Güd wrtr

We put pair after pair of her shoes into
great garbage bags, some for donation, some
bound for the Place Where Old Shoes go,

but some I could not quite bear to release—
the dyed-to-match pink linen pumps
that accompanied the fuchsia sheath

with row after row of matching fringe that
she wore with one of her quartets. As she
sang, the fringe shimmied, which my sister

and I loved. Our mother had a thing for bling—
the gaudy, the sparkle, the glitzy
(“a girl can never have too much glitter”),

which we shunned. No sequins or bedazzling
for us. So why, then, could I not let go of her
sparkly silver slip-ons, the last shoes

she wore for months before her departure?
I’ll never wear them. They’re much too
small for me, not my style and worn

to the point of discarding rather than
donating. But my sister put them aside,
and I brought them home, wishing

they’d been bright red, so that, in the end,
she might have clicked her heels together
like the other Dorothy in her ruby slippers,

no-place-like home-ing her way into
whatever comes next—with luck, the
sparkle and glimmer of the cosmos,

eager to embrace and receive her.

through your just-written poem as you read it
to your writing group is to pronounce a few words
as best you can, gulping, gasping in your shakiest voice,
then pause, take a deep inhale, then read a few more.

Repeat. Read, pause, breathe.
Again. Again. Till you get through the thing.

For years I have given those who cry as they read
the words of my late mentor and friend:
Wait till your breath comes.

I rarely cry reading my own work, though my
eyes often dampen when others read.

But today, with the companion spirits flitting like
fireflies around the room, winking their enlightened
selves at me, I cannot stop the tears.

Then I hear her voice with all the other dead
loved ones swirling around me:
Wait till your breath comes.

So I do. Read, cry, breathe. Repeat.

And when I lift my head, my damp eyes behold
the beloveds around the table, this community
I never expected to spring up around me,

holding me with their collective breathing,
their great hearts, so I can read what
needs reading, then listen as they praise
what’s working in my stuttering draft.

I never hear the gems that they do, but
I believe them as they believe me when
it’s their turn to pour their words onto
the table, luscious rubies that sit there
gleaming at us all.

We all want to pluck a chunk of time,
usually the good bits, and store them
someplace safe—

a chronological savings account,
perhaps, or we chop time into
small sections and stuff it

into mason jars, tucking those
precious containers into our souls’
basements so that we might

periodically descend into the dark
and retrieve one when we crave
a taste of the sweet preserves.

We can try to freeze time, but
honestly, there isn’t a walk-in freezer
big enough to safeguard a lifetime.

We are left, then, with the fragile
storage of the heart, the even more
fleeting repository of memory,

kairos, deep time, which wobbles,
seems to stop as we step outside
and bask in the light of a waxing

moon and winking starlight, or
when we laugh with a beloved, losing
track of that measured by clocks,

but leaving us—if we are lucky,
even as these mortal bodies fade—
with only the most tender snapshots

of a smaller, more beautiful world,
one in which we are not alone,
to carry with us for as long

as we are us.

(Noun: Music. A more or less independent passage at the end
of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.)

Neither my sister nor I thought it was important,
but the family photographer did, wanting to

take photos of us in the now-empty house
where we grew up, the one that, beginning today,

will be taken apart Humpty Dumpty-style and remade
anew for the next generation. And so we gathered,

we two girls, one silver-haired, one perennially golden,
to sit on the sky blue carpet in front of the fireplace

one last time—the room where we’d watch TV,
where I’d lie on the floor, and she’d sit on my back,

tickling me, prompting Mom to chuckle and holler,
Donna, quit tickling your sister! which made both

tickler and ticklee laugh harder, and Dad, too.
Where we posed for Christmas card photos sitting

on the raised hearth, the room that was the center
of family goings-on, including the matriarch’s departure

not quite three months ago. So we two sixty-somethings
posed for one of our beloved men as the other looked on,

none of us yet knowing that the next day it would all
begin to disappear, as it all morphs into pure memory.

We are happy about that. Really, we are. And the two
who bought this place in 1966 would be, too.

But still, as I look at the final photos in the house of us,
the coda to the long symphony of us, the last notes

dying away, a tiny piece of me rises inside, crying,
Encore! Encore! wishing, impossibly, for more.

•••

Our deepest thanks and love to our guys—Dick Schmidt and Eric Just—for their
decades of devotion and support, particularly in the last year of our mother’s life.

I couldn’t find it for months, the bracelet that
she insisted had to be on the dining room table,
the one I could not find on the dining room table,

nor in her bathroom atop the slender medicine
cabinet jammed with jewelry and all manner of creams
and emollients that she meant to use but didn’t.

And when I finally did find it, in a tote bag that was,
to be fair, near the dining room table (how on earth…?),
she was nearly gone. But it did not stop me from invoking

the name of our long-ago elementary school as I
hollered, “Eureka! I found it!” and relocated it to her
bathroom with the approximately 242 pendants

tangled on various hooks and jewelry stand, telling
my sister, “We are not losing this thing again.”
She agreed because Mother—who hadn’t worn

the charm bracelet in years and couldn’t have seen
most of the charms on it, having outlived most of her
vision—was frantic that we find it, but never said why.

My sister was all for donating it with so many other
pieces of jewelry, but I brought it home where I now
study the trinkets as if they contain the secrets

of the universe, which they might, for all I know,
in the 22 little silver milagros that held significance
for her—from the mini buffalo to the spiral shell,

the labyrinth to the sunflower, from the angel to
the cowboy hat to the headless horse, from the circle
of dolphins and the feather to the turtle to the seastar.

