Güd wrtr

(for Ashley and Kevin)

The one where we grew up, which is no longer ours,
which belongs to the next generation in the family
who have, thankfully, spiffed it up and made it their own,

so much so that if my sister and I closed our eyes,
we could still walk down the long hallway on a
newly revealed, long-hidden wood floor, and find

the bathroom between our two former bedrooms,
with a lovely tile floor, fresh paint and a far
nicer shower, sink potty than the ones we knew.

Our forebears have gone. We are the elders at
the table now, along with the parents of the young
wife in this house, whose young husband

resembles his grandfather, our father who
brought our little family here in 1966, the guy
who all winter was itching for summer,

antsy to get the turquoise ski boat back
in the lake across the street. The boat still
lives here, and today new relatives visit—

little ones and grownup sisters and their
partners and another grandma, too. And we
who sat in this room last year, watching

our mother finish a long lifetime,
find ourselves a mixture of grateful and
gobsmacked by the transformation,

thankful this Thanksgiving for the carrying on,
for the restart, as we feel the presence
of the ones who set us down in this house

so long ago, who left behind—to our surprise—
only the love and a ski boat born a half century ago,
eager to find the water again.

Years ago, working to retire
my heartfelt litany of
I’m sorrys, I decided

to replace them with
a dozen or more simple
thank yous each day.

Not that I keep track,
but I still toss handfuls
of gratitude to the wind

like the tiny specks of seed
that my neighbor leaves
on the corner of our block

for our wild bird friends,
trusting that those in need
will find it. And that some

who land, briefly peck, then
take off again, will fly away
with perhaps a bit more

than they need, prompting
them to drop morsels
of kindness where others

may pick it up and pass it on.
As you do, again and again—
and you and you and you—

thank you very much,
as I do, too,
just because we can.

(for Donna)

Because for a woman who retired after
a long career as a traveling physical therapist
just in time to do daily care for her first
grandchild—something she very much
wanted to do—

last year juggling that with coordinating
the last months of our mother’s life
with extraordinary patience and kindness,
then doing the heavy lifting of clearing
out her house and settling her estate,

and recently having entered her own Medicare
years—though she looks a good twenty years
younger—

and because a second grandchild came along
so now she and my best brother-in-law ever
are chasing around two little ones under 3
and making it look like no big deal.

Today I watched my sister hoist her
granddaughter into an on-the back
carrier and shouldered the kid, then,
when the toddler boy had a tearful
moment, picked him up, too.

And my mind reeled back more than
three decades when she did the same thing
with her babies—the younger boy
on her back, the older girl in her arms—
that older girl now the mother of these two
that Grandma is currently toting,

all with such grace and patience
that I know she didn’t learn from
our mother, but somehow it was born
in her, this nurturing that allowed her
to become the mother she needed.

And, in doing so, she extends that care
to all around her, including this bigger,
older sister who is beyond grateful
that our parents had the good sense
to produce this sibling for me—
the best little sister ever.

Amen.

I dream of painting, and then I paint my dream.
—Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother
while at Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

•••

He considered “The Starry Night” a failure—
too abstract, straying too far from nature,
painted as he looked out the iron-barred
windows of his rooms in the asylum.

Though he put himself there, though it did
not quell the madness, in a year some
150 paintings, more than 100 drawings
emerged.

It’s still there, the asylum, his upstairs room
and slender iron bed with head- and foot-
boards with more slender, vertical bars.
The ground-floor space where he set his easel,
where expressive, intense colors appeared.

Short, circular brushstrokes animate his
magnum opus—a summer night sky of cobalt
blue with flame-like cypress trees set against
zinc yellow and white whorls of stars.

If this is mania in oils, thickly applied,
we enter it willingly with him.

Never mind that nowadays his famous
dervish stars appear on a million coffee cups
and magnets, making his best-known painting
feel cliché.

But come closer. Focus on that
bright moon casting its sharp beam on
the little village he saw in his imagination,
the tapering points of the tall cypress
connecting earth and sky, life and death.

No failure, that—even as the artist’s mind
tormented him. Even as the whirling
overtook him, defeating the dream of sky
visualized by the one holding the brush,
a human being—like you, like me—

so much more than his suffering,
creating nothing less than a miracle.

I did not fall from grace: I leapt to freedom.
—Ansel Elkins, “Autobiography of Eve”

What if every fall is a leap to freedom?
What if the cast is the cocoon under
which a simple caterpillar gestates?
What if, in every ending—as brutal,
heartbreaking, unfair as it feels—
lies a beginning, a promise,
a do-over, a surprise?
What if that surprise is peace?

What if, as we clear away the clutter
of a season or a lifetime,
we discover treasures?
What if one of the treasures is grace,
which cannot be fallen from,
which is our birthright,
which accompanies our every step,
no matter how shaky,
every breath, no matter how ragged?

What if we are born anew every morning,
every moment with big, blinking eyes,
with perfect little feet and fingernails?
What if we are beheld with adoration
by one looking at us right now
(perhaps one we cannot see), thinking—

There you are! A miracle…
has there ever been such a lovely you?

(for Sue Lester, BFF birthday gal)

I cleaned off my desktop for you.
Not my actual desktop, though there
are two of those in my office.

The one I am sitting at is overfull
with all manner of stuff—
three skinny tubes of lip balm,
small sticky notes, two thumb drives,
three cough drops (wrapped),
several of my business cards
(in case I forgot who I am?),
an unreasonable number of pens,
the small pink fan (which I could
retire for winter) and my trusty
red, old-school, heavy metal
stapler. And a printer.

