Shorn
after weeks
of missing the cat with lush hair
he appears on his stoop
lion cut
Let’s size up our traumas, let’s raise a glass to bad parenting,
let’s compare bruises the way housewives compare recipes.
We swap stories of bad lovers,
car accidents,
overdosing on hope,
almost-drowning.
We trade confessions like currency.
We laugh too readily at our mirror images
of damage and bad decisions.
We catalogue our griefs and fractures,
wrap them in self-ridicule,
arrange them lovingly inside little boxes.
We keep it light the way you keep knives in a drawer.
Then one day it’s no longer about what happened before we met,
but the fact that you remember
which version of the story I told first.
Beautiful to know the painted turtle emerges
each spring from a state of suspended animation
entered into at the beginning of winter —
a testament to the designer who
seems to have covered every detail
down to the least of his creations —
awakening earlier this year than in years past
which is a sign to some of what’s to come,
warmer temps, a true hell on earth.
No one knows the full effect climate change
is going to have on nature, on humans,
but those who spend their time studying it
seem to agree
it’s not going to be good.
That the reckoning seems to be coming
sooner than initially projected,
makes us perhaps the last generation
to live during a time
when small miracles still happened,
but not one so big as to still the heart
of the beast we’ve awakened.
because it is willing to bend.
Like the way autumn gladly bows toward death,
or the way eager buds arch toward the sun.
Like water flowing down a creek bed,
carving a path where a path is allowed,
changing course as rocks and stones demand.
For nature, life is not an obstacle, a barrier to joy,
but an invitation to change and grow,
to die and let go—
always trusting that what will be is not the end.
I celebrate the warmth of solitude.
Tiny feathers cling to each other,
repel winter’s cold and the white
noise of the day, the buzzing
that seems never to end. They chase
the chatter so far, I lose its cloying
scent, the clicks and clanks
of its claws and chains. With one
cleansing breath, I have entered
my temple, more a convent cell
than a consecrated space.
It is dark—the only light needed
the tricks closed eyes play, magical
as candlelight. And the silence—
sacred how it wraps around me
in its own version of flannel,
sacred in how it plays at being
as infinite as numbers. Then comes
the balance this space claims,
the moment when I lose track
of warmth, darkness, silence
and fall asleep.
“He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it.”
Dreams
were
the
dimension
I lived in, the
blank white space of
being
quiet. I can
hear the
clipping of
time’s
narrow comfort.
I pull the white curtain
across my face, like a veil
to open
a glimpse
you might call being kind,
or
I might be able to
still
a moment
to
vanish.
~ An erasure of pages 57-58 in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale
