Güd wrtr

for Curtis

It’s not that I’ll be 65 next month,
or that I’ve had to wade through
the confusion of Medicare, but
the long-loved optometrist
saying, I’m pulling the trigger—

something we’ve talked about
for years—writing the prescription
for drops that, she promises, will
plump up my puny lashes, deepen
the hazel of my irises, and, we hope,
halt any possibility of early
glaucoma in its tracks.

Like Bodie, I say, the ghost
town, in arrested decay?

She laughs, this other Janis
who has looked longer, more
deeply into my eyes than
anyone who has loved me,
studied my retinas, examined
the macula and the optic nerve,
a tiny glimpse into the human
central nervous system.

The enormity of this hits me
a day later, seizes my chest,
watering my precious eyes before
any drops enter them. And it takes
me a minute to breathe, before
calling the college boyfriend,

legally blind since babyhood,
who understands better than
anyone I know what it is to live
partially sighted, who spent his
career working on behalf of people
with disabilities, who has said more
than once that most of us find
ourselves disabled at some point—
perhaps not permanently, but…

I know that I need to hear the voice
of this man who, though he could barely
see me, long ago looked into my eyes,
those of my younger, still-forming self—
understanding something about my
depths that I did not—

to gently tell me four decades later,

—The drops will help.
—You’ll be OK.
—I love you.

unlike x or y, which can be,
the online dictionary quiz implies,
so I rack my brain for words—
victor, va-va-voom, environment—

and then root around for the silent x—
well, faux pas, but that’s French.
Because I cannot conjure silent y words,
I hurl myself down the rabbit hole,

getting lost in online lists of words
with silent letters—and y is not
among them—remembering some
of my non-native English-speaking

students in years past
who delightfully pronounced
the b in lamb or the k in knife,
the l in salmon (which some native

English speakers do, too). And my
own embarrassment—as a freshman
in high school, so wanting to impress
the teacher who might allow me to

work on the newspaper, though
she usually only admitted juniors
and seniors—when, reading aloud
to the class, I mispronounced

horizon, prompting Mrs. Colón’s
eyebrow to arch and her to say,
Whore-a-zon?! and me to blush
because that’s how my mind said it

when I read it. And how, despite that
faux pas, she put me on the newspaper
staff, unknowingly catapulting me into
two careers—as a journalist and a

writing teacher, regularly reminded
to practice patience with those who
stumble over this confusing,
maddening, astonishing language.

(for Gerry Colón)

What we call morning
gleams down the throat
of this purple beauty,

as if lit from within,
opening its larynx so
its vocal cords can

sing the day awake,
which I’ve gotten up
and outside to see,

unusually, not
expecting this glow,
or the sound of

the windless back
yard—a single bird
tossing its trill

to this spot, giving
voice to the glory
of the morning.

Not the Jerry Garcia type, but the gardening one,
grabbing clippers and heading out to the yard
to nip the spent buds, toss them on the grass
so they might be picked up later,

of pinching the shriveled pink bits that only days ago
waved in the breeze, frilly hollyhocks bursting
like bright earrings on the single long stems
on which they form and grow, live and die.

I know that clipping what has passed allows
room for what is to come, but there’s always
a bit of mourning in it, especially for such limited
life cycles, knowing that all this glorious growth
is here for such a short season,

that all too soon it will entirely disappear
in the cold months, that time of rest, when
we all need to hibernate a bit. So I remind
myself, as rose petals crumble in my hand,
as I toss spent blossoms to the ground,

that I have reveled in their shy brilliance—
like music lovers swaying in their tie-dye—
how grateful I am for their return in this lush
season, surrounded as I am by such beauty,
whispering my thanks with each snip

of goodbye.

The baby born on my 29th birthday
is having a baby today,

and, though I am not there, as I was
when my niece made her debut

I do not mind. That day, almost
36 years ago, taught me how

difficult it is to watch someone you
love labor, in great pain, doing one

of the most important things she will
ever do. I still see my sister’s contorted

face, the baby pushing her way out,
as that baby’s baby is doing right now,

as people who already love that baby
eagerly await his appearance, and

there will be tears, not least on the part
of the grownups (from this grownup, too)

because as some of us have the honor
to midwife some of us out of this world,

there is so much joy for some of us
watching a brand new being enter it,

this one they already call Henry—
lucky boy, lucky us.

It feels like a moment ago—not years—
when I delivered books of her poetry

to her shortly before her death, put a copy
in her hands, watched the skin stretched

thin over her knuckles as she stroked
the glossy cover of the slender volume,

some of her best work sewn into those
pages like an intricate quilt of many colors.

