Good night, sweet ones,
as you head into the dark.
Oyasuminasai—wishing
you restful sleep, as they
say in Japan.
Buenas noches to your
yawn, to your mind
curling around itself
readying for rest.
Buonanotte, whisper
Italians, as your
lashes kiss each other
and settle into sleep.
Oíche mhaith,
they say in Ireland, as
you try to wrangle your
tongue around it:
eee-ha wah
Or, as they say in Jamaica,
Gud nite, boonoonoonoos,
darling one,
Gud nite.
Some people like to build boats in the basement.
I like to do things to food.
—Julia Child
Bless me, Julia, for I have stepped
again into the kitchen where I have
few natural gifts,
and though I am not tackling any
of your greatest hits (still working
up the nerve to attempt
your French onion soup), I have,
in recent weeks, made five batches
of custard, and dazzled the man
in my life by showing up in his
kitchen with ingredients chopped
and ready to sizzle in the wok
for chicken stir-fry. Forgive my pride
in carrying off this simple meal
reasonably well (the chopped
Brussels sprouts were a nice touch,
if I do say so myself), but I count this,
along with my friend Lisa’s split pea
soup that my mother loved in winter
and my grandmother’s brownies—
ideally not consumed together—
as one of a handful of kitchen
accomplishments (besides
opening umpteen cat food cans
over many decades). You who
dropped a whole turkey on the floor
(“well, that didn’t go very well”)
and picked it up and kept going
on live television remind me
that food failures happen,
that we laugh and start again.
And if I keep this up, I might
get brave enough to try your
Quiche Lorraine, the secret
of which, you said, was cream
in the custard, and, oh, Julia,
custard I can do.
All this light on Easter,
as so many wish for
and don’t have,
along with warmth
and tenderness and
blossoming things.
But hope, even under
a waning gibbous moon, 🌖
is also given this day,
every day, really,
to all beings everywhere,
not least, dear one,
from me to you.
Did I ignore the words
starting to ticker tape
their way across my brain,
imagining that I could
collect them later?
When, in fact, they would roll
away like spilled jellybeans, and,
needing to walk onto the next thing
and the next, and the next,
I could not go back and retrieve them.
Now, in the midst of running errands,
between the pet food place and the bank
and the sandwich place and the grocery store,
I sit in the parking lot and dictate
what is showing up, having no idea
if it is any good or not.
Not caring, really, just mindful
that it is almost Easter,
and jellybeans have been strewn
in front of me,
and, after all these years,
I have finally figured out that
the only sin is to walk by all those gifts
and not pick up at least a few bits
of sweetness.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
—Mary Oliver
This is my work in the world—
walking where spring has greened
the many waist-high grasses
and thickened the bracken and
sent up the tall spiky milk thistle
and the propeller-like wild radish.
I stroll really, often pausing mid-step
to bend and peer at something
blooming like an eager teenybopper,
its petals shimmying in a just-right
breeze. And though I may have
a glimmer of its name buried
in the overstuffed filing cabinet
of my brain, that’s not what’s
important. I snap its photo
anyway, wanting to capture
the whatsits at its peak, sparkly
and young and full of life—
as we all are for a time.
I remind myself to pay attention
to the tiniest of everyday miracles
because what better work
is there than to walk through
the world and acknowledge
the lovely ones, whether we
know their names or not?
Those who likely see
themselves as the most
ordinary of living things,
but whose very existence,
however fleeting, blesses us all.
Needing the water
but far from the ocean,
I take myself to the river closest to me,
the same one that turns into a lake
by the house where I grew up,
then is strained through the teeth
of a great dam and released to flow
40 miles to the city where I now live.
I can’t explain why some days
I need to see water and motion
on its way to the sea that I am missing.
Call it longing, call it grief,
call it a settling.
But when I find my way to the riverpath,
walking and stopping to take pictures
of new purple vetch in high season,
its florets hanging like ringlets
off a young girl’s head,
I am startled by a splash and the arf!
of one of the resident sea lions.
His massive head emerges, a fish
in his jaws, which he flings across the water
in a pinniped game of fetch,
then dives after it.
