Güd wrtr

(for Margery Thompson)

I first made your mother’s custards
for your mother some 26 years ago
in her last year of her life—

her faithful recipe neatly inked
onto the 3×5 card that you gave me
after she died. Easy, you said.

I, one of the cooking impaired,
asked my best friend how to scald
the milk, which is when she—

a good cook herself—delivered
one of her funniest lines:
How do you feed yourself?

Not with scalded milk, I retorted.
You patiently explained the simple
process, and I delightedly presented

my first custards in your mother’s
1950s milk-colored Pyrex cups to her,
which she praised as if I had brought

her Baked Alaska (what alchemy
it must take to bake ice cream!).
Her eyes closed as the first spoonful

reached her mouth—just as yours
did today when I delivered a pink cup
of custard to you in the hospital,

the very definition of comfort food
from your mama through me to you,
her adored daughter, who has

fed me and friends and family for
decades, who has taught me more
than a thing or two about food.

And as I stood next to you of little
appetite, watching your face fold into
into contentment as you savored

every bit of custard, spooned the
little pink bowl clean, I confessed
my haphazard application of

cinnamon on top. In between bites,
you, my cooking coach, gently suggested
how to avoid clumping the next time,

which made us both grin, knowing
how eager I was to head back
to the kitchen and give it a try.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors,
there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke”

•••

If they were cars, they’d be pulled over for doing
60 in a 25 mph zone, these arrest-me-red flowers
ablaze with show-offy cheeriness. They pop up
with look-at-me-look-at-me insouciance, like
a pretty girl in a fuchsia frock at the dance,

and you want to hate their cheekiness,
their unearned confidence, but really.
How can you ignore their reckless blooming?
How can you not stop, bend and reach
out a hand, tell them how gorgeous they are,

flash your own lovely smile back at them?

(for Popoki)

There was rain in the night
just before dawn when I tiptoed
into the kitchen to peek at her
sleeping in the cardboard box
she had chosen near the back door.

I had lined it with towels easily
laundered, now that accidents often
happened, and there she lay,
a perfect kitty spiral, her tail
hugging the circumference of her
skinny self, not awakening as usual
when she heard my footsteps.

I have known for a good year that
two of the important females in my life
were on their way into mystery—
my mother, a too-thin version of herself,
who went in December, and Poki,
who had been losing weight
but eating like a horse.

For some time I had a feeling about
what was ailing her, but because she’d
long been the cat-turned-tiger at the vet’s,
I was reluctant to subject them to her
understandable outrage at such indignities
as being poked and prodded
in places no cat wants to be.

For years a now-retired veterinarian
had treated Poki at home, this easygoing
cat who never failed to use the litter box
properly, which she recently started
overshooting and leaking wherever she sat—
a sign I recognized.

I’ve done this a lot—
seen the two- and four-footed beloveds
to their ends—but I never want to
make the call. Though I do.

After the rain washed the sky clean
and the sun emerged, I let Poki out
to stroll the driveway for a last look
around her queendom. She sat and
closed her leaky eyes, basking as she
has done for sixteen years, as my
own filled, too, both of us
soaking up so much spring,

Then I tucked her unprotesting self
into the soft carrier and took her to a kind
veterinarian born and raised on Maui
who instantly understood—Popoki,
the Hawaiian word for cat—

and together we sent her off
with our aloha and the lyrics
by a Hawaiian queen in our heads:

One fond embrace
A ho’i a’e au
Until we meet again.

•••

Mahalo nui loa to Dr. Kourtney Kaya Lee (the Maui girl-now-Sacramento-veterinarian)
for so kindly ushering Poki into mystery, along with the always kind staff at Sacramento
Animal Hospital. I appreciate your terrific care of my animals over the decades.

When you blast poppy orange
all over March like
an enthusiastic kid fixated
on that one color screaming
“Me! Me!” in the crayon box.

You are spitting up poppies everywhere
all at once with some stocky lupine
thrown in—both the lemon variety
and the vibrant purple,

not to mention the trees you’ve
coaxed into blossom
and the wisteria over my driveway
hanging like lacy lavender ornaments.
I look for them all year, aware
that too soon they will disappear
as so many other florals arise.

Oh, California, how I love you.
Spring reminds me how proud
I am to be one of your natives—
born and grown and thriving—
right here in this state showing
off so much of her golden
where I was long ago and
happily planted.

My sister posts under a poem I’ve shared
about our mother,

Miss you and dreamt of you and Dad last night.

And I, not for the first time, envy my
younger sister—far more slender, blonder,

more organized and efficient than I.
But not for those reasons.

She misses our mother, the difficult one,
who was, as our father would’ve said,

a pistol right up to her end. I covet
that feeling. I’m nowhere in that

neighborhood, though I like to think
I’m walking around its periphery,

having forgiven our mother for
a lifetime of anger not infrequently

directed at me. I’d love to miss you
someday, I’d think when she was

particularly snappish. I’m still
miles away from missing her,

though I think of her often, and
our long-gone father, too,

but my sister’s heart clearly holds
a greater capacity for absolution

than mine. I don’t want to carry
a hardened heart. I like to think

that mine is soft—or softening—
more each day now that she’s gone,

that our connection with her
is only about the love that I

trust she carried for us, even if
she didn’t voice it, even if some of

her words near the end were harsh
ones. Hours later she apologized,

I remind myself, an occurrence so
rare it falls into the category of the

miraculous. I like to think I saw
softness in her dying eyes,

the ones that could no longer see us,
but were perhaps looking in the

direction where she was heading,
into the after, the place where

dreams might reach us, if only
we can hold ourselves lightly.

