Güd wrtr

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.

As kids, we counted every half birthday,
50% older than we were six months earlier,
on our way to the next number,

which always felt like a better age to be.
Older, we felt, was better than younger.
Now, with more than six decades behind me,

I still count the half birthdays—
like the one today—because, although
I likely have what I imagine are fewer years

ahead of me than the ones behind me,
every day, every week, every month,
certainly every year, is a gift that

not everyone gets to open.
For all that is behind me,
I am grateful.

For all that is ahead of me,
no matter the challenges,
may I be just as thankful.

I stand at the marimba, snuggled
beneath three fleecy layers to protect
its sweet old rosewood keys,

and confront the marching glockenspiel
on top, the closest thing I have at home
to orchestra bells,

rubber mallets dinging away,
practicing. I find that I have about
15 minutes in me per session,

which makes me both envious
and regretful about how much time
I once spent before bells and marimba,

xylophone, vibraphone, tympani.
Hours. At least an hour for each practice
session, going over and over and over

the notes to find the best stick patterns,
get the rhythms right, tune the tympani
as perfectly as I could get them.

And now, beginning again, I figure I’m
doing well with three or four short
sessions a day. Repetition is key,

I used to tell my students trying to study
for tests. The more times you touch
something, the better you understand it,

says my friend the grammar teacher.
I’m going for frequency, I tell
myself, not that my attention span

has narrowed to the width of
middle C on the bells. Never mind
that my eyes fatigue far faster

than they did a half century ago.
Repetition. Frequency. Repetition.
I’m getting it, I tell myself,

despite the flubs and mistaken
dings and awkward hands.
I’m getting it.

Everything we do, each small act, leaves an impression.
Make it one of kindness, empathy, reason and peace.
—Janine Vangool, Uppercase magazine

•••

She asks in her weekly online newsletter
in big block print letters:

ARE YOU OK?

In another photo, she adds,

I AM NOT OK WITH THIS

And who is, really? In these times
of unnecessary tumult and meanness.

In this moment when so many
are reaching out with kindness,

as if we can counteract the ugly,
the awful, with a hand extended,

perhaps offering a flower to
someone walking by, as the hippies,

bless them, did in what feels like
such a long-ago time.

Peace and love, baby. We’re
singing that refrain again, along

with We shall overcome someday…
and Give peace a chance.

Not OK at all. But may we, with a series
of small, big-hearted acts, leave an

impression—a big or a small one—
with all beings everywhere

of kindness, empathy, reason and peace.

•••

In memory of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, whose last words before being killed
by ICE agents, were, to an injured woman he was trying to help,
“Are you OK?”

And in honor of the venerable monks and Aloka the Peace Dog of the
Huong Dao Buddhist Temple, walking 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas,
to Washington, D.C., to spread awareness of peace, mindfulness, compassion,
loving-kindness and unity.

With gratitude and thanks to all who have helped them on this journey—
from their own team to the police and firefighters, volunteer medical
and veterinary professionals, and the thousands who have come to feed,
see and listen to the venerable monks and Aloka, the peace dog.

With thanks for the inspiration to Janine Vangool, editor and publisher
of the beautiful magazine Uppercase, “made with love in Canada,”
as her website says, which you can find here.

When did I turn it into an altar of sorts?
Did I gather the items one by one,
or did I collect them for a time
before installing them
in the mirrored chamber?

It wasn’t that I’d been avoiding
his bathroom or the medicine cabinet—
they’d been empty for quite a while—
but in the time of after
I found his baseball on a closet shelf,
scuffed and stained, and I palmed it,
wondering where the mitt he’d bought me
had gotten to.

And I looked up and saw him in the then,
tall and grinning in the backyard,
teaching me to properly throw and catch
the summer we moved into the house,
as we began to make it ours.

In the after
the baseball went to live in what
had been his medicine cabinet, with some
of his last guitar picks and magnets
of electric guitars. I added his favorite watch,
a single dogtag, two pairs of sunglasses,
a small metal film can with bits of his ashy self,
along with a square hunk of pine wearing
his scrawl in fat woodshop pencil:

toots
first cut
love cliff

Parachuting into the then,
I hear the whine of the new table saw
in our garage just outside the back door,
a portent of furniture to come.

Lately I open the medicine cabinet door,
when I need a hit of him—on anniversaries,
his birthday—to palm the baseball,
finger the guitar picks and magnets,
peer through the sunglasses. I pick up
the wood block and the film can that
rattles like a tiny maraca when I shake it,
along with four fishing lures in the shapes,
if not the actual colors, of slender fish.

And I lift his last coffee cup,
hold it as he used to, imagine it falling
to his lap after the final breath,
then put it back in its spot on the shelf,
feeling his smile, then close the cabinet door
with a small pat of a grateful hand.

•••

In memory of Clifford Ernest Polland (1952–2001)… for no particular reason…
just because I opened the medicine cabinet.