Life
Faith
Love
Grief
Worry
Frustration
Encouragement
Success
Failure
Like clay, I feel I am being twisted, contorted, shaped, molded, formed
Every Day
The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful
All form who I am
Life is Exhausting
Exhilarating
It is MINE
I embrace it all and am grateful for it!
Life stopped spring was spent
isolated in the hospital and then nine more
months of chemo her daily ritual confined
for hours the life-saving poison pumping
through her veins by way of her chest port
once she said they cut down on the arsenic
as it was causing my heart to race by now
her hair has thinned hands tremble
It is her life. She works her garden, tending
vegetables to share on days she cannot eat
Told by the experts she has the “best kind”
of leukemia, she vows to keep herself going
You
want to wring out your words
in the sink
like that summer didn’t break us
like we shouldn’t be done
and all I want to remember
about that summer
is the way the water rippled
in reflection
on the roof of that indoor swimming pool
while I floated away
forgetting you.
The bed is depressed
where had been your body—
the body, the lost mind
of the bed. How well you once
extended a thought like
a leg all the way through the toes.
Argue again for the persimmon
you’d take over permission
and which I too would take
over another fruitless year
buried beneath the old anxieties.
A father returns like a symptom
and you feel sick but other
things also. What you want
to go away, it’s possible
you’ll want to come back.
Saying “Shut up, you had me at hello” to Renee Zellweger,
Getting Chaka Khan to sing “Through the Fire” to me at my birthday party,
Doing a one-man show on Broadway–in a theater, not on the street (which might actually be realistic),
Getting infected by a new Covid strain that actually makes me healthier,
Winning the Nobel Prize for an invention that came to me in a dream,
And finally, getting appointed the next Poet Laureate.
Cotton candy clouds lull me into complacency
a false sense of security.
But even on a sunny day evil lurks behind a
crazed road rage driver, mentally unbalanced
men wielding AR-15 rifles, politicians lure with
promises just to win the race, internet and phone
scammers skim the surface.
Conjuring cloud configurations are
childhood memories.
a deer approaches
comes close
lays her head
on my shoulder
whispers my name
takes the one apple
slice I offer
brings her fawns
leaves them in the grass
beneath the chapel
windows while I hold
large print pages close
stumble over well-loved
words becoming fire
in my hands as music
rises from a deep
well of silence
I ran into an English major the other day
Excited, I asked them which was their favorite Faulkner?
they had only read one, and didn’t like it
Disappointed, I asked for a recommendation
Jack Kerouac was as deep as they got
I ran into a History major the other day
Excited, I asked their thoughts on “Gulag Archipelago”
“It wasn’t required”
Disappointed, I asked about “Das Kapital”
“Very important” (but hadn’t read it either)
Yet both were strident
So sure of their opinions
I guess they’re so smart
They don’t need to know anything
The lock gives easily. I expected
resistance. The room is neat,
unchanged from that day, one
week before the world closed down
when we loaded her, her clothes,
her cat into my brother’s truck. She didn’t
want to go, but we knew, she knew,
she couldn’t stay, to fall again.
Piles of the Washington Post,
the New Yorker, still linger on the table
beside her favorite chair. A Who’s Who
of poets stacked up on every surface,
all the names she introduced me to—
Linda Pastan, Eavan Boland, Marie Ponsot,
Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov—
her subjects, my guides.
I thought I’d feel her here, in her home,
where she never stopped wanting to be.
I thought I’d hear her spirit calling out from
every book, every painting on her walls.
I hear nothing. When I turn out the lights,
no ghost disturbs my sleep.