Among other things.

But because the iMac popped up
a reminder about your birthday,
and the universe provided
the perfect wallpaper photo
at the very same time
(what are the odds?),

I cleaned up the messy Mac desktop
so I could snap a screenshot
to show you how beloved you are
(in case I haven’t said so enough)—

you, the childhood BFF,
the third Haag sister (as Donna
and I are likewise the second
and third Lester sisters),

the marine zoologist Dick and I
adore, with whom (as we had earlier
—n the day of this photo) we love to
prowl beaches and peer into tidepools
as you point out sea creatures
with exotic names before returning
to your day job doctoring all manner
of kitty and doggy.

You, who also likely still
keeps a messy desk or two—
thank goodness, not just me—

you of the great, good heart,
you, our Sue-babe, HBD2U,
here’s to many, many more.

(for Deb, my riverside walking buddy)

Though the river has shrunk to
a slender fall ribbon,
exposing a narrow band
in the center of the channel
populated with trees going about
the business of shedding,

we walk the sandy trail
looking for the telltale splash
of sea lions who swim upriver to make
their home, however temporarily,
in these fish-rich waters.

Sure enough, in a spot where children
on a walk pause with two smiling adults
to watch the show, we stop, too,
riveted by the sight of a big guy in the water
flopping at the surface, not unlike a big fish,
though whether catching or playing
we cannot tell.

And when he swims upriver,
we follow on the parallel path,
eager to catch glimpses of his
big head, his slick back, gleaming
under the morning’s sun.

For no matter how many times
we witness these little miracles
of one who has migrated far from home,
to waters unaccustomed to his kind,

we applaud the presence of this
fellow, quite oblivious to the way
his presence has delighted us,
reminding us to pause, look
and inhale the glorious
in the everyday.

The night before I never saw
most of my students again—
only some of their framed faces
via a newfangled form of online
communication—

I watched a massive synchronized
cloud, thousands of starlings
zooming as a collective whole
over a fall-harvested field, looking east
over the stubble into the setting sun
of a promised spring,

bird ribbons whirling and pirouetting,
tiny ballerinas in silhouette
dancing as a single breathing,
wing- and heart-beating organism.

All this as crows cawed to their
brethren from not-yet-leafed trees
against the hazy sky,
end-of-day tangerine seeping
into blue-gray.

I did not see the murmuration as a sign
of what was coming, of the millions
about to be flung into chaos,
thrown into the air,
ready to fly or not.

Instead I stood in the parking lot,
unaware that this would be the
final in-person college class
I would ever teach, thinking

that it takes only one starling to copy
the behavior of seven of its neighbors,
then those nearby copy seven of theirs
and so on until the entire group
swoops as one to avoid a predator
or catch insects in flight
before finding someplace safe
to roost for the night.

I watched that evening sky show,
enthralled not for the first time
and certainly not the last,
by nature’s special effects
that astonish mere humans,

phenomena that transport us
out of our little lives for
a breathtaking moment
if only we stop, look up
and allow ourselves
to marvel.

A woman, filled with the gladness of living,
put the purse of her body on the table
and began to unpack it.

“I have no need of this,” she said to no one
in particular, though the fluffy black cat
watched her, as he often did.

And she withdrew the bones of her feet
and arranged them prettily on the table,
as though from an archaeological site,

the phlanges and metatarsals, names
she had long ago learned in anatomy class,
and above them, from her purse,

emerged the bones of her legs—the long
tibias and fibulas—and above them
the patellas that underlaid her knees,

anchors for the strong femurs that locked
like baseballs into the glove of hip sockets
around the pubis, the coccyx and the sacrum.

She stood back, admiring her arrangement,
mindful that it was not truly hers, that
the framework of her existence was a gift

from the ancestors, so she murmured her
thanks into the ether, trusting that it would be
received as she hoped to be. Resuming her task,

the vertebrae tumbled out of the purse of
her body like dice, and she chuckled as she
gathered them up and studied them carefully

before putting them in the correct order.
“You’ve been such a good body,” she said then,
assembling the cage of her sternum,

the humerus of her arms, the ulna and radius
of her hands, then moving upward to arrange
the long collarbones and stacking the cervical

vertebrae of her once elegant neck. And there
she paused, as the cat cried and she smiled.
“Thank you for the good life,” she said,

retrieving the heavy ball of her skull
to top the horizontal sculpture on the table,
just before her boneless skin suit fell to the floor,

and the cat walked over to it to sit on the last
bits of her warmth, curling up, as he so often did,
for a good nap.

•••

With thanks for the inspiration from the first line of the poem “Table” by Edip Cansever (translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast). And thanks to Phyllis Cole-Dai, Author for the prompt and her joyous Joysters group.

(for Dickie)

I drive toward you under playful
fluffy clouds doing the sidestroke
through rain-washed blue,

thinking about the little ginkgo
in my front yard that years ago was
on its way to being a proper tree

when someone accidentally broke it,
and it became a bush. Just before
I got in the car, I stood next to it,

now a foot taller than me, the little
gilt-edged fans hinting of color
to come. Its larger cousins

in the neighborhood have already
shimmied into their fall wardrobes.
But my little tree is taking its time.

I don’t mind. I can wait.
And in the meantime, on my way
to make you a rare breakfast, I glory

in our city’s plethora of trees,
the ones that keep their clothes on
year round as well as the ones

that remain green until—
shameless strippers that they are,
and oh, how we love to ogle—

they drop it all, trusting the cycle
of the seasons to dress them again
when it’s time for their next act.