Güd wrtr

He rings the doorbell, twice,
loudly, the old bell in the kitchen
summoning me as if to a fire.

But it’s Ernest come to offer
his hands for whatever tasks
he thinks need doing—today

clearing gutters and roof of
a forest of leaf litter. The rain’s
stopped awhile. I can get up

there and take care of that
mess, he says. He offers a
modest price that I know

I will enhance because
it’s a dirty job on the best
of days, and this, I want

to say, is far from the best
of days, drizzle turning to
pounding rain and back,

continuing to down leaves
stubbornly hanging on.
But Ernest will chase

the strays off the roof
and clean up the mucky
mess between showers.

He will wish me a nice
day when he’s done,
which reminds me that

it is, of course, a very nice
day, weather notwithstanding,
because a gentle man

who pops by now and again
appeared on my porch
to offer assistance I didn’t

ask for, didn’t realize
that I needed, but was
delivered at just the right

moment by someone who
shares a name with
someone I loved who

once lived here, too.

She is bundled, as she often is nowadays,
in puffy black vest and an equally puffy jacket,
shoes on, ready to go when I arrive at 9.

“Hi,” she says as I set down my stuff. “I’ve
been up since 5, and I’m resting.” She sits
in the recliner, feet up, blanket on lap.

“Where are we going?” she asks.
“Exercise at the church?” I suggest,
which earns me a frown.

“Starbucks?” I offer, and a familiar
Marilyn grin spreads across her face.
She’s already discarding the blanket.

“That sounds good,” she says. “Let’s
do that.” And so, on a morning showing
signs of blue sky instead of yesterday’s

spitty gray, we head out to my car.
I’m taking a tip from some of Marilyn’s
other chauffeurs who squire her hither

and yon, landing her at home bearing
the seasonal red and green cup.
“Do you know where it is?” she asks.

“I do,” I say. “What do you like there?”
And, without hesitation, Marilyn says,
“Latte with an extra shot.”

She’s on it, Marilyn, whose mind is
is working overtime to grow new
neural pathways after her stroke.

At the drive-thru, I order her drink
and mine (hot chai), then pull ahead
to the window where, with snappy

efficiency, a young woman takes the bill
Marilyn hands me, returns the change
and delivers two red and green cups

into my hands. We’ve rarely spent this
kind of time together—around a writing
table, yes, or at public readings, but

certainly not in a Starbucks drive-thru—
and would not be doing so if not for
a brain bleed caught early.

We find ourselves oddly grateful for
the gift of each other, of so many others
who’ve come to lend a hand these days.

Each week, each day, she improves as she
negotiates this rough road back to herself.
“How is it?” I ask as Marilyn, sipping

her latte, closes her eyes for a moment
and says exactly what I’m thinking:
“Good.”

Learn how to:
• Skateboard
• Dance
• Scuba dive
• Sail a sizable craft
• Play guitar and sing
• Speak at least four languages

Most important:
• Be born into human form again,
some time, some place.
Doesn’t matter where or when,
but preferably to kind people
who adore me.

Like the man I saw ambling
down the sidewalk
the day after Christmas,
a small boy with tousled hair
the color of Yukon gold potatoes

riding tall on the shoulders,
I imagine, of the one who
made him a boy, who contributed
the chromosome dubbed y,

which begs the question:
Why do this? In this lifetime
(please, let there be more)
or any other?

And there’s the answer:
strolling just to stroll, carrying
someone you love so they can
see the world,

someone who one day might
do the same for you—
offer you a new vantage point,
ferry you with great devotion
where you need or want to go,

singing in a language you have
come to know by heart.

On Boxing Day, the hub and the bub
having subsided, life resuming its
normal ebb and flow,

I errand around my ‘hood, deciding
that yes, I will tackle the traditional
post-Christmas chicken lasagna

that Dick and I have come to love,
so I stop at two stores and from
memory (a risky thing)

gather ingredients, pleased with
myself for recalling them all, when,
outside Trader Joe’s,

I walk past the surprise of someone’s
stray purple spectacles on the path
to the parking lot.

I stop and peer through my own lenses,
thinking of my mother and her
lost specs yesterday,

on Christmas, me fetching her readers,
not the bifocals, not where they
she thought they were.

I think of the poor woman whose
purple frames must have fallen
from pocket or purse—

a stylish woman, given the snazzy specs,
who perhaps this very moment is frantically
looking for them.

I pick them up, searching for someone
blinking in optical confusion.
Seeing no one,

I settle for a store employee who says,
after I ask, that yes, they have
a lost and found,

and I hand him the glasses,
hoping they find their way back
to their owner, as I was finally able

to do for my mother, after she recalled
where she’d last seen them. She
put the beaded chain

around her neck, her eyeglasses
restored to their proper position
on chest or bridge of nose,

the gift of sight one that we lens
wearers do not take for granted,
sighing in relief

when the world comes blessedly
into focus.

It’s been 33 Christmases since we’ve had
a baby boy to fuss over, and that one’s
grown up to be a band director,

and his sister, the high school photography
teacher, and her husband have thoughtfully
brought the best gift to the party—

their firstborn, a son, all of seven months
old, who provides all the entertainment
nine grownups could want. He’s better

than “White Christmas” on the big TV.
My sister and I don’t even sing along
when Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen

go into their “Sisters” number with their
gorgeous aqua dresses and feathered fans.
We are focused on The Baby, who is

Henry, and we take turns holding him,
jostling him, feeding him, soothing him,
not least my sister and brother-in-law,

the delighted grandparents who babysit
weekdays. He is a gem in every way, of
course, sweet and easily amused,

incredibly tolerant of all the holiday
hub-bub, tired but fighting it, not
wanting to miss the goings-on.