I keep touching the hand with its widespread fingers,
a cut-out heart in its palm—the place, perhaps,
where the love she so craved had leaked out,

the portal she hovered over for much of her charmed life,
trying to collect all the touchstones she could
to fill the unfillable hole.

My sister said to me in the driveway,
her truck and my car, which not long ago
was Mom’s car, full with the final loads

from the house our parents called home
since 1966. Weighted with so much stuff
bound for my own over-full house—

so much I have still to comb through
of hers, of his, of mine—and needing
to get moving to deliver some

of the stuff to young people into
vintage stuff, we did not linger. And
therefore, the tears that might have

sprung from my eyes waited until
after we’d delivered and dropped off,
after we had dinner at a place in

my neighborhood we’ve loved for
more than three decades. Not until
I carried her wedding dress over

my threshold, along with his impossibly
small Army jacket, and set them on
my bed did my sister’s words land:

We did it. We’re done.

The house is cleared out, ready for
its next act with the next generation,
for renovations that will erase so much

of what was, that will make room
for what will be. And I sat on my bed
to open the 70-year-old box that

migrated with her from her nursing
school dorm in Chicago to California,
marveling at the gossamer veil

as delicate and as strong as a
newly spun spiderweb, holding it
next to the dress she wore

when they married, when
everything began for them,
for all of us.

I hadn’t realized when
I gave them to her one Christmas
that they didn’t match.

“Jan,” said my mother in her
what-have-you-done-now? voice,
“These socks are mismatched.”

“What?” I said. She hadn’t yet
removed them from their cardstock
sleeve. “They have butterflies
on them. You love butterflies.”

She shook her head. “Look.
They’re different colors.”

I did. And, as usual, she was right
(because she couldn’t not be)—
one sock a bright robin’s egg blue,
the other a subdued navy,

though they did, indeed, have the same
butterflies and dragonflies flitting merrily
across their sock-y selves.

“Why would they do that?” she grumbled.
“Intentionally mismatch socks,”
glaring as I had manufactured them
that way.

“Whimsy?” I guessed.

She pulled her brow into its familiar furrow.
“That’s just dumb,” she declared, and
though I offered to exchange them,
she took them home, where, after her
death, I found them with a dozen other
brand new, unused things I’d given her—

from the turquoise (her favorite color)
butterfly’d jewelry pouches
to yes, other socks that scored
high on the whimsical scale.

Today I found the mismatched
pair that I forgot I’d tucked in
my sock drawer and unhinged
them from their protective cover.
I put them on and said aloud,
“Whimsy, Ma,”

which was when I felt her smile
along with the fanciful butterflies
fluttering with my every step.

Shimmering before my eyes most days now,
a vision that makes me both worried and hopeful,

I wonder: Is that the glaucoma? Oh, wait,
is that you, Helper? Nice of you to drop in.

I used to think of them as angels, but nowadays
you never know if that’s an acceptable term.

Even “heavenly being” might put them off, and
I’d hate to do that, showing up unexpectedly

as they do—in fat drops of rain plopping onto
the windshield, pearly and translucent, hanging

there for a weighty second before trailing down
the glass. Or in the pirouettes of leaf-twirl still

dancing groundward as I walk the neighborhood.
Or the unexpected cosmos, bright fuchsia, bouncing

tall on their long stems at the corner of my street.
How does that young woman gardener in her

floppy hat and knee-high wellies coax such color
out of winter? She’s angel-ing, for sure.

I’m pretty sure I don’t ask for divine assistance—
the angelics just show up. I’ve decided that

they always have, that my bones and eyes and
skin have at last become more porous, softened

so that I might detect the eternal glimmer and
see it for what it is: a constancy of care from

those seen and unseen, raining beams of love
down on us all, which we simply have to learn

to bear, if not embrace, as the great gifts they are.

If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a story

—Refaat Alareer from “If I must die”

•••

I feel hope leaking like
a bag of fresh sunlight after
your slow passage into

the what comes next.
In the array of pale pink
camellias showing off their

double spiral perfection
outside a window you looked
through every day. In the grins

of your grandson and his
wife tugging hard at roots
you literally set down

nearly six decades ago,
unruly and overgrown,
clearing space for the new

while gently trimming
vintage vines that will
tendril their way

toward the front door.
In the four deer
across the road

nibbling at the
green bits emerging,
two does with smaller

fawns, some of your
wild neighbors, along with
the turkeys who’d

cruise the backyard
like teenage toughs
on a Saturday night.

“They’re just hungry,”
you used to say, leaving
bird seed for them

outside in the old dog dish.
“They’re not such foul fowl.”
This makes me smile as

I relay this anecdote to
people who will never
know you except through

the stories I tell,
the poems I write
about you and other

companion spirits,
bringing hope, that
thing with feathers,

and a little bit of love,
as all the best stories
do.

Every day the grandpa erects a castle
for his grandson who spends weekdays
with his grandparents at the home

where his mama grew up, the grandpa
knowing that his grandson will behold
the intricate blocks-and-Lego structure

for perhaps all of three seconds before
he King Kongs his way into the edifice,
sending towers sprawling, a mass

of primary colors flung hither and yon,
the boy chortling as he performs his own
act of creativity, which the designer

delights in, too. And, after the boy’s mama
has retrieved him and taken him home
to his own blocks and bed, the architect

will gather up all the pieces and start
anew, building the next day’s castle from
from scratch, each one a unique invention,

anticipating a small boy’s delight as he
surveys his kingdom before knocking
it all down again.