for Jen Meyer It was innocent to start, how Jenny and I gathered the dried bits of cacti that had fallen on the trail in the desert dome in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Inside the dome, it was hot; outside, snow, and at eight years old, we had never before seen anything so prickly, raised as we were amongst trillium and violets. Perhaps the docents had told us not to touch. Surely we knew better than to take something we found, but we gathered the strange and spiky rounds like the treasure they were and carried them in our knit hats. Years later, I can’t recall how we were caught. But I remember the sting of thousands of hair-thin spines in my scalp, my skin. That was how I learned something unusual and beautiful could also be cruel, that some things will hurt you simply because that is how they are made. But oh, how I love that girl, the one who wanted so badly to touch and be touched by the world. Keep touching, I want to tell her. Even when it hurts. There is so much you will never know any other way. |
Posts Tagged ‘memory’
In the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cacti, domes, healing, memory, pain on July 1, 2024| 12 Comments »
Preserving Sweetness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apples, intention, legacy, memory, mom on June 27, 2024| 13 Comments »
The whole house smelled
of ripening then the day mom
made apples into sauce.
The heat from the stove
made the small kitchen
swelter, and the autumn air
almost shined with the bright
scent of Jonathan, Pippin,
Winesap, Cortland.
Her arms were strong then,
straining to push the blushing
pink mash through the sieve,
slow and stiff with the effort.
Perhaps there is a language
somewhere that has a word
for this: the way something sweet
can linger, how it flows over,
around and through the body
like the cidery scent of apples
till it lodges itself in the memory.
Oh Mama, I want to serve this
sweetness to you now,
the memory of you stirring
with two good, strong arms,
the way you put all of who you were
into the smallest of acts,
how fifty years later,
what you did that one afternoon
still matters.
What Lives On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged joy, mariachi, memory, music on March 13, 2024| 10 Comments »
It didn’t last, but there was that afternoon
when we were walking side by side
down the middle of the street,
all four of us straddling the center line,
different musicians every few blocks.
It was Father’s Day. The alpine sun
was hot but not unbearable, and we stopped
to listen to the bright brass of the mariachi band.
My kids were not embarrassed when I hummed along
to Guantanamera—or at least they did not tell me so.
We laughed about I don’t remember what, but
I remember the laughter and the light,
easy feeling I had, a full-body certainty
everything was going to be okay.
I remember how our shadows
stretched out on the street in front of us
like a future I could not read.
I fell in love with the shape of our shadows,
not knowing how soon there would be only three.
These moments of gladness—
like notes in the summer air, they don’t stay.
But they stitch themselves into our being,
a goodness that lives and lives,
sometimes hidden for years until
it sings back to life with joy so real
I can almost feel the sun on my back,
can almost hear all of our voices
join the chorus for La Bamba.
Even now, alone in my quiet room,
my smile is as real as the tightness
in my chest, as real as those trumpets,
real, that blue, blue sky.
If the Heart Could Dog Ear a Day, There Would Be This Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, daughter, grace, memory, photograph, rain, reverence on March 12, 2024| 11 Comments »
The autumn rain was not warm, but soft,
the kind that makes everything shine.
Even the sidewalk. Even a Tuesday.
Likely the air smelled of leaves and cut grass.
Likely the birds were a riotous chorus,
because that’s how it is here in fall.
What I remember so clear is how you
rushed out the front door
in your favorite hand-me-down dress
with brown velvet polka dots
and a pink satin sash—
mighty fancy for a day spent at home—
and began to dance on the driveway,
both arms lifting into the drizzle,
an elegant twist to both small wrists,
one leg stretched straight,
your bare toes pointed to the pavement,
your face raised up to the rain.
It’s your smile that startles me,
then and now, a look of deep contentment,
measureless pleasure in being.
Over ten years later, I still see it in you,
something utterly unfakeable, wildly true,
the capacity for joy beyond the frame.
It vibrates in me like the tone
of a gong struck gentle and long,
until I too am shining
with trembling reverence,
astonished by the grace that’s here.
Even when it’s gray. Grayer. Even when it’s cold.
Woodsy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle, hiking, memory, mountain, spruce, trees on January 18, 2024| 8 Comments »
somewhere above Telluride, Colorado
If you close your eyes and just breathe in,
then it’s sixteen years ago and we’re off the trail
roaming through damp autumn woods.
The duff is soft with needles, moss,
and the air is scented with resinous spruce—
fresh and woodsy, tangy, bright.
Sun filters into the evergreen glade
to kiss the clearing with light. Remember, love?
Whatever dreams we brought in with us,
they, too, came to smell of earth, forest,
musk and shade. The mountains
had their way with us that day.
We said little, but by the time we left,
shadow-drunk and gloriously map-less,
everything had changed.
Inner Fusion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, driving, father, gratefulness, grief, memory, New York on January 11, 2024| 8 Comments »
How does it happen,
you’re driving and the mind
opens a door closed for decades
and suddenly you’re sitting
at an elegant white table
with white linen napkins
and a single white rose
in a restaurant in The Plaza Hotel
in downtown New York City
and your father sits across
from you, his smile wide,
his eyes bright, and you’re fifteen
and you’ve never before
been in a place like this
and it’s wonderful, this strange
and beautiful scene where
you don’t belong and yet
all worlds seem to merge into this one
where you’re driving through snow
on the winding river road and
your father is here holding your hand
as you look at the menu and
accelerate through the curve
as he taught you and
he loves you and though
he is dead now, you can’t stop
saying thank you.
Because in a year or twenty I won’t remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, indwelling, memory, moment, time on January 7, 2024| 10 Comments »
the way this afternoon my daughter
wraps her arms around my shoulders
and hangs for a moment on my frame,
because I won’t remember
the simple curl of her smile
and how our necks bow forward slightly
so our foreheads lightly touch,
because I don’t remember hundreds of millions
of other small and precious slivers,
I let myself fully dwell into these seconds—
the warmth of her skin, the cool air of her room,
her window open even mid-winter—
and I pour myself into this moment
knowing how a liquid takes on the shape
of its container, and oh, how I long
to be shaped by this, even if it’s only for now.
Memory, Like a Passport
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, joy, memory, snow on December 27, 2023| 8 Comments »
That winter night you streaked
down the walkway in your undies
and jumped into the snowbank,
I think of it now,
your raucous laughter,
your feral joy
as you emerged frosty and grinning,
I think of how you wore your elation
on the outside,
not hidden up a sleeve,
not tucked in a pocket
where no one could see.
It didn’t save you, your wild joy—
perhaps that’s not what joy is for—
but some nights it saves me.
I still smell the clean sharp cold of it,
hear the glee-giddy,
mirth-ringing choruses of it
like an anthem to a country
that has changed its borders
and still, somehow, lets me in.
A Great Distance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged distance, grief, hurt, intimacy, memory on December 19, 2023| 8 Comments »
Because there is no road to yesterday,
the shortest distance to you is memory,
and so the mind searches to meet the ache
the same way a tongue keeps reaching
for a sore tooth. Relentlessly.
With purpose. With a wince.
Because pain is a brilliant teacher.
Because somehow the reaching
makes the impossible distance less far.
Because I like feeling you close.
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.