Güd wrtr

(In memory of Margery Thompson)

On the last day, before your daughter
turned your house over to people who
would go through every drawer,

as we had, pull out everything saleable
from closets and cupboards, assign
value to each item, then donate

or throw away the rest, I sat at your piano—
the creamy Baldwin baby grand that your
beloved bought you after the two of you

moved into the house three decades
ago. I lifted the fallboard over the keys
that looked back at me, unblinking.

I wanted to play something lovely,
but your sheet music had been bagged,
your binders of music and hymnals boxed,

so my fingers noodled through scales,
attempted some chords. I watched
the strings sheltered by the open lid

leap at the touch of the hammers,
and the ghosts of pianists wafted out,
those who’d sat on the pink velvet

bench and played all manner of etudes,
hymns and jazz—and on one memorable
night, my favorite Gershwin concert waltz

by a famous jazz pianist whom we all
loved. And you, too, rose with the notes,
floating into the empty living room

where you hosted so many parties
and family gatherings, where last
Christmas you gave us the best gift—

you, one last time—which we could
not fit into any of the dozens of boxes
we carted away to live with us.

But we carried you with us as we
flicked off the lights, locked the
back door one last time, saying

goodbye, then turned to see you
and your beloved standing in
that doorway, as you had

a thousand times, waving us off
into our lives—ta, ta for now!—
the strings of our hearts pulled

taut, the notes dissolving into
a gentle pianissimo before they
drifted gently into the good night.

•••

And in memory of so many who played Margery Thompson’s
lovely Baldwin piano—among them Rev. Harvey Chinn
and jazz pianist Bob Ringwald.

…my whole self
saying and singing what it knew…

—Denise Levertov from “Variations on a Theme By Rilke”

•••

At the end
may my whole self rise

saying and singing
what it knew

after a life in which
I mostly did not know

or did not think I knew
that I could have

lifted out of myself
at any time

or no time
beginning anew

flush with abundance
with the last breath

so full of song
so full of light

To see the sea run from clear aqua
to darker turquoise to genuine navy.

To watch it grow storm cloud gray,
then blacken like cooled lava.

To have the genuine birds’ eye view,
the top-down perspective of below,

the one rowing, anchor at the ready
should there be a desire to heave to,

as those in flight decide when to touch
down here or here or over there,

whether by need or whim—who’s to say?
To fly over is to overlook, not take in

the unnecessary or fret about what
might lie beneath. Which might also

look like forgiveness. Which is,
of course, another word for love.

And for a moment, looking at this photo,
I feel whatever part of me that travels
without my body wander into wonder,

transfixed by the symmetry of concrete
pillars topped with soothing arches.
But it doesn’t look like the I-80 I know.

And then I remember the enormity
of this continent and the east/west
interstate that stretches wide

its elastic arms. So I look it up:
This cathedral lives in an Ohio national
park, spans the Cuyahoga, a word

meaning crooked river that my western
tongue mangles. It runs beneath a
turnpike (a foreign concept in California),

anchored, for the moment, in snow,
which does not visit sea-level valley cities
like mine. But I cannot stop looking at

the shapely curves, the strong columns
that look as if they’ve stood as majestically
long as any medieval cathedral.

Which makes me peer more closely,
searching for a hooded monk, perhaps
carrying a battered lantern that he

will light on his rounds as the short day
fades, before he climbs the bell tower
to pull the ropes and set them pealing,

as the strong pillars gentled by light
do the job they’ve done for ages—provide
much-needed, rock-solid stability—

they hold and hold and hold.

Janis Ian (who spells her first name
the “correct” way, according to the woman

who gave it to me) sang that she
learned the truth at 17. I believe her.

But, at 67, this Janis is 17 again—
another odd truth. For instance, I’m back

in band, the only girl percussionist, playing
orchestra bells, whose ringing steel keys

I knew well at 17. My teeth are being
straightened again, voluntarily this time,

with molded plastic hugging all 28,
instead of tortuous clamps and wires.

I’ve also lately dug out the ModPodge,
dabbing blank postcards with watercolors,

affixing stanzas of my poems. At 17,
I decoupaged images and words cut from

magazines onto clean cardboard tubs
in which rainbows of ice cream once lived.

And later this spring, I’ll play in a band concert
honoring America’s 250th birthday,

50 years after my bandmates and I struck up
patriotic tunes for the nation’s bicentennial.

Just as I’m trying to wrap my (now gray) head
around the half century ago part, I chuckle

at the time machine that’s put me here
in my spacey poet brain (also part of 17),

picking up mallets and a gluey brush,
preparing postcards with abstract washes

of color and typed words and who knows
what else to fling me backward across decades

to land in the frame of that skinny girl
percussionist with braces and aching teeth,

who directed the pep band and edited
the school newspaper, scribbling daily,

hoping she’d be a Real Writer someday,
someone who wanted to live a creative life,

without understanding that she, lucky girl,
already was.

Gratitude is the confidence in life itself. In it, we feel how the same force
that pushes grass through cracks in the sidewalk invigorates our own life.

