She’s always ready to run to the rescue,
trained in putting out housefires,
wildland fires, grease fires, electrical fires.
Explosions? She’s prepared to vent,
quench, flank and set up a collapse zone.
Child swallowed a ring?
She arrives in minutes.
Accident on the street? She’s pulling on
her uniform before the call is over.
She’s saved me thousands of times.
She’s always been like this—
keen to fix any problem. Capable. Strong.
I’m stunned by her abs, her biceps,
her focus as she goes where she’s needed.
Who could blame her for wanting
to put out this fire that’s been flaring
in me for almost three years.
Please, I say, don’t put it out.
It just needs to burn.
She eyes me strangely.
But it’s taking down whole structures,
she says. I nod.
Whole structures, I agree.
So much I knew is now ash.
But—she says, extinguisher in hand.
Please, I say. It’s okay if it all comes down.
I’m thinking of how much more I can see
as unnecessary things I’ve built submit.
It is in her to fix. To save. To make things better
in the way she knows how.
But she is learning to trust me in this
as I am learning to trust the wisdom of flame.
She shakes her head and walks away.
I watch as the fire continues to blaze.
Posts Tagged ‘loss’
Making Peace with My Inner Fire Fighter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fire, grief, inner conflict, loss, trust on April 4, 2024| 22 Comments »
After I Told Them About Our Two Daughters, They Asked If We Had More Children
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, difficult conversation, loss, what is unsaid on March 10, 2024| 13 Comments »
today’s poem mentions suicide–I mention this so you can choose if you wish to read it
There’s no easy way to say it.
I told them. Our son died.
They were sitting across
from us, our new neighbors,
afternoon sun streaming
into the room with low spring gold.
Their grandson sat on our floor,
a teaspoon the only toy I had for him.
He mouthed it with quiet joy.
Was it an accident? she asked.
He chose to take his own life, I said.
The words hung in the air
like dust that sparkles
then seems to disappear.
What I did not say:
Once we sat on this couch
and read books, watched Peter Pan,
built pirate forts with pillows, searched
for Waldo and snuggled when it rained.
Once he, too, chewed on my teaspoons,
before he built computers and
took AP Statistics and helped me buy a Ford.
They murmured, I’m sorry,
because that’s what people say
when there is nothing else to say.
I realized I needed nothing more.
When the talk soon turned
to bonfires and building permits,
I did not mind. It was enough
to have acknowledged he was here.
What I did not say, but somehow said:
Just because he’s dead
doesn’t mean he’s gone.
We have three children—
two daughters and a son.
Loving You No Matter What
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, healing, helplessness, joy, loss, rainbow on March 3, 2024| 10 Comments »
for Dan
Still, this longing to help.
I want to write the impossible poem,
the one that would make what is terrible
less terrible, want to give you
something useful as a tool belt,
practical as long division, hopeful
as the grace that rises out of our losses
as surely as sunshine rises
at the end of our valley.
There was that cold March morning,
years ago, when you grabbed my hand
and pulled me toward the street
to see a rainbow of ice crystals
glowing bright in the east.
An ice rainbow! you shouted,
your joy so feral, so real it became my joy.
God, how I needed it.
That. I want to give you that.
*
After Talking About Vulnerability
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged certainty, hats, loss, vulnerability on February 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
I just want something
I can hang my hat on, she said.
But the mortarboard didn’t hang on education.
The government’s white wig fell off.
The tiara slipped from beauty.
The skullcap blew off the church.
No hat she hung could stay.
The ball cap fell off the firm body.
Art couldn’t keep the beret.
Even the mesh net
of the beekeeper’s wide brim
fell away, fell away, it all falls away.
Which is to say nothing stays.
Not the dodo. Not the dino.
Not the houses we live in.
Not our firm young skin.
Not a father, not a son.
Not sunshine. Not rain.
Not empires. Not cats.
Not the first crushing fist of heartbreak.
Not nightmares. Not bruises.
Not hats.
She let herself drift
in what was left, her head bare,
hands empty, heart open,
eyes wide. The sun stroked
her shoulder. She breathed in
the musky scent that arrives
on the wind just before spring.
Nothing was certain. She stood alone
at the edge of every possible thing
no hat in hand, and listened
to the chickadee sing.
