Güd wrtr

though you were mostly gone,
every breath a great labor,

I thought of others who,
before liftoff, with great effort,

forced their parched lips to say
to those assembled:

I love you. You mean the world
to me. Thank you for being here.

You girls are the best things
that ever happened to me.

And as we watched, as we’d
been doing for days, I knew we

would not hear so much as a
whisper from you. Not merely

because you were past speech,
or that you had already traveled

beyond us into mystery, but also
because those were not your words.

And I wondered if, in the after—
if there is, indeed, an after—

you might have wished that
you had looked at the daughters

you bore—whom you must have
fussed over when we were babies,

whose fine hair you twirled between
your young fingers, who must have

watched us brand new beings sleep,
ones who had come through you—

if something in you, as you lifted on
the wings you’d grown, might have

wished for us to hear the words
that you could never say in life:

I love you. You mean the world
to me. Thank you for being here.

You girls are the best things
that ever happened to me.

And oh, that you heard us whisper,
Thankyouthankyouthankyou

for our lives, for all that you gave us.
You did good, Ma—you did well.

Yes, we love you, though we often
found it hard to do, even harder

to tell you, and somehow—
though we cannot know for sure—

we trust that you loved us, too.

Winter sunshine deceives us
into thinking that spring has arrived
in January, along with the narcissus

arrowing upward from cold earth,
blooming their fool heads off when
they have no business doing so.

But they do, I remind myself.
This is what gives us hope
in the soil of sorrow where

we’re momentarily planted.
I forget, as I look at the mud
lodged under my nails,

staining the creases of my
palms, that I can wash it
off with warm water

if I remember to do so.
That before long I will
loosen this hard-packed

dirt, allow it to crumble
like old paper into my hands,
then tuck in baby plants

that will grow as they will
with only a bit of water
and love.

As will I if I close my eyes
and tilt my chin toward
the warmth that our

greatest star pours into us
every day even when
we can’t see it.

Grief takes funny forms,
as we know, and when

a link arrived to a Peter Yarrow
video singing new lyrics

to his famous tune about how
the song of Puff came to be

(before, Yarrow says, he knew
about marijuana, so no, it’s not

that kind of puff), I didn’t yet
know that he’d died. But, still,

I found myself in tears
watching his face as familiar

as an old friend, especially
when he sings that Puff’s

no longer lonely, that little
Jackie Paper’s daughter visits,

“and the story has a happy end.”
I so hope that his did, too.

•••

With gratitude to the memory of Peter Yarrow,
as well as to still-with-us Paul Stookey
and the late Mary Travers, for all the music…
especially Puff.

Though I’d been bribing him
with yummy baby food for weeks,

after I added the magic powder
to help him relax in the carrier,

Maxi walked away. Of course.
You’re on to me, aren’t you?

I said at 6:30 a.m., too early for
both of us. But I left the moosh

in a dish by his tall cup of water,
which he has come to prefer in his

new room at my house, and I said
aloud to the companion cat spirits,

OK, you guys. Help here.
Dude needs a good clipping

to get all the mats off and
a good once-over by Dr. Sue,

who as a girl sat with Donna
and me in our mother’s house

with a fresh batch of six-week-old
kittens of Fluffy’s (a mini version

of Maxi, now that I think of it).
We’d diligently work to “train”

the baby kitties to use a litter box,
plopping them in the sand and

guiding a little forepaw to dig.
As if they didn’t have such instinct

hard-wired into their feline DNA.
And decades later Sue became

Dr. Sue, and decades after that
I’m driving the big guy an hour

up the mountain to see her and
her team, Maxi complaining

all the way. But his cry wavers
after a while, and I relax, too,

because Maxi did eventually
eat the doctored baby food.

I imagine that he’s growing
less fearful with every mile—

and me, too—as if, after all
these years, I’ve learned

a thing or three about the
mysterious minds of cats.

•••

With thanks to the original girl-next-door BFF
and veterinarian extraordinaire Dr. Susan Lester
and the great team at Four Paws Animal Clinic in
Nevada City, California, for their excellent medical
care as well as removing Maxi’s many mats.

Circling the labyrinth
on the first walk of the year,

I turn into the ascending sun,
stop, tilt my chin to welcome

the kiss of light through
bare-limbed trees,

and think of the beloveds
seen and unseen,

those here and gone,
as pilgrims walk the path,

turning and turning again
into slow epiphany.

I feel the stirrings of spirit,
the invitation to remain

open to what is waiting for all
all beings everywhere

held in the great symbiotic web
that sustains us. Love calls us on

as we walk through this life,
as we return in our turning,

as we receive the gifts of
a quiet, peaceful presence

nudging us through anguish
and grief, joy and laughter

on this new morning,
on every morning,

through every breath.
Amen.