(for Cliff)

Deep in the night I dream
you holding a sphere of light,

a mass that requires both hands—
do you still have hands?—

though light, it turns out is, well,
light, hardly weighs a thing,

pretty much weightless, but
cradled in your palms gets molded

like weightless clay into something
bigger than a softball, ready

to be thrown into the darkness,
splatting photons like paint splotches,

brightening whatever it sticks to.
Which might be me.

Which might be the reason
I suddenly feel lighter after

a weighty season. You lob light
gently at me the way you did

that long-ago spring when we stood
in our back yard and you taught

grownup me how to catch a softball
with your massive mitt the texture

of a broken-in saddle. Eyes on
the ball, Toots, you said,

your voice reaching me as it does
from the wherever, melting the heavy,

turning it into a trickle of burnished
gold that trails down my cheek,

illuminating my cupped hands,
warmed by your now and forever light.

(for Mom)

Two months after you die, we have your house
cleaned out and ready for renovation.

Three months after you die, on a cloudy day,
I drive from my town to yours to pick up
from the cleaners a couple of Grandma‘s
afghans we found in your linen cupboard.

And because I’m nearby, I head to the car wash
where I went every Monday between your
appointments in the oxygen chamber
and later the chiropractor—with lunch
in between at your favorite restaurant.

Along the way I stop to extend the gratitudes,
yours and mine, to a couple of the people
who felt great affection for you in your final years,
who were so kind to you—the ones who looked
forward to your arrival, who treated you
so specially.

From Mel (she’s now the manager)
who automatically brought you a tall flute
of champagne with a jaunty strawberry slice
on the rim

to Chloe at the chiropractor’s,
who hoisted you twice a week into
the oxygen chamber for your hour
of pure O2 and a good nap.

All this, you were convinced,
contributed to your ongoing healing
and longevity—not least the champagne.
And it probably did.

Whether or not the procedures
extended your years on the planet,
you swam in this pool of goodwill,
filled with so much kindness from
folks a good half century younger
than you—people who clearly
made a difference in your life,

as you, they now tell me,
did for them.

(for Rosie Just Giel)

Today we have a new family member
who, with some help, has emerged

from her shell to find two parents
waiting for her, along with a brother

and grandparents eager to tuck her
under their wings to keep her warm

and dry and fed—the flock it takes
to raise a fledgling.

Welcome to the world, baby girl.
We have so much to show you,

as we know you have to show us,
as you live and thrive in love,

as your damp wings dry and
strengthen, as you grow—

faster than we’d like—and
stretch, flutter and—

before you know it—
fly.

My favorite poem is the one I haven’t written yet.
—Martha Silano

When people ask, it’s impossible to choose.
Not just of my own poems, which I can’t recite,
but of all the poems that live in my heart,

and, thankfully, on my computer, so I can find
them when I need them. That Galway poem
about blackberries, and Merwin’s about

not knowing the anniversary of our deaths,
and Ellen’s about lovers meeting in the airport,
and Naomi’s poem about happiness—

and Robert Hass’s on the same topic with
one of the best lines ever: “our eyes squinched
up like bats.” I could go on and on, lost

in poems I love, and I sometimes do so
on purpose—open them on my desktop
and wade in, first to my ankles,

then to my knees, and the next thing
I know, I’m up to my neck, swimming
in lines I love by poets so dear to me

I call them by their first names
like some people do with their favorite
musicians. My own poems I love

like children—I cannot choose
between them—but the poems
that great poets have knit into

my very fiber, let me keep them
till my mind thinks its last thinks.
Let me die with poetry on my lips.

•••

(For Laura Martin / poet, moetess and birthday gal)

Poems mentioned:
• Galway Kinnell: “Blackberry Eating“
• W. S. Merwin: “For the Anniversary of My Death”
• Ellen Bass: “Gate C22”
• Naomi Shihab Nye: “So Much Happiness”
• Robert Hass: “Happiness”

whom I have never met but whose
lines have touched me again and again,

who is chronicling her gradual decline,
but I do not cry for my dead mother?

Is it because my mother was not a poet?
(She did leave behind some heartfelt haiku.)

Or is it because my 93-year-old mother
refused to believe that she was dying,

that she could not be dying, because, if
she willed it so, she could live to be 120?

I imagine the gifted poet at home with her
daughter, the 19-year-old caregiver in

one poem, along with the poet’s husband and
their son, all hoping that she lives to see her

next book published by her fall birthday.
I am the poet who does not like to remember

my mother angry in the middle of the night,
demanding that I help her out of her hospital

bed in the family room, to sit on the commode,
which she could not do—her muscles gone

gelatinous as a jellyfish, her once formidable
spine unable to support her, though she

insisted it would. Instead, I envision the poet
still laughing with friends before she slips

into a cocoon from which she will not emerge,
her limbs stilled, her last soft I love yous

before the disease steals her voice, the tenderness
of her family caring for her, hating to lose her.

And I wish that we might have had that
kind of sweet sorrow in the house where

our mother raised the two daughters who
tended her. That, whether she wanted it

or not, she was writing her final lines in
our company, that she might somehow

have murmured words of love we hoped
she must have felt for us, as I imagine

the poet living into her dying is doing
with her beloveds, endearments that

she whispered in their tiny ears when
she first held them in her arms.

•••

(for Martha Silano, with love and appreciation)

You can see a terrific short video, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,”
about poet Martha Silano, who is living with ALS, here.