Güd wrtr

(for Clifford Ernest Polland
May 21, 1952–March 18-19, 2001)

I stand atop a rock at Shell Beach,
looking out to a sea far calmer
than yesterday’s stormy one
but still alive with vigorous
waves exploding onto seastacks,
sending spray forty feet above
the surge.

No longer do I think on these days,
the anniversary of your departure,
the day you were found:
You should see this, you gone
two dozen years now.

Instead, I think:
You are this—every wave,
every drop of saltwater, every
flower springing into this season
of flowering when you left.
You never left, merely
transformed into, well,
everything.

Years ago the physics of it
struck me: If no new energy
is created in the universe, then
nothing comes to be or perishes,
our atoms simply rearranged
into, well, everything.

You still with me—in sunlight
warming my face—as I stand
at the edge of the earth,
in cooling seaspray
dotting my cheeks,

a kind of holy water
that I never want
to wipe away.

When the tide swirled in,
I found my wellies overtopped
by the chill of saltwater,
as hundreds of tiny becalmed
sails swirled around my calves.

I did not leap toward shore,
but stood and watched them
caught in a vortex not of their
making, these small doomed
creatures that could not make
their way back out to sea,
that would die near the tideline,

their once-cobalt bodies fading
to ghostly white before sunset,
their delicate skeletons
ribboning the sand.

I thought of all those stranded
through no fault of their own,
those aching and lonely,
those suffering and in pain,

and, with my wet feet squelching
in my rubber boots, sent every
droplet of lovingkindness coursing
through me into the waves,

hoping against hope that
the merest trickle of it might
reach those who need it most.

Leo horoscope for Sunday:
Introspective feelings could drive you to probe
the inner recesses of your mind today.

🌖 🌖 🌖

I ask Dr. Google: How many people in the world
are born under the sign of Leo? (Like me.)

Dr. Google’s AI cousin replies: While it’s impossible to
know the exact number of people born under the Leo sign,

approximately 6.4% of the world’s population, or roughly
5.4 billion people, are Leos, born between July 23 and Aug. 22.

And, of those, how many of us bipeds find ourselves waning
under this gibbous moon that was just a few days ago wolfy

plump for its star turn at a lunar eclipse? (Again, 6.4%.)
And, of those, how many are probing the inner recesses

of their minds as I am, captivated by rain on glass,
through windshield, as he and I drove four hours

to the coast? (Impossible to know.) And, now that
we’ve arrived, we watch thousands of dripping drops

crawl down the picture window where outside rain
scours this patch of earth clean, within view of the ocean,

or would be, if the gray veil would rise, like velvet curtains
used to at the theater, revealing the big screen. And yes,

we’d sit with strangers in the dark, before the gray
of the film began to flicker and blossom. I know that if

I sit here long enough, this, too, shall pass under a waning
gibbous moon that I’ll likely not see tonight, but hey.

You never know when the curtain will lift, the sun
will take a bow and deliver a Leo-style, show-offy

sunset that could bring all of us across the zodiac
to our feet, applauding the brilliant performance.

Bravo! we’d cry, as if we were, indeed, one people,
we humans being. Encore! More! More!

“You can’t save everything,”
my sister said as we went room by room
through the house of our mother,
who pretty much did.

Though hers was more of a case of
not-getting-rid-of, of stuffing more stuff
into an already full drawer or cupboard,
which turned the sorting of them after
her death into an archaeological
excavation of our family.

I hear her now:
I did get rid of rubber bands,
you know. I didn’t save all of them
like Grandma did.

Which was true, especially since my sister,
the minimalist, periodically went through
the junk drawer, quietly tossing brittle bands
that snapped and dead pens whose veins
had long since dried up—not to mention
appointment cards from the long-gone barber
on the corner who cut our father’s hair
for decades.

But after—oh, the after—the lightning fast
cleaning out quickened my pulse, spun
my archivist’s heart with its urgency.
I didn’t object—it made sense to clear
out the house so it could be remade anew
for the next generation in the family
now making it their own.

But what to save? What to let go?
Life’s perennial dilemma for those of us
who hang onto too much. Which of my
mother’s many books do I box and
trundle home? (Too many.) How many
of her notebooks filled in class after class
in the lifetime of this forever student?
(Dozens.)

