Güd wrtr

Can’t get enough I love yous,
sincerely delivered from ones
we adore, especially from
children or spouses,
dear friends, or the paw
and maybe a lick from
a favorite four-footed one.

Thanks is always nice, too,
and an I’m sorry from one
who had a thoughtless moment
does wonders.

But mostly we need to hear,
I mean you no harm, regardless
of where we hail from or our
skin color. We need to hear,
you’re safe, you can continue
to do your job, earn what you
need to support your family,
not feel threatened in any way
for simply being who you are
or whom you love.

We need kindness, not
threats. We need to be held
in light and with compassion,
as I hold you, wishing you well—
truly, I do, fellow human, you
traveling this path next to me.

Nice to meet you.
Let me give you a hand
along with a smile, maybe
sit for a bit. Tell me about you,
and I promise to listen with
a wide-open heart.

After a few more hours pulling books
topped with miniature dust bunnies off
her shelves and stuffing garbage bags full of
decades-old papersmagazinearticlesjournals
and lugging them to the driveway to heft into
my trunk a couple hours after sunset, I realize that
they are too hefty. One splits like a punctured
balloon, scattering a portion of what she’d read
and saved, top right corners creased, important
parts underlined or highlighted for reference,
meaning to come back to it later.

Something ruptures in me then, too—
everything disgorges in the dark—as I stand
stunned before I slowly begin to retrieve all
that has gone astray, weeping for the ending
that, for her, came too soon—for us, too late—
and I need to walk away from this detritus
of a life, just for a little bit.

So I let my feet steer me down the sharply
sloped driveway into the inky street and
look up into the night. I locate Orion’s slanting
belt high above the eastern treetops, thinking,
wait—the easiest of all constellations to identify
hangs high in the southern sky this time of year,
arrowing, as that belt does, toward bright
Sirius lower in the heavens.

Pulling from my pocket the magic device
with the nifty star app and pointing it skyward,
I realize that for most of my life I would’ve sworn
that this stretch of road and the parallel path
to the lake head east, toward the foothills
and beyond to the Sierra.

But, I discover, not so. When I’d stand
here a half century ago, cooling off after
doing battle with my mother or bidding
a boyfriend a tender goodnight,
I’d been looking south.

The reorientation stops my tears
as my eyes clear and my ears pick up
a small flotilla of geese overhead, calling,
as they do, turning all that sadness
into wonder, no matter the direction
of my gaze.

Whaddya mean, you didn’t know you were looking?
Of course, you’ve been looking. All your life you’ve
been looking.

It’s in freepin’ neon, for heaven’s sake.
Or someone’s sake. Maybe yours.

How should I know what it means? Angels don’t
know everything. It’s your sign. Let this be a sign
unto you. Maybe not a babe wrapped in swaddling
clothes… but those don’t come along every day.

And if it’s a burning bush, you may have another
problem. You might want to go look for a hose.

But not all signs are dramatic. Perhaps it’s
the tickle of breeze on your cheek as you emerge
from the car into the day, just as you begin the walk
to the store. Maybe it’s the smell of a long-gone
loved one as you walk in the door.

Doesn’t matter. It’s for you, this sign. All you need
to do is smile, hold it to your breaking-open heart
and breathe. Let it sing to you.

Then listen. Like this.

The holy disaster is a beckoning. Come.
Enter the fire of love and let it remake you
again and again.

—Mirabai Starr

I’m not looking for the sacred,
the holy, but it finds me unaware,
which is why, later, it occurs

to me that what shivered like
failure, tasted like disaster,
turns out to be an opening,

a beckoning toward the fire
that will anneal me, to first heat,
then cool me,

make me less brittle. In that
strengthening comes a softening,
a translucent spirit that

reshapes me in love, that nudges
me into humble forgiveness
of self. Come, whispers

the wintering sycamore,
naked for the moment. Stand
beneath me. Together we’ll

leaf into our newest selves,
offer shade to those who
think they’ve just happened

to walk by.

(ah-sin-duh-tin): The omission or absence of a conjunction between parts of a sentence.

(or why I love the word-a-day gems that arrive in my in-box)

•••

I learned the word long ago from a wicked good
grammar teacher in college who threw chalk at people

in class who had the temerity to answer incorrectly,
a fancy word that years later I tried not to throw

at my students like chalk because who needs that kind
of punctuation intimidation? No one, that’s who.

But having forgotten, I believe, a good fifty percent of what
I used to know and teach, when the word leaped into my

in-box, I thought, I know that word; it has something to do
with conjunctions—those nifty linking ands, buts, ors, nors.

I have not forgotten the editor I worked for who insisted
that it confused readers not to toss an and into a simple series.