Still Breaking Open
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, losing the self, loss, love on February 15, 2024| 4 Comments »
Surely you know. Surely,
whatever happens to the soul
after we die is capable of feeling
the love of those still living,
can attune to it like a bell.
Tonight, alone, I relish
the chance to miss you—
to miss you so much
I crawl into the missing
the way you once crawled
into my lap and held to me
until the world was nothing
and the holding was everything.
I want to crawl into the love
that still burns in me
and disappear in it,
let it take me completely
until there is nothing left
to burn. I want it
and I don’t want it.
I love this world too much
to want to leave and yet
I want to be so in service to love
that there is nothing left of me
but rampant, self-shattering love.
I want everything but love
to burn to ash. Want everything
but love to be blown away
like dross, like chaff.
Want all that is left of me
to be this feral heart
still opening, though
it seems it couldn’t possibly
break open any more,
yet I marvel as it opens again, again
into, how is it possible?
more love.
Talking to My Son at Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, mother, nothing, silence, son, stars on December 13, 2023| 9 Comments »
I miss you, I say to the stars,
The stars are not you,
but always they seem to listen,
as if what I have to say is important.
I miss you, I say again.
The stars never talk back.
Still, I listen for a response.
When I say I miss you,
I mean I’ve barely begun to understand
what missing you means.
Though I live it every day.
Though missing you infuses every breath.
Though missing you shapes me—
especially at night when I’m alone
and I find myself talking with stars.
I miss you, I say to the stars.
I hear nothing in response.
I let myself be cradled
by that nothing.
Tonight I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, letting go, loss, memory, shoes on November 16, 2023| 18 Comments »
how he resisted learning
to tie his own shoes,
how I cheered
when he learned
to pinch the laces
between his fingers,
knotting and looping
and pulling them tight,
making a bow
that would stay.
How I encouraged
the very thing
that allowed him
to walk away.
Oh, sweet woman
I was then,
beginning to learn
letting go.
Now that he’s gone,
I’m a student
of being loosened,
untied, undone,
still practicing
how to let him go.
Is
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emptiness, grief, loss, presence on October 7, 2023| 11 Comments »
On the highway, an empty space
where you are not driving. At the college,
a chair where you don’t learn.
In this room, a tall and slender empty space
where you are not. Not whistling,
not closing your eyes and humming,
not eating noodles, not reading the news.
Everywhere I am, this space you will never be.
Not in Ohio. Not in the woods with walnuts falling.
Not laughing with these new friends.
Not in these hands and not in these arms
and not in these words where you are
because you are not.
I would not fill these emptinesses
with anything else is. They are anything
but empty, these spaces of you.
True Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cemetery, generosity, graveyard, kindness, labor day, loss, tears on September 16, 2023| 9 Comments »
with enormous thanks to Kristen
In this story, the grave keeper
is a woman named Kristen.
She plants grass seed
where soils have been disturbed.
She pulls weeds by the roots
instead of poisoning them.
She learns the birthdays of the dead.
When a mother comes to sit
by her child’s tombstone,
the grave keeper gives her space,
but as the mother leaves,
she offers her a quiet smile, a hug.
Kristen knows the name of the child.
In this story, when the mother
leaves the graveyard,
dead flowers in her hands,
she is filled with no less grief,
but there is something generous
alive in her now, too,
soft as the new grass that thrives
around her son’s headstone,
loving as the grave keeper’s voice
when she whispered, Happy Birthday.
When the mother tells this story,
she weeps every time.
It’s not for sorrow
tears slip from her eyes.
In the Days Leading Up to His Death Anniversary
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death anniversary, grief, loss, memory, sensuousness, thisness on August 12, 2023| 17 Comments »
Strange how the body remembers
everything about this time of year—
the angle of light, the hue of sky,
the scent of almost rain,
the shape of the green beans
twisting on the vine. It remembers
the cool of the basement,
the curl of my hand as it slid
into his hand, remembers
the tilt of the hill where we drove,
the droning of bees in the sunflowers,
the brief blaze of fireflies.
It’s as if the shock of his death
opened every door of every sense
so I was flooded with life,
imprinted with the thisness of everything.
In these days leading up to his death,
life rings me, bell-like, again and again,
and I chime, charged with memory,
amazed how my own emptiness
is what allows for the world
to make in me such music,
so vital, so clear, so raw.