Güd wrtr

My hands are powerful healing tools
They know exactly where to apply
their healing energy. I handle my life
with love.

—affirmation on the bulletin board in
my mother’s home treatment room

•••

Again and again, on sheets of paper
I find in her handwriting—notes and
reflections for literally hundreds
of classes she took as a holistic healer—

she squirrels away words like energy and
healing like nourishing nuggets stored
for retrieval in bleak moments.

Love bubbles up again and again—
the wish to live a loving life, to create love,
to be a gentle and kind person, which
she could be with so many she served,
but far less so with my father,
my sister and me.

She never felt loved enough,
appreciated enough, listened to enough.
She found it easier to explode and harder
to summon patience and kindness.

Yet now that she’s gone, I search for
her gentler side, so elusive in life,
in notes she took for hundreds of classes
and seminars, her writing on decades-old
pages in a hand that I can still decipher,

or in a quote tacked to the bulletin
board in the room that had once been mine
in that house of chronic angers—
the aspiration to walk lovingly
though the world.

I hope that, nearing her end, we gave
her what she so craved, that, as she
she slipped away, not wanting to
leave the body that could no longer
house her soul,

that what she felt from us—from
those who’d gone before, from
the vastness of the universe she
so embraced, what she’d longed for
all her long life—

turned out to be only kindness,
that all was forgiven, her rancor
vanquished, leaving nothing
but the love to carry her
into mystery.

•••

In memory of my mother and father on the 68th anniversary of their wedding.

Dewy, Dewy, Dewy, do you love me?
Dewy, Dewy, Dewy, do you care?
Dewy, Dewy, are you thinking of me?
Dewy, Dewy, will you still be there?
—1970s pop song

And he is there—Dewy remembers me,
who visited him last year—coming
to drape his long, lanky form down
mine, gaze into my eyes with the soulful
look of a momentary lover, making me
feel adored, if not forever, at least
in the moment.

I know that he will tire of this, remove
himself to another part of the house,
search for the human female to whom
he’s truly devoted. I get it—she’s
the kitty mom here, my friend
who’s invited me to stay.

And you gotta love a guy
who loves his mom, because
that weighty feline blanket draped
over me for even a little while
offers the kind of warmth that,
if nothing else, sends each of us—
purring right along with him—
into a sweet cat nap.

•••

With thanks to Terri and Al Wolf, for inviting me to visit them in the California desert,
and to Dewy and Quince, most excellent feline hosts.

(after Nikita Gill)

Well, first, it should be “fewer,” as I told way too many
college students who truly couldn’t care less. But
short is the point. Love short. Trying to write shorter.
A lifelong task.

(for Terri Wolf)

I step into the warm indoor pool
as, outside, the desert dawn
begins to bloom.

I’m 500 miles from my rainy-
cold home, staying instead
with my friend who jogs down

Lane #3 every winter morning at 6.
Though I am a far-from-early gal,
I’m a when-in-Rome one,

so I rise in the deep dark,
that time just before the day
becomes day, because

shoving off from the side
of the pool in Lane #2, head
down, ready to pull and kick

and glide places my older
body in its element—
weightless and floating—

as Sir Issac’s third law
of motion attests—that
by pushing the water

with arms and feet,
the water pushes back
in an equal and opposite

direction, sending me
forward. And so life
lifts us as we progress,

as we unexpectedly,
blissfully
float.

Wrapped in the arms of ancestors
long gone, the younger generations

criss-cross their way up the trunk,
living their lives, dying their deaths,

becoming stairsteps for the newest
descendants at the top, shaggy green,

reaching for the high blue.
We all grow from such deep roots.

Anything can be a poem.
Even typing the number for my to-go
airport burrito into a note on my phone,
which would in itself be a fine start,
if not remarkable in any way,

if not for the fact that, as I waited,
I watched a single person womaning
the grill. No one stood behind the counter
to take an order, this being the 21st century
and only some oldsters like me wanting
to use cash.

So I got with the program and stepped up
to the little kiosk that younger people use
with such ease and followed the simple
directions to order.

How much easier things are for some
of us travelers who can fly and cross
borders with ease. How much more
challenging for the fast-talking,
Spanish-speaking woman tending
the grill and others who have emerged
from the kitchen carrying metal tubs
of food, laboring, I imagine, for low wages,
living on their dreams.

Where did their people come from?
How easy was it for them to move from
one land to another that appeared
to promise so much? How many of
those promises have come true?
How many will be taken away?

(for Ashley Just and Kevin Just)

The kids are really putting their backs
into it—my nephew, who, with his wife,
are working hard to make the old house theirs,

clearing a half-century’s worth of overgrown
front yard and remaking it anew with slender
bender board and lots of shredded black bark.

It makes me smile and teary every time I see
them out there, not unlike our parents nearly
six decades ago, bending and planting, Dad
going after poison oak, Mom planting camellias.

Today the kids set out a half dozen pittosporum
plants in their black pots, ready for the freshly
de-rooted soil under the windows of what were
my sister’s and my childhood bedrooms.