And though I lobbed I came, I saw, I conquered (Caesar’s
perfectly lovely asyndeton) at her, she would not be moved.

I inserted an and in my sentence but read it silently without.
Sometimes intentional omissions smooth a repetitive rush—

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…—

even as they leave us breathless, a beating heart of rhythm,
a living thing that moves with determined intention:

…it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

And oh, how we need the hope, the light, the belief
amid the incredulity, the darkness, the despair.

Let us rise, even in the season of darkness,
always rise, into the light.

•••

(It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… and …it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity… lines are from the beginning of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” )

I will hold to my heart the sight of a young man
with a garden hose on his late grandmother’s patio,

aiming a clear stream of water at his late grandfather’s
ski boat, which, ages ago, he drove across the lake

we thought of as ours, pulling our mother out of
the water on her single ski, then my sister,

a blonde streak who zipped across the wake like
an old pro in her first decade of life, and me,

slower to rise, a bit tentative, until I felt the wind
whipping my hair and the water bumping beneath

me, the closest I’ve ever come to flight. And by golly,
if that young man as a toddler wasn’t a sweet copy

of his grandfather, the boater, the skier, and even
now takes a similar stance as he washes down

the vintage ski boat that’s still got a lot of life in her,
as he and his lovely wife make plans to move

into the house where his mother and I were raised,
bringing new energy to the place, infusing it with joy.

And yes, he will take his grandfather’s boat out
on our lake again, the old man, I’m sure,

riding along, beaming with pride.

The term for a series of regular curves
in a river’s channel is a meander,

created when a river erodes the outer bank
and deposits sediment on the inner bank,

a natural building up and breaking down,
defining the edges of ricefieldswheatfields

tomatofieldsalfalfafieldsalmondorchards
walnutorchardspearorchardspeachorchards,

grateful recipients of the bounty of the great
Sacramento River and its tributaries

winding around and cutting through some
two million acres of farmland, not to mention

serving as homewaters for hundreds of species
of fish, which do a fair meander themselves,

Chinooksalmonrainbowtroutstripedbass
whitesturgeonAmericanshadsteelheadtrout.

The word itself comes from the Maiandros,
a river in Turkey that winds and wanders,

as rivers do, going about from place to place
without plan or purpose. Like this poem

meandering, as, in deep midwinter, I propel
myself back into summer, my feet rambling

a riverside path, eyes skyward, imagining what
the snaking waterway rimmed with trees

must look like to the hawk circling the blue,
taking in the meager humans so far below—

wingless, grounded, flightless.

While you are trying to work, by which, I mean type at a computer
because the poem is coming, and your mews has the idea that she needs
to be Right There, Right Now, which she never used to insist upon. For years
she rarely sat on your lap, but now Poki, skinny and bony, still nimbly jumps
into your lap as you type, watching your fingers with the same stare she’d
fire into the backyard ivy, hoping for rodentia to make a fatal move. She
comes to lie on you when you lie in bed, fitting her dainty self behind
a curled leg, which makes you smile. And now you’ve brought home
your just-departed mother’s Big Guy Cat who, though Poki hisses at him,
joins the two of you on the big bed—a respectful distance from the lady
of the house—so you again have a couple of felines who want to be On You,
which is endearing in winter, stifling in summer. And oh, here she is again,
back on your lap, just in time for you to reach over her perky ears to type
as she nudges your right hand for a pat. Because what’s more important
than patting the kitty? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Amen.

I found a stash of your rose quartz hearts
in the top drawer of what had once
been my childhood dresser.

You, like me, a collector of stones,
perhaps using them in your healing work.
Me carrying cool talismans in my pockets

along with smooth pieces of shells and
heart-shaped coral from warm ocean beaches.
After you died, I poured all those hearts

onto my dining room table, imagined you
giving them to clients who came to what
had been my bedroom where you’d

have them lie on the massage table
and hold your hands over them,
offering the energy of the universe

to pass through you. I wonder now—
did any of that benevolence adhere to
the cracks in your broken heart?

Did those lovely pieces of quartz
help what needed healing in you?
And was it no accident that I found

your leftover hearts, opening my own
tender chakra as I palmed each one?
That the unconditional love I

sought for so long had been sitting
in my childhood bedroom for years,
waiting for me to find it?

Now comes the resting
as the spiritual and corporeal worlds
come together beneath the big tree
of stillness and silence.

The boundary between worlds
has fallen away, dark and light
holding hands, and, in this interlude,
you easily slip into the then.

You may pause here for a while,
preparing to resume the everyday,
but this, too, is a gift of the passage,
this flickering hollow through time

when you, like the one who has
moved on, are held in the thin place
between heaven and earth,
between here and gone.