Next year we’re eager to see his
bigger version tearing into pretty paper
to see what surprises hide there.

Henry will be past this baby stage,
well into toddler-hood, and we
will, as humans do, miss this

drooling, bright-eyed boy with his
close cap of barely there red hair.
It’s all going so fast, his mama

will say, and we who remember her
and her brother at this age will
nod and smile, marveling at how

far they’ve traveled in these human
journeys, all of which come and go
so much faster than any of us

would like.

Christmas is coming. (future tense)
Christmas is upon us. (present tense)
Christmas joy spreads throughout the land.
There is no Christmas like snow Christmas.

Santa Claus is coming to town. (hopeful tense)
He sees us when we’re sleeping;
he knows when we’re awake
he knows when we’ve been bad or good—
the old stalker. (creepy tense)

O, Christmas tree, O, Christmas tree,
how lovely are your branches
(see the kitty, very much in present tense,
ready to leap into them).

For unto you is born this day a savior,
which is Christ the Lord. (present tense)
And this shall be a sign unto you; (future tense)
you shall find the babe wrapped
in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

That’s what Christmas is all about,
Charlie Brown. (Linus tense)

This Christmas. Present tense.
The gift of all of us together.
We are love incarnate, like the babe.
Breathe in the love molecules,
invisible bubbles floating
around us.

Future tense:
Tomorrow, go outside.
Exhale them into the world.

Rejoice.

Searching for the app on my computer,
I stumble across a photo of you that I
took seven years and eleven days ago

at Burr’s, you having polished off
a turkey sandwich, you in town for
a visit, you upright, on your feet,

the perennial cancer patient, you
called yourself, doing reasonably
well. And you are FaceTiming

with Emma in Washington so she
can say hi to me—the grownup
girl who, as a baby, cried for a solid

month after you brought her into
your life. (Rescued is not too strong
a word.) I’d come to your house

and walk the floor with Emma,
wailing through all manner of young
trauma, so you could go to the store.

That day, years later, we joyfully
reunited, even if you did have to nap
on my couch for a while, and big old

dumb boy cat Diego draped his lanky
orange self along your side as you
slept. I am brought back to the now

as Terri and I try to puzzle
through long-distance connection
gone wonky, not unlike you and Burr’s,

both vanished into mystery. If we
keep at it, we can connect through
one means or another, the living,

the non-living and those in between,
the how-can-this-still-be
of enduring love everpresent,

if we pause long enough to let
our ravaged hearts settle, practice
patience as grace searches

then finds us just where we are,
we thirsty beings, holding out
our nearly empty cups,

ready for love to fill them
to the brim.

•••

(for Terri Wolf, with thanks and love,
and for the late BFF Georgann Turner,
likewise)

•••

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

—Norman Maclean (Dec. 23, 1902–Aug. 2, 1990)
from his novella, A River Runs Through It

•••

We know so little of John—
that he fished with his father,
Zebedee, and his brothers, one
of them James—so the story says,

that they became some of the first
fishers of men, and that John
was perhaps the “beloved disciple”
who sat near the foot of the cross,
who ran to the empty tomb to see
his dead friend and teacher
resurrected.

But I imagine fisherman John
not on that great sea with a net
but with rod and reel and creel,
one of seven men who miraculously
caught 153 fish after Jesus
urged them to keep trying.

And even more miraculous,
when I happen upon a river
where fishers ply the water,
I see the apostle—not unlike
the fly fisherman who loved me—
tall and bearded, strong armed,

standing in the shallows
waving the long, supple rod
high overhead on a 10-2 count
before loosing the filament
with its dry caddis fly to glide
lightly upon the water—

later walked upon by his
beloved master, who
multiplied the fish
and fed the 5,000—

he, the light of the world,
the prince of peace,
whose birth we herald
this blesséd season.

for the Together We Heal writing group
on the winter solstice, 2023

•••

Heads bowed, bodies stilled,
it looks as if we’re doing nothing,
when, actually, so much courses
through us like snowmelt over
rocks, making its way down,
down, down.

Not wanting to go there, we
find ourselves amid rapids,
a little fearful of what we might
find, not wanting to tumble over
the rough bits, to scrape paper-thin
skin on unseen rocks, to dredge up
what we’ve so carefully buried.

But in the depths there’s more
than dark, more than sorrow
and loss and great gulps of pain—
the scariest things with no names.

Together we write; the page
can take it all—the hurt, the rage,
the ugly parts we’ve worked
hard to keep hidden.

As the letters form on the page,
the worst of the worst begins
to melt, to run downstream
away from us, whispering
as it goes:

Even on the longest night,
so much good lies ahead.
You are safe. You are held.
Tomorrow you will see
more light.

I am one who sits with you
under the mystery of stars,

whether by day or night,
always present, visible or in-,

long fascinated by the universe
that both creates and holds us.

You, too, comprise part of
the greater One, the Is,

and we often rise and dance
together, knowingly or un-,

even on this, the year’s
longest night, under a waxing

gibbous moon that will set
just before sunrise.

And when you breathe into
mystery—in awe, in grief,

in joy—you extend the cosmic
hand of divine love back into

creation, on a single breath,
right back to me.