Sitting on the floor of my sister’s room, going
through piles of our late mother’s sheet music,
I see their baseball-hatted heads popping up,
then disappearing, as they bend and plant.

Later, after we all return to our respective
homes in three different cities, my sister texts:
It takes a family to rehab a home.

I add, Exactly—the newer generations
of the family to rehab the family home.
Especially the yard duty couple.

And my nephew texts back: We are happy
to bear that weight on our useful lower
backs with ample cartilage!

I paste a happy red heart
on that text, a tiny metaphor for
my very own.

In other words, it seems like love has left you
because, perhaps, someone has.

Because it feels as if:

(choose your metaphor):
—you’re alone at the bottom of the cold, dark sea, or
—a great bird has just slammed into your chest and made
off with your trembling heart, or
—the gray haze of grief has wrapped its arms around you
too tightly to be comforting.

So start there. Write every cliché you’ve heard or imagine
about love putting on its fancy shoes and click-clacking
its way out the door. Be sure to include where this hits you
in the body—stomachs are overused, so consider, say, the elbow.

Strong verbs are a must, so sure, head for the thesaurus,
a vintage volume anchoring a high shelf. Take it down,
appreciate its heft, all the language it contains, and
remember the too-many-to-count times you’ve used it
to find the just-right word.

Make a list of those strong verbs and, while you’re at it,
images of the beloved. Hair blowing in the wind should be
avoided, since it, too, runs high on the cliché scale.
Ditto for soft lips.

But you cannot miss if you describe the scene of her final
breaths or the distinctly oaky odor of his skin or the texture
of the four-legged’s fur,

if you show us the particulars of personhood (yes,
beloved animals count) that made her or him or them
so worthy of your precious affection.

Throw in a place name. Or their name, if you can bear to
see it on the page. Maybe even if you can’t. You may cry,
but you likely won’t die. And if you do, you’ll have gone out
writing, which is never a bad thing—leaving these artifacts
of human creativity, of what’s inside us,

which is to say, leaving the crumbs of love behind
as we walk down a final metaphorical path into
the who knows what, the who knows where.

•••

(Thanks to Natalie Goldberg, who, in her classic, “Writing Down the Bones,” urges writers to keep writing no matter what—adding that even if you die, you’ll go out writing. And thanks to the equally classic poet Molly Fisk for the prompt.)

He was the proverbial stick—
or the rear right wheel of his car was—
the rainy night of his 82nd birthday
when he drove out to my late mother’s
house by the lake to haul bags of her
clothes 20 miles to the thrift store I love.

We thought he’d left when he came
back in the house, where my sister
and I were bagging shoes—well-used
tennies, no; serviceable pumps, yes—
saying, “I’m stuck.” And we looked up
from big garbage bags of heels
and blingy flats, alarm flickering
in our eyes.

He was the one who collapsed
in cardiac arrest six years ago on
an airport floor, utterly gone, only
to pop back with a single shock
to halt his fluttering heart, give
it a chance to restart.

He saw our concern before we
said a word: “Not me, the car.”
And we trooped outside, coatless,
to stand in the drizzle and look
at the spot across the road where
he’d backed up too far, sinking
into a half-century’s worth of
lawn clippings and detritus that
my father left behind, making
for soft, tire-swallowing mulch.

My sister, always the innovator,
dashed to the garage for long,
slender pieces of wood to slide
under the front tires. I retrieved
two carpet remnants, having read
years ago that if you get stuck in sand,
try to drive out on bits of rug.

Neither worked. We gave up, called
for roadside service—40 minutes,
they said, which turned into another
40 minutes and another before
I called again, pulling the old guy
card—my “husband,” 82, needing to get
home to take his medication—mostly true
but not as urgent as I made it.

And when—exhausted, anxious—
we finally saw the headlights
of the tow truck blazing through
the rural dark, illuminating
the slanting showers that had
let loose, I thought, not for the first
time, Hey, no one died.

And no one had, and no one did,
and tow guy Chue (whose name, he
told us, rhymes with “shoe”) arrived
at last to gently nudge the Civic
bit by muddy bit with a gentle but firm
tug, and another, and another,
and another—one of us in the car
shifting from neutral to drive on
command, the other damp and hooded
standing by, watching—

marveling again at the skills
and patience required to extract us
when we’re stuck, to jumpstart us
so that we might drive off into
the rest of these never-long-enough
little lives.

(for Dick)

Some burst like pale pink fireworks so early,
and I pull the car over to walk up a newly

greening slope and admire them up close,
tiny gems bobbing against a gray sky.

The first blossoms surprise me every year. And
here they are on the anniversary of your birth,

the day before the rest of the world celebrates
love, a hint of spring showing its eager face.

These precocious bloomers will soon disappear,
the trees will leaf out, later ones joining the chorus,

proof of love in floral form—like your unwavering
presence in my life, which leaves me astonished

once again by all things bright and beautiful that
seem to come early and last not nearly long enough.