Everyone else has gone to bed.
A boy and his mother sit
at the table in the house
they are renting for a few
more days. They are familiar
the way my eyes are familiar.
He sees a large cockroach
climbing the wall, and when
his mom squeals, he gets up,
grabs it, throws it to the ground
with youthful efficiency,
then smiles at his mother,
a tender smile that says,
I like taking care of you, mom.
But the boy is not happy.
Soon he is crying. His eyes
are empty, colorless, black.
Then it is only the mother
sitting at the table, her
empty hands full of fear,
uncertainty, lack. Why
do I return to this moment,
knowing I cannot change
what happens the next day?
The closet. The gun. The choice.
I go back to slip my hands beneath
the mother’s empty hands,
making for them a nest,
then sneak up the stairs to the boy
in his room in his bed in his pain,
and though I know it will not change
a thing, I whisper in his ear,
there is nothing you can do
that will keep me from loving you.
Posts Tagged ‘past’
Five Years Ago
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, grief, mother, past, son, suicide on August 13, 2026| 10 Comments »
Living in the River Bed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flood, past, river, self-destruction on January 5, 2025| 4 Comments »
The way the riverbank
remembers high water—
even many years later—
with logs and sticks lodged
high along its edges,
this is how it is I remember
you, the detritus of love
strewn all along my walls.
There is just a thin trickle now
and I’ve come to value clarity,
but remember the raging rush,
how it roared—a violent crush,
a terrible greatness—
how it tumbled everything
in its path. How the path
itself was never the same again.
One Growing Awareness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, daughter, mother, past, present on September 1, 2024| 4 Comments »
millions of small miracles
bring me to this morning
beside you
Beneath the Big Moon
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged moon, night, past, shadow on June 1, 2023| 4 Comments »
I walk in the chill,
and the past
walks beside me,
smooths my tears,
holds my hand,
faithful as evening,
gentle as a shadow.
By the time
I re-enter my home,
it has slipped
inside me again.
We walk through
the door
as one.
Tonight, When I Turn Right on Ogden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged father, grief, love, mother, past, present, time on January 21, 2023| 10 Comments »
Another part of me turns left,
and it is fifteen years ago
and I am driving to my parents’ new home
and my son and I will spend the night with them
because they live there and we can.
By the time I turn onto the highway toward home
it is fifteen years ago
and my father is sitting in his favorite chair
and my son curls into his lap
and dad tells him his ears are his mouth
and they laugh
and my mother and I make tea and chat.
And I am almost to the stoplight in Ridgway
when it is fifteen years ago,
and we go outside and make a fire in the pit
and sit in a half circle and sing camp songs
and snuggle because we are there.
And when I get home, an hour later,
it is fifteen years ago
and I am so full of their presence
and roasted marshmallows and
joy and loss that I lift my son
into his crib and kiss my father
on the cheek that is now ashes
and hug my mother now far away
then walk into the house
where my son no longer lives
and I have never been
so here.
Evolution
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, choice, past, self on May 1, 2022| 7 Comments »
There comes a time when
the life you have
meets the life you once had
and you stare at that old life
as if it’s a beautiful bird
with a haunting song so familiar
you can’t stop yourself
from singing along.
Isn’t it strange
how quickly things change,
how already you’ve forgotten
some of the words.
How already, your wings
have changed color.
Just When You Think It’s Over: A Kind of a Grammar Lesson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grammar, past, pluperfect, poem, poetry, present on September 15, 2017| 2 Comments »
I’m now going to dazzle myself with the pluperfect.
—Jack Ridl
And isn’t it dazzling, the notion
that an action not only began in the past,
but was finished in the past, or,
as they say in Latin, it was perfect.
Not like these leaves, that began
in the past as green flags, but now
transform into gold flame. And we all know
what happens next. No, not like
the boy who once fit in my lap
and now looks me in the eye.
Not like the dream I had for my life
that changed before it could
be achieved. What really ends?
What do our cells not remember?
Even the dead are here in this room,
on the streets, in cafes. We carry
our history with us everywhere
we go, and it wriggles out of its
perfect cage and dances through the ending,
though we thought we’d shut the curtain,
though the director has long since yelled “cut,”
though the audience has already left,
see, here it is, even now, progressive
and as present as these cut sunflowers,
spilling their pollen all over the table,
hardening their seeds into future gold.
I Tell Myself
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged past, poem, poetry, presence on June 6, 2016| 5 Comments »
Be like a river,
shaped by the past,
always finding
a new way
to travel
the same stretch.
Does This Explain that Strange Feeling of Emptiness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged future, love, memory, past, poem, poetry, sankalpa, time on December 27, 2014| 4 Comments »
In a book that has not yet been written
the pages are already turning to dust
and a reader is pressing the petals of roses
from a lover she’s yet to meet and love,
and the lover is off in a forest somewhere
where the trees are all still seeds in the ground—
he is singing a song that’s not yet been composed
while he rides on a horse that hasn’t been foaled
and by now the reader is not the same woman
she was when she first began to read
the book and already her skin has been pricked
by the thorns of the rose she’s yet to receive,
and she’s singing the song he never sang,
she sings as if she knows the tune
from long ago, now how did that
old lyric go? She hums where she
forgets the words, something about
a man, a horse, a drop of blood,
a peace that has never and always been,
a woman who thinks she’s lost something,
but can’t remember what.
But the Hot Summer Air Felt Just the Same
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged going home, memory, past, poem, poetry on July 6, 2014| 2 Comments »
But the Hot Summer Air Felt Just the Same
We went back to the old road
with the four-way stop and
the old white church, and the memory
of how to proceed unfolded block
by block and not a moment sooner,
but both of us knew that as much
as we had found our way back
past the golf course, past
the sagging homes with their eternal
garage sales and roses in dusky bloom,
past the drive in and the market
where we used to buy roasted chilies in fall,
though we were right where
we set out to be we can never
really go back, not even driving
as carefully, as slowly as we can.