I am completely taken out of myself,
caught up in the marvel, in the interplay
of life and death before me—
perhaps of actual play, too—
of being just one organism
in a great ocean or a swift river,
whether walking or swimming
or flying or crawling,
as all of us making our way
through this world
somehow manage to do.
•••
You can watch the sea lion I saw toss his fish here.
(for Dickie)
Forgive me as I take again
the sacrament of avocado,
which I know you find
distasteful, its texture
lining your mouth like
mushy wax. Even I
object to an unripe
specimen’s chalky taste,
and if they go bad, they
go bad, baby. So turn
your back as I peel, then
scoop the creamy innards
from this ready-to-be eaten
indulgence, not thinking
about the fact that it’s a
fruit (it contains a seed,
after all) or its good fat
and fiber and an alphabet’s
worth of vitamins, not
to mention the antioxidants
that are good for eyes
and brain. No, I’m just
anticipating the smooth
after the mashing on
a hot summer afternoon,
the first bit of green glop
in the mouth, along with
the little B vitamin glow
that comes after loading up
up a tortilla chip with fresh
guac and reintroducing it
to my eager tastebuds,
relishing the first swallow,
the holiest bit of communion
I know.
Deep pink ones pop like over-inflated balloons
all over my front yard, as they do everywhere
these days of floral abundance springing into action.
I did not plant each geranium—my next-door
garden goddess did from sprigs of her own plants—
though the newbies struggled through summer’s heat.
We both watered them extra, and flowers did emerge,
a bit limp and wan. Still, I applauded their fortitude.
Now the gerania arranged in a row near the sidewalk
toss come-hither glances over their blossoming
shoulders, which entice more than just the
four-footed passersby to stop, bend and fawn
over them—especially the four-year-old who
sniffed a large bundle and, to her smiling mama,
hollered “Yummy!” throwing her arms
to the sky at such a profusion of loveliness.
•••
(for Christine Cross, with my thanks)
(for Mom and Ashley, with love)
The same Monday afternoon I cruise
plants in a nursery, I walk by a large
heart sculpture on an outside wall,
and think, Nice, about to walk on.
But something stops me, and I
backstep to peer closely, discover
that the heart is composed of dozens
of small, open-winged butterflies,
delicately rendered in rusty metal.
And it comes to me:
Here you are.
Of course, it would be in butterflies,
your favorite, like the one on every
incarnation of your business card,
on brightly colored stakes in
the potted plants on your patio,
the one that’s no longer yours
but now belongs in the good care
of your grandson and his wife.
I often see images of butterflies,
but this one says Mom in a way
that others have not.
I have to buy it, of course, knowing
the spot on my backyard fence
where I will hang this sweet swarm.
As I place it in my car, I feel
my phone vibrate, and what I see
makes me vibrate, too.
Your grandson’s wife has texted
three photos of the purple lilac
blooming its fool head off
in your/her backyard. And
on that bush that I hand watered
through the three too-hot summers
rests a large butterfly, its wings
open to reveal a shade of blue that
you would love—an aqua teal.
I think she saw me taking
pictures of her flowers and
had to check on them, too,
texts your grandson’s wife.
Purple lilac with a blue butterfly.
That’s her in a nutshell.
It so is, I type back blurrily
through damp lashes.
Which is when the voice
of a long-gone beloved friend
of yours and mine rattles through
my head, as she often does:
Honey, there are no accidents.
And I say aloud to no one
and everyone who might
be listening,
I know. I know.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou.
I am terrible at games,
even word games, which you’d think,
wordy as I am, I’d cruise through
like a Sunday spin over smooth road.
Not so much, which makes no difference
to me until I take up a challenge
to convene quartets of sixteen seemingly
random units of language. They have
relationships, the game tells me,
and I puzzle over how to balance
some of them, over what to do with
the rest. I try to find some harmony
among the difference, the diamond
among the remainder pebbles. And,
when to my surprise, I succeed—
not only in making four sets of four,
but also in figuring out how to play
ball in this field of dreams—I’m aflush
and smiling as if I’d whacked one
out of the park, a whole stadium
of word fans cheering my prowess.
•••
(Thanks to Ellen Rowland for the prompt that sent me
to The New York Times word game called Connections.
Below are the words that I attempted to connect in some way…
then I used all but five of them in a poem. You might want to
give this a try, too!)
Güd wrtr 