Güd wrtr

I did not fall from grace: I leapt to freedom.
—Ansel Elkins, “Autobiography of Eve”

What if every fall is a leap to freedom?
What if the cast is the cocoon under
which a simple caterpillar gestates?
What if, in every ending—as brutal,
heartbreaking, unfair as it feels—
lies a beginning, a promise,
a do-over, a surprise?
What if that surprise is peace?

What if, as we clear away the clutter
of a season or a lifetime,
we discover treasures?
What if one of the treasures is grace,
which cannot be fallen from,
which is our birthright,
which accompanies our every step,
no matter how shaky,
every breath, no matter how ragged?

What if we are born anew every morning,
every moment with big, blinking eyes,
with perfect little feet and fingernails?
What if we are beheld with adoration
by one looking at us right now
(perhaps one we cannot see), thinking—

There you are! A miracle…
has there ever been such a lovely you?

(for Sue Lester, BFF birthday gal)

I cleaned off my desktop for you.
Not my actual desktop, though there
are two of those in my office.

The one I am sitting at is overfull
with all manner of stuff—
three skinny tubes of lip balm,
small sticky notes, two thumb drives,
three cough drops (wrapped),
several of my business cards
(in case I forgot who I am?),
an unreasonable number of pens,
the small pink fan (which I could
retire for winter) and my trusty
red, old-school, heavy metal
stapler. And a printer.

Among other things.

But because the iMac popped up
a reminder about your birthday,
and the universe provided
the perfect wallpaper photo
at the very same time
(what are the odds?),

I cleaned up the messy Mac desktop
so I could snap a screenshot
to show you how beloved you are
(in case I haven’t said so enough)—

you, the childhood BFF,
the third Haag sister (as Donna
and I are likewise the second
and third Lester sisters),

the marine zoologist Dick and I
adore, with whom (as we had earlier
—n the day of this photo) we love to
prowl beaches and peer into tidepools
as you point out sea creatures
with exotic names before returning
to your day job doctoring all manner
of kitty and doggy.

You, who also likely still
keeps a messy desk or two—
thank goodness, not just me—

you of the great, good heart,
you, our Sue-babe, HBD2U,
here’s to many, many more.

(for Deb, my riverside walking buddy)

Though the river has shrunk to
a slender fall ribbon,
exposing a narrow band
in the center of the channel
populated with trees going about
the business of shedding,

we walk the sandy trail
looking for the telltale splash
of sea lions who swim upriver to make
their home, however temporarily,
in these fish-rich waters.

Sure enough, in a spot where children
on a walk pause with two smiling adults
to watch the show, we stop, too,
riveted by the sight of a big guy in the water
flopping at the surface, not unlike a big fish,
though whether catching or playing
we cannot tell.

And when he swims upriver,
we follow on the parallel path,
eager to catch glimpses of his
big head, his slick back, gleaming
under the morning’s sun.

For no matter how many times
we witness these little miracles
of one who has migrated far from home,
to waters unaccustomed to his kind,

we applaud the presence of this
fellow, quite oblivious to the way
his presence has delighted us,
reminding us to pause, look
and inhale the glorious
in the everyday.

The night before I never saw
most of my students again—
only some of their framed faces
via a newfangled form of online
communication—

I watched a massive synchronized
cloud, thousands of starlings
zooming as a collective whole
over a fall-harvested field, looking east
over the stubble into the setting sun
of a promised spring,

bird ribbons whirling and pirouetting,
tiny ballerinas in silhouette
dancing as a single breathing,
wing- and heart-beating organism.

All this as crows cawed to their
brethren from not-yet-leafed trees
against the hazy sky,
end-of-day tangerine seeping
into blue-gray.

I did not see the murmuration as a sign
of what was coming, of the millions
about to be flung into chaos,
thrown into the air,
ready to fly or not.

Instead I stood in the parking lot,
unaware that this would be the
final in-person college class
I would ever teach, thinking

that it takes only one starling to copy
the behavior of seven of its neighbors,
then those nearby copy seven of theirs
and so on until the entire group
swoops as one to avoid a predator
or catch insects in flight
before finding someplace safe
to roost for the night.

I watched that evening sky show,
enthralled not for the first time
and certainly not the last,
by nature’s special effects
that astonish mere humans,

phenomena that transport us
out of our little lives for
a breathtaking moment
if only we stop, look up
and allow ourselves
to marvel.

A woman, filled with the gladness of living,
put the purse of her body on the table
and began to unpack it.

“I have no need of this,” she said to no one
in particular, though the fluffy black cat
watched her, as he often did.

And she withdrew the bones of her feet
and arranged them prettily on the table,
as though from an archaeological site,

the phlanges and metatarsals, names
she had long ago learned in anatomy class,
and above them, from her purse,

emerged the bones of her legs—the long
tibias and fibulas—and above them
the patellas that underlaid her knees,

anchors for the strong femurs that locked
like baseballs into the glove of hip sockets
around the pubis, the coccyx and the sacrum.