Today I brought copies of an anthology
to another poet slowly dying, hoping to

hold the collection of many voices,
including hers, before she finishes her

lifetime of words. I have lost track of how
many pieces I’ve published by those

knowingly dying or recently dead, a small
gift, sometimes delivered too late, that

makes eyes shine with unshed tears.
Leaving behind a creation we’ve sculpted

with our two hands and devoted intention
is perhaps the most meaningful gift we can

offer our beloveds. The art forged by those
too soon gone gleams like a shimmering road

map in the dark, illuminated simply, held
deeply by the brilliance of a passionate heart.

Hose in hand, watering plants
in Mom’s back yard on a day so
mild it hardly qualifies as summer,
I look up at the tree that’s grown
there for decades, dark green
leathery leaves shading oblong
’quats snuggled in trios, some of
the fallen already underfoot.

And, as I aim the hose at two nearby
hydrangeas lacing out elegantly,
something in me stirs, urges me
to pluck a ripe fruit from its birthplace,
splash it with the hose, take a bite.

I’m sure I’ve had loquats before,
but today, standing in afternoon
sun, thinking about deadheading
Mother’s roses that popped out
so vibrantly only weeks ago,

spitting out first one ’quat pit,
then the other, each as smooth as
a surf-washed pebble in my mouth,
I think, Not bad, these cousins
of plums and apricots, unable to
recall why I’d spurned them in
previous years.

Maybe, like that boy who rode
the bus to school with me every day,
whom I barely registered—one day
his sweetness caught my attention,
and then all I could think about
was how I might arrange to put
myself in his presence again,

how, on this summer afternoon
a half century later in my mother’s
yard, the taste of loquat soft in my
mouth, within sight of the spot
where the bus once stopped twice
a day, I can summon the freckles
on that cute boy’s face, envision his
winning grin.

Come for me now, World—
whatever is near, come close.
I have been over the water
and lived there all alone.

—William Stafford (1914–1993)
excerpt from “Looking Across the River” in “The Darkness Around Us Is Deep”

•••

It’s time to re-enter the world
knowing it will not look or feel or smell
the same as it did when you left it,

orbiting, as you have, in an unrecognizable
space of neither here nor there—or
there nor here. The world has come

for you, calling you back, wanting
your voice, your personhood, to travel
through the void, across the water,

to no longer be alone. You are not
convinced, content to linger in that
amorphous space, without pattern

or structure, lacking definite form.
But you are of definite form, and you
are needed in the world, no matter

how much you tell yourself that you
are not. Welcome back from your journey.
You have much to share as you land

feet first, wobbling a bit, then finding
your balance, setting off with one step,
then another, and another,

into whatever glorious surprise awaits.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves…
— Ada Limón, from “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa”

We catalog the great loves,
tucking them into the heartspace,
hoping they never disappear,
even when those we love have.

We sigh over the long-ago romance,
the ones who got away—or didn’t
and maybe should have—the adored
elder, the long-gone best friend,

the beloved pets. But we seldom
think to record the ordinary loves—
the favorite ice cream, the moment
in spring when bare trees leaf out

in exuberance, the discovery of
a bug whose name we do not know
perched on the crimson geranium,
the satisfaction as we sip our tea

with a dear one. The thousand bits
of everydayness that swing by us
every day, ones we don’t record
in words or images, because we

can’t archive them all. Can we?
Brief snippets of love, tiny in
magnitude when they occur, but
later they morph into marvelous.

Like the light streaming through
the dirty window of this room,
just now, on us, right here, together.
Let us tuck this smidgen of love

into our catalog of the ordinary,
which, someday, when we open
this compendium of astonishment,
will leap out at us as nothing

short of extraordinary.

Taking the hands of someone you love…
—Robert Bly

I had a much older friend years ago,
who, when she got excited,
when she wanted to make a point,

she’d grab my hands—
not just my fingers, but grasp
my whole hands firmly in hers—

look into my eyes and say
what she needed to say.
But, so startled by the feeling

of my hands so intimately
embraced by another’s—
not a lover’s twining of

fingers pressed against
panting sheets—all I could
register was the warmth

of her palms wrapped
around the bony protrusions
of my knuckles, transmitting

a tenderness, an intensity
of feeling, an urgent sense
of pay attention, and I did—

if not to her words, then
to her small hands that
somehow enveloped mine,

that I feel right now, this
instant, all these years after
she let go, drifting into

mystery, where I find her
still.