In those long-ago days, whenever possible, we lay braided like eager wisteria in spring, your leg around mine, mine around yours, requiring no little untangling should
one of us want to turn over or rise. And then the other would reach out with come-back hands, and, often without words, we’d weave ourselves together again.
Affairs of the heart can ignite like that, and while not my first, only with you did I awaken disoriented, tangled in a fiery dream that neither of us wanted to extinguish.
I feared we’d burn so ferociously that we would crumble to ash, and in that disintegration I would not remember you.
All meeting ends in parting, said the Buddha.
Lying in your bed or mine, face to face, you’d run your hand down the curve of my torso and hip, promising the impossible:
I will remind you.
What if you don’t know where I am? I’d ask, with a foresight that seared me.
And you would assure me, I will find you in this life or the next. I will always find you.
I didn’t say, Even if we end up with others? Even if we die?
Because romantic me wanted to believe that somehow, eons afterward, we could return to that state of green love, raw and crisp, even if it exists only in other existences yet to come.
And all these decades later, in dreams, I find myself half-hoping that parting might end in meeting, that each of us still carries an ancient, tiny spark,
which, on a breath, in a future lifetime, a fresh lifespace, might one day rise and warm us again.
“In every lifetime I will find you” / sculptor: Michael Benisty / Burning Man 2022
Shelley providing the cheek pop alongside sisters Susan, Sally, Sherri and Shauna, all of them singing together in the ’50s,
now singing ’50s tunes in the ’20s— the 2020s, that is. And as I listened to their voices swirl on “You Belong to Me,”
I thought, not for the first time, that sisters are the best— there were never such devoted sisters—
harmonizing throughout their lives. Look at them up there, singing their sweet hearts out:
All I want is loving you and music! music! music!
•••
Listen to Jo Stafford, who popularized “You Belong To Me” in 1952. sing here.
Listen to Teresa Brewer, who popularized “Music! Music! Music!” in 1950, sing here.
(Top) The Burns Sisters harmonize onstage at Twin Lotus Thai Oct. 10, Shelley Burns at far right. (Above, from left) Tom Phillips and Shelley Burns of Avalon Swing, with Bill Dendle, far right, and Shelley Denny, rear.
How grateful I am for all who have led me through the fields of their hearts, beneath the branches of their losses, into the alleys of their wonder.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer from “We Are Told to Make Our Own Way”
•••
I cannot count the poets, certainly not the poems, that have led me through the ravages of my own heart, dropped breadcrumbs of hope, beckoning with a crooked finger down sweet-smelling paths and rugged roads:
Follow me.
And I have, falling into lives that were not my own, but felt, somehow, as if they were—at least a little. Like diving into a novel that plunges me into the deep end of an existence that doesn’t exist, except on paper, starting in a writer’s mind and leaping into a reader’s.
Poetry sings in me, thrums me like six strings and a good melody. For every loss, poems have shown me the way through, reminds me that there’s always a way through, even when I can’t see it.
Poets built me into a poet, still learning, forever reading and sighing, thinking, I’d pay for that line, it’s so good, some of them people I write with, lucky me.
But they are my poets, as sure as Mary and Dorianne, Billy and Marie, Maya and Raymond, Lucille and Emily and Jane. As Denise and Ellen and Kim and Naomi are. As Galway is, and Mr. Merwin and Danusha and Joy and John and Ada are. As Rosemerry and Jack and James are.
I claim them as they claimed me ages ago, embedded their poetic voices in my cells, wound themselves into my DNA, whispering words that fill me, fuel me and follow me through the very best and worst of times.
Güd wrtr 