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.
(for Dick Schmidt, on his birthday)
Because, the day before he turns 82,
he pulls himself out of a warm bed
sooner than he’d like to come to
your house and pick up
the lone box that remains of
your late mother’s many, many
boxes of books, and he drives it to
the friends of the library place
that only accepts donations
two mornings a week, which you
can’t manage this week because
of other obligatos, as he says.
And because it is the birthday
of the 16th president, this day that
was once upon a time a federal
holiday, he texts that, though you
are not available, he would have
liked to see you and give you a
new penny (soon to be extinct if
a new president has his way)
to honor “dude’s birthday,”
adding, “I owe you one,”
this dude of yours who
presents you with a shiny
penny each time you cut
his hair, which you save
in a special place, and which,
should the bits of copper-
plated zinc go the way
of other vanished species,
you realize takes on an
even greater meaning—
all those bright coins that
reside in your kitchen,
winking his love at you
all the livelong day.
On the church steps on a cold clear morning
three days before St. Valentine’s Day
there he was in the deep shade,
a slender young man with a days-old beard
and only a small towel around his shoulders.
Honey, whispered the little red-haired angel
who nudges me when I need nudging. This one.
We can do no great things, Mother Teresa said,
only small things with great love.
And, driving in the car, I had two small things
filling the back seat—a bulky egg-crate
piece of foam large enough to sleep on
and my late mother‘s bedspread.
I parked, got out and approached him,
the big foam pad in my arms.
Would this help? You could spread it out and sit or…
Oh, yes! he exclaimed. That would be wonderful.
And he came down the steps and took it as gently
as if I were handing an infant into his keeping.
I went back to the car for the bedspread, and,
watching him hug it to his chest, I asked his name.
Vincent, he said.
Jan, I said.
Two nights earlier I had driven around
to places where I knew the unhoused
usually sleep with the bulky bedding in
the back seat, finding no one. And in
the eerie dark I wondered, Where have
they all gone? Were they chased away?
I know they’re out here somewhere.
Honey, there are no accidents, the little
red-haired angel whispered. It’s one of her
favorite sayings.
Vincent lingered with the bedspread as
I noticed that he’d already spread the foam pad
on the church’s top step.
My mother died recently, I blurted. These
were hers. I think she’d want you to have them.
He didn’t hesitate. God rest her soul, he said,
the first time someone has said this to me
about her.
And while I’m hopeful that her soul
is at rest somewhere, St. Vincent’s blessing
touched me deeply.
And yours, too, I said watching him turn to walk
back up the church steps, wrapping himself
in a small thing, the little red-haired angel and I
sending prayers for his safekeeping, that he might
find some warmth and rest of his own.
After we leave for the night—
after we have spent hours pulling dusty
books off shelves, and finding photos tucked
into unexpected crevices, after tossing
paper, paper, and more paper, setting aside
office supplies and semi-precious stones
(so many crystals!), more books, more records,
tapes (cassette and VHS), clearing cupboards
that hold serving pieces you never used
(three chafing dishes? a sleek percolator with
a spout angled like a 1950s Cadillac tailfin?)—
we imagine that you two take over your house
once more.
It looks so different now that we are clearing
it out for a new generation of your descendants,
though we expect that you don’t notice.
That if, when we are not there, you drift like
smoke through the rooms where we imagine,
in the days that were, you fell into each other’s
arms and danced, stunned by your good fortune
to have landed in this house by the lake
where you raised us and so many puppies
and kitties, where, we believe, for a time
you were happy.
You are one big enigma to us now,
you who turn on the mystery light
before we arrive and sometimes seem
reluctant to allow us to turn it off.
Each time we come in to see it on,
our hearts leap a little, and we say,
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for the light,
for leaving us with so much light.
How is it that my little sister is a grandma,
and her husband (that cute blonde guy who
played baritone sax in the college night band)
is a grandpa?
And that they made a Lauren, and Lauren
(with Gerald) made a Henry (and now she’s
putting the finishing touches on their
soon-to-appear Rosie),
and, as my little sister and I bag and box,
discard and donate so much of our parents’
house to pass it to the next generation,
while outside, Kevin (with Ashley) prune
and rake and pull out deep-rooted ivy to remake
the front yard into a place of beauty.
In our family’s family room I watch that
little sister (now Grandma) climb into Henry’s
plastic corral to change his diaper
(Grandpa, the still-sax player, in there, too),
and it’s déjà vu all over again, as they say,
Aunt Jan remembering these two as young
parents just, oh, a blink of an eye ago,
raising a little Lauren and a little Kevin into
lovely humans with kind-hearted spouses.
I’m whooshed by that time-flying-by thing
right there in the house where we were raised,
watching the latest set of grandparents
in our family take such delight in the offspring
of their offspring, me stunned by so much life,
so heart-full at the sight of all them.
Güd wrtr 