She stood back, admiring her arrangement,
mindful that it was not truly hers, that
the framework of her existence was a gift

from the ancestors, so she murmured her
thanks into the ether, trusting that it would be
received as she hoped to be. Resuming her task,

the vertebrae tumbled out of the purse of
her body like dice, and she chuckled as she
gathered them up and studied them carefully

before putting them in the correct order.
“You’ve been such a good body,” she said then,
assembling the cage of her sternum,

the humerus of her arms, the ulna and radius
of her hands, then moving upward to arrange
the long collarbones and stacking the cervical

vertebrae of her once elegant neck. And there
she paused, as the cat cried and she smiled.
“Thank you for the good life,” she said,

retrieving the heavy ball of her skull
to top the horizontal sculpture on the table,
just before her boneless skin suit fell to the floor,

and the cat walked over to it to sit on the last
bits of her warmth, curling up, as he so often did,
for a good nap.

•••

With thanks for the inspiration from the first line of the poem “Table” by Edip Cansever (translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast). And thanks to Phyllis Cole-Dai, Author for the prompt and her joyous Joysters group.

(for Dickie)

I drive toward you under playful
fluffy clouds doing the sidestroke
through rain-washed blue,

thinking about the little ginkgo
in my front yard that years ago was
on its way to being a proper tree

when someone accidentally broke it,
and it became a bush. Just before
I got in the car, I stood next to it,

now a foot taller than me, the little
gilt-edged fans hinting of color
to come. Its larger cousins

in the neighborhood have already
shimmied into their fall wardrobes.
But my little tree is taking its time.

I don’t mind. I can wait.
And in the meantime, on my way
to make you a rare breakfast, I glory

in our city’s plethora of trees,
the ones that keep their clothes on
year round as well as the ones

that remain green until—
shameless strippers that they are,
and oh, how we love to ogle—

they drop it all, trusting the cycle
of the seasons to dress them again
when it’s time for their next act.

The poetry inside you
is a chalice
and it is golden.

—”Chalice” by Kathryn Hohlwein,
May 18, 1930 – Nov. 18, 2024

•••

I sat in the poetry center waiting to
read a few of your poems on the eve
of the anniversary of your death,
holding a honey lozenge in my mouth
hoping to quell a seasonal cough.

Of course, you were there,
alive in the eyes of your children
who miss you terribly, coming
from the tender mouths of others
giving voice to your words.

And I thought of you who often found
new poems arriving at night in bed,
even in your final days in the hospital,
honeyed lines that you held in your mouth,
allowing them to melt into you, able
to recite them the next morning.

And in my own waiting, I felt your
sweetness against my own palate.
The cough did not arise, though
your words did from my mouth
at just the right time.

•••

For Laura Hohlwein and Reinhard Hohlwein
in memory of their mother, Kathryn Hohlwein

•••

“Chalice” is from the “Dear Poem” series, in Kathryn Hohlwein’s
collected works, The Little Chapel in Donegal © 2021, Random Lane Press.

says the message on the screen,
by clicking here, checking the box,
identifying all the stoplights,

because only we bipedal ones
with big brains can do so.
What of the whales with

their outsized hearts the
size of a Volkswagen bug,
or our ape relatives who,

as Jane Goodall taught us,
not only use tools but
invent them? What of

the instinct of caterpillars,
who willingly create and
wrap themselves in their

own shrouds, turn to liquid
and re-emerge as winged
creatures with a job to do?

Are we not all here to
pollinate and create
some kind of beauty

with our sizable hearts,
the ones that, if we are
lucky, expand with time,

with love given and received,
the best confirmation
of humanity after all?

The next generation lives there now,
their motion cam picking up all manner

of wildlife in the backyard, the one
that used to be our backyard when

my sister and I were growing up.
My nephew and his wife show us

photos of a little gray fox peering
into the sliding glass door—

one staring at the orange cat inside—
this caller who comes to visit.

In the nearly 60 years that our
family has occupied that house,

we’ve never seen a fox, though we’d
heard they were our neighbors

living in the state park across the road.
This one with such a sweet face

lingers as if it’s checking out the place,
perhaps knowing it well. As if she—

who died in the room on the other side
of that glass, whose essence may have

seeped through it as she headed into
mystery, she who so wished for

reincarnation—has returned to see
who’s coming for Thanksgiving

and what might be for dinner.

He heard it at least weekly from bosses
looking for something striking to anchor

A1 or a section header: Get us a weather
picture. And the photographers would

sigh as they headed out of the office,
into the world, to fulfill the always

challenging assignment. How many
umbrellas, the brighter the better,

and puddles, the splashier the better,
did they scope out, never knowing if

one of their shots would make the next
day’s paper? All these decades later,

the force still runs strong in him,
so, sitting at a stoplight in the rain,

the camera nowadays tucked
into his phone makes it easy

to grab a quick weather shot.
He’s made this picture more than

once, but the drops on the driver’s
side window always render

a unique abstract, and the blurred
lights of a gas station provide

a nice contrast against the gray
day. Through the magic of the air

he sends it to me, a once-upon-a-time
editor who responds that, even

retired for 22 years, he’s still got it,
and if it were up to me,

that baby’d go on A1 tomorrow
with a snappy headline and his byline.