—Jack Kornfield

•••

The essence that nudges tiny green bits
upward, searching for light and air
through the smallest sidewalk fissures,

by any name or none, elicits wonder
in me on every walk, as though such
a phenomenon is a rarity,

as if tiny growing things don’t find
ways to enter the world. But I also
think of the ones that don’t or can’t,

the prodigies that didn’t take root,
the ones stopped before they could
appear. Which makes me stop

mid-stride, bend and touch the bit
of life coming through. Which might
be taken for a weed and plucked.

Which, I, too, have plucked, and later
wished I hadn’t. So nowadays I give
the little plants that can a Yay, you!

before walking on, mindful of
the marvel that any of us seeds
landed and grew and thrived,

that, despite everything,
we have somehow flourished
in these lucky, lovely lives.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

—David Whyte
(from “Start Close In”)

•••

At first it is lending a hand when she
needs to take the small step up a curb.

Later, as her steps become shorter,
her balance iffier, she reaches for your arm,

and you provide it, hoping that you
are steady enough for her.

And when she can no longer take any
steps, you watch your sister lift her

from her favorite spot on the sofa and
slowly waltz her—onetwothree, onetwothree—

to the hospital bed that she doesn’t want,
in the family room facing the TV,

her constant companion during all her
waking hours. It is then, sitting the vigil,

that you think of her gradual need
for assistance, that, as her sight dimmed,

as her body failed, she rarely asked for
help, but you learned to read her gestures—

the outstretched arm, her hand reaching
for yours, which she had never done,

as far as you could recall. But she must
have held your small hands in hers

when you and your sister began to try
your own steps, holding hands

while crossing the street,
a daughter on either side of her.

And near the very end, you grownup
girls cradle her bird-boned hands

in yours as she readies for flight,
no more walking necessary,

her wings appearing just in time
to lift her into mystery.

•••

(for Donna, in memory of our mother)

for the night, they wing in
to the rookery where others like them
will rest after their daily travels,

or travails, as the case may be,
which, I imagine, for large hunting
birds, might consist of missed

prey, avoiding power lines and
other ravages of mankind that
threaten their survival.

How nice to be gladly received
in a spot that feels like home,
no matter how temporary.

How generous to be welcomed—
or at least accepted—by others,
no matter our differences,

to watch the glorious light fade
on another day bestowed
without ever asking for it,

assuming that there will be
another one rising with
the ever-dependable sun,

that there will be tomorrow.

Walking across Virginia, Buddhist monks
make their way closer to D.C., months
after leaving their Texas home,

buoyed by love, tended by strangers
at every stop. And somehow that, for me,
quells the awful—at least for a bit.

I can’t say how following the journey
of men on foot, silently moving in the name
of peace helps, but it does. Somehow.

It is in the somehow that I live lately.
It is in the somehow where, come to
think of it, I have always lived.

Somehow I can rise again, even on
another foggy morning in what seems
like an endless winter of fog,

and I can feed the huge black kitty
in my house who, after I inherited him
a year ago, has decided that I am his,

as well as Hercules, the neighbor feline,
who appears mornings on my porch,
as if he does not get fed at home.

I can relate. “It’s always more fun
to eat out, dude,” I tell him as he
dives into the pâté du jour.

It’s in the somehow that we do
the smallest things for others, and,
of course, in that, for ourselves.

Somehow, even on another gray
Saturday morning, I can gather up
bowls and snacks, as I’ve done

thousands of times. I can unplug
the laptop and sheath it in its soft
sleeve imprinted with typewriter keys.

I can make copies of the prompt,
retrieve keys to the loft, and drive
to the place where writers arrive,

where, around a rectangle of long
white tables, they spill words onto pages,
which do not clatter, but land softly

under pens, under typing fingers.
And when I ask, “Who wants to read?”
someone always speaks up.

And somehow, in the gentle voices
burbling into our thirsty ears,
we perk up like cats waiting

to be fed, eager for the kind of
sustenance we too often forget
that we need.

•••

For the Team Haag writers who gather in the loft and online to
write their art out with me. I continue to be grateful for your
companionship and the community over many years.

Peace is not something to be found outside; it must be cultivated from within.
Even in a divided world, peace is possible—not because the world changes,
but because our hearts change.
—Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, leading the Walk for Peace

•••

We are carrying the heaviest things these days—
one among us with a massive old walnut tree
threatening her house where a woman
and her son with brain cancer live.

One among us having been recently rear-ended,
the effects of which are pinging through her body
like jolts of electricity—she, too, with a beloved
in the late stages of cancer.

All of us staggered by the weight of cruelty
and meanness of a corrupt leader and his
minions in what we used to think of as
our country, the land of the free,

the home of the brave. On our knees,
wishing for relief on a day when hundreds
of teenagers walked out of school, then
miles to the Capitol of our state,

joining so many outraged, so many
carrying signs: Wake up, America.
We need to relearn empathy.
Uncle Sam pointing his bony finger,

saying, I want YOU to defend democracy.
We’re ready to defend; we’re saying no.
But the walnut tree and the broken car
and the aching body require TLC first.

So let us, just for a moment, put down
the heavy, rest our arms, take a load off.
Let us write, as a Buddhist monk suggests,
walking with his brother monks across

America on a 2,300-mile peace pilgrimage:
Today will be my peaceful day.
Then breathe mindfully, sending
kindness and compassion into the world.

It will feel like so little. It may look
like nothing. But, the monks would
tell you, it is everything to awaken
the peace that lives within us all.