh, the bliss today
to notice anew these hands,
these eyes, these feet!
What joy to see them again
as the miracle they are,
to offer them in service to life.
They Say It’s the Best Bloom in Ten Years
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bluebonnets, death, flower, friendship, life, love, poem, poetry, wildflowers on March 29, 2019| 6 Comments »
She wants to go see the bluebonnets, she says.
This is after she tells me they’ve said she has three months to live.
And I want to find her vast fields of bluebonnets,
acres and acres of white-tipped blue bloom.
And I want to send her more springs to see them in,
more days to live one day at a time. I want to remove
the pain in her belly, the pain that aggressively grows.
I want to make deals with the universe. Want to say no
to the way things are. I want to tell death to wait.
I want to tell life to find a way. I want to hug her
until she believes she’s beloved. I want to give her
the pen that will write every brave thing
that she’s been unable to say. There are days
when we feel how uncompromising it is, the truth.
How human we are. There are days when the bluebonnets
stretch as far as the eye can see. There are days
we know nothing is more important than going to see them,
a billion blue petals all nodding in the wind, teaching us to say yes.
Details
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, friendship, gratitude, life, loss, poem, poetry on March 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I fell in love, today, with the black
and blue marker stains on the table
made by the two-year-old boy—
he colored in the circles he’d drawn
with so much enthusiasm that the ink
seeped through the paper
and into the lemon cream paint on the table
where no amount of scrubbing could remove it.
It wasn’t so much the stain though, no,
and it wasn’t the color. What I fell in love with
was the way his mother didn’t see
that the table was ruined. She saw
that he did such a fine, precise job,
that he took so much pleasure in the coloring.
And when I apologized for bringing markers
that didn’t easily wash, she looked at me
with so much surrender and said,
“On a day like today,
who could worry about a table?”
It was yesterday they found the dog
waiting beside the car.
It was this morning the skier’s body was found
in a massive snow slide.
It was all day, through the stupor of loss,
I fell in love with the shape of empty branches,
the scent of black tea, the sound
of my son’s voice, fell in love
with the grace in the way my friend shrugged
when she saw the table, the way she hugged
her son. She offered me chocolate from London.
We ate the squares slowly. All day the gray edge
of grief made every little thing
more precious, more sweet.
The Diagnosis
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, death, doctor, life, poem, poetry on January 5, 2019| 3 Comments »
Well, he said, I’ve seen it before.
You have all the symptoms.
Fairly common, actually.
You have life. It’s terminal.
I will give you, oh, about
forty years to live. Some people
really pull through, make the most
out of what they have left.
As he walked away, I listened
to his footsteps until all I could hear
was the sound of my own breathing.
God, it was beautiful, a tide, a river.
And that plant in the corner, have you
ever seen anything so delicate, so green?
After Reading about the Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, life, poem, poetry on December 27, 2018| 6 Comments »
It is the work of the living
to grieve the dead. It is our work
to wonder how else the story
could have gone. It is our work
to weep and worry, and it is
our work to heal. The clouds
hide the moon, hide the sun, sometimes
for days. We don’t believe
it will be forever. Some part of us
knows not only hope, but patience.
It is the work of the living
to love even deeper
in the face of death, to know ourselves
as flowers on the pathway,
easily crushed. The world crushes.
Some stems spring back,
some never rise again.
We know we must be resilient,
but resilience has wings
and sometimes flies away.
It is the work of the living
to, against all odds, grow wings.
It is our work to live—
and work it sometimes is.
It is our work to show up again
and again and again, genies
who refuse to go back in the bottle,
lovers who ever insist on love,
stems that feel sunlight and,
though we can’t yet move,
let it encourage our being.