I’m not a resolutions kinda gal.
I like to be surprised by what’s coming

since predictions seem silly.
Life is nothing but unpredictable,

as is survival—for us, for the planet.
And while we do all we can to assure

the going on—for us, for the planet—
the evidence of my life on Earth might be

a breathful of some good enough words
that I toss into the ether each day.

Ephemeral, sure, soon to wash away like
impressions of our souls in damp sand.

Not meant to be literature embedded
in the hearts and minds of most people—

except maybe you, reading this, where
it may land like a bit of sunlight creeping

along a shining floor, then vanish
in the wink of a moment—no less

meaningful for its brevity.

•••

With thanks to the inspirers:
• poet Esther Cohen for her phrase, “some good enough words”
• my multi-talented friend, poet and musician Antsy McClain for
his memorable album, “Our Evidence of Life on Earth”
• the wonderful late-great poet William Stafford for his poem,
“You Reading This, Be Ready”

My sister’s note is still
taped to the pole lamp in
the living room on our mother’s
well-trod route through
the house.

I cannot bear to remove
it just yet, though Mom’s
innumerable trips pushing
the red walker ended
21 days ago, and she
faded into the hereafter
14 days ago.

I stand in this room where
another lamp glows—
the mystery light, she called
it, the touch lamp that turns
on unbidden.

We have tried to make it
come on by stomping near it
or bumping the table where
it sits, but it remains
stubbornly dark—until a
hand ignites it.

As she walker’d her way into
that room, Mom would often call,
“Light’s on!” though no one had
touched it. She loved that, she
who strongly believed in unseen
energy illuminating her path.

Two days ago, when I brought
her home in a heavy plastic box,
the lamp was on.

I lingered there in the room
of the living, looking at my
sister’s handwriting taped to
the dark pole lamp, then at
the mystery light glowing,
and spoke the words I’ve been
saying for two weeks to
no one and everyone:

Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Moonset in the southwestern sky,
Venus and Saturn suspended above
a tiny fingernail of waxing crescent,
as I pull into the driveway in
her car with her in the front seat.

Never mind that she’s been gone
for 12 days, that she lifted off from
the family room on the winter solstice
with “The Music Man” on TV,
shortly after Marian the librarian
was sweetly serenaded by a
pitch-perfect barbershop quartet.

If hearing is, indeed, the last of
the senses to go, then let her be
surrounded, my sister and I figured,
by some ringing chords on her way
to the great chorus in the sky.

And if she’s still within shoutin’
distance now, before I get out of
the car, I put my hand on the small
box that contains what remains of her
and say, “We’re home, Ma.”

This is how I know she’s gone:
the singing silence. Something
she was not known for.

I bring her inside—“Here you go,
Ma,” I say—setting her gently on
the dining room table with her
official papers in her tasteful bag
from the mortuary.

I walk into the hall and open
the closet door where, for
two decades, Dad’s been tucked
away in his matching box.

“She’s back,” I tell him,
hoping that, for all their tussles
in life, they’ve met up again
as points of light zinging
around the universe,

attracted to each other like
protons and electrons
orbiting a nucleus that might
just be the two daughters
they made together,

the giantness in our smallness
of this little atom we call family.

•••

(With thanks and love to Kathleen Lynch.)

I walk under high fog
because something has propelled me
to get outside and see the neighborhood anew
on this quiet afternoon as the world
heads into who knows what.

Already, across this country,
two major acts of public violence
have rocked us. But because I thought
to tuck a few bills into my pocket before
I left home, when I passed the man
in front of the church sitting with
his knees up and his head down,
possibly praying, possibly trying to
keep warm,

I realized I had something to give.
I turned around and walked back
with my small offering to say,
Excuse me. Might this help?

His head popped up and his smile
brightened the day before his thanks.
But that’s not why I did it. It’s because
this has become my prayer:

For every horror humanity visits upon itself,
let this year also be one of unnecessary
acts of kindness, mostly small ones,
that we can offer one another—

like the pink cosmos in my neighbor’s
yard on the corner that, with no prompting,
continues to produce the flushed,
happy faces of bobbing blooms,
even in the depths of winter.

On the last day of the year,
sunshiny and chilly, I make
my way back to Amy’s deck

where Shelley and the gals have
been exercising their hearts out
Tuesday mornings while

I’ve been otherwise occupied.
Coming back into my world,
delighted to be part of the circle,

I begin to move to Shelley’s
old-time country music—
Patsy Montana yodeling,

I wanna be a cowboy’s sweetheart,
I wanna learn to rope and ride…
and then the tumbleweeds tumbling

with the Sons of the Pioneers—
both songs written in 1934,
and there I am thinking of her,

born three years earlier, my mother
who loved horses, riding the docile
mares stabled across the street,

delighted to sit on horseflesh
and amble down the path
to the lake.

She’d have wanted to be
the cowboy, I think, not
merely the sweetheart—

or maybe both, the woman
who brought up two girls
to believe they could do

anything they wanted.
And on this cusp of a new year,
we have, by golly.

We have.