Now surrounded by towers of boxes in
my living room, I remove each lid, pick up
her objects, study her handwriting as if
it holds secrets, which it might.
I cannot toss the folders en masse,
searching for insight, the rare bit
of self-reflection.

I find haiku and aspirations,
and oh, the treasure of photographs—
a formal portrait in an off-the-shoulder
black formal, snapshots on the dock
at a summer camp in Wisconsin, or
pulling an arrow from the bullseye
surrounded by other young archers.

“Look at you,” I say, peering closely at her
face on the deckled-edged glossy paper,
the girl who had no idea what was to come,
whom she would love, the children she
would make, the life she would live.

“Look at you,” I whisper to that
dark-haired girl staring into her future.
“Look at me.”

After missing the eclipse the night before,
I drive home in the blazing incandescence

of a full moon on high beam, power lighting
the sky so that when I step out of the car

to try to capture its radiance, I land in
moonshadow and began humming the song,

remembering that even when I cannot see
the orangey-red penumbra momentarily swallow

our nearest celestial neighbor, the miracle
happens nonetheless. Of course, it does,

this form of grace so freely bestowed
upon us earthlings who have done nothing

to earn such a sweet gift as that
temporary tangerine beaming

glimmers of love into the night sky.

We put pair after pair of her shoes into
great garbage bags, some for donation, some
bound for the Place Where Old Shoes go,

but some I could not quite bear to release—
the dyed-to-match pink linen pumps
that accompanied the fuchsia sheath

with row after row of matching fringe that
she wore with one of her quartets. As she
sang, the fringe shimmied, which my sister

and I loved. Our mother had a thing for bling—
the gaudy, the sparkle, the glitzy
(“a girl can never have too much glitter”),

which we shunned. No sequins or bedazzling
for us. So why, then, could I not let go of her
sparkly silver slip-ons, the last shoes

she wore for months before her departure?
I’ll never wear them. They’re much too
small for me, not my style and worn

to the point of discarding rather than
donating. But my sister put them aside,
and I brought them home, wishing

they’d been bright red, so that, in the end,
she might have clicked her heels together
like the other Dorothy in her ruby slippers,

no-place-like home-ing her way into
whatever comes next—with luck, the
sparkle and glimmer of the cosmos,

eager to embrace and receive her.

through your just-written poem as you read it
to your writing group is to pronounce a few words
as best you can, gulping, gasping in your shakiest voice,
then pause, take a deep inhale, then read a few more.

Repeat. Read, pause, breathe.
Again. Again. Till you get through the thing.

For years I have given those who cry as they read
the words of my late mentor and friend:
Wait till your breath comes.

I rarely cry reading my own work, though my
eyes often dampen when others read.

But today, with the companion spirits flitting like
fireflies around the room, winking their enlightened
selves at me, I cannot stop the tears.

Then I hear her voice with all the other dead
loved ones swirling around me:
Wait till your breath comes.

So I do. Read, cry, breathe. Repeat.

And when I lift my head, my damp eyes behold
the beloveds around the table, this community
I never expected to spring up around me,

holding me with their collective breathing,
their great hearts, so I can read what
needs reading, then listen as they praise
what’s working in my stuttering draft.

I never hear the gems that they do, but
I believe them as they believe me when
it’s their turn to pour their words onto
the table, luscious rubies that sit there
gleaming at us all.

We all want to pluck a chunk of time,
usually the good bits, and store them
someplace safe—

a chronological savings account,
perhaps, or we chop time into
small sections and stuff it

into mason jars, tucking those
precious containers into our souls’
basements so that we might

periodically descend into the dark
and retrieve one when we crave
a taste of the sweet preserves.

We can try to freeze time, but
honestly, there isn’t a walk-in freezer
big enough to safeguard a lifetime.

We are left, then, with the fragile
storage of the heart, the even more
fleeting repository of memory,

kairos, deep time, which wobbles,
seems to stop as we step outside
and bask in the light of a waxing

moon and winking starlight, or
when we laugh with a beloved, losing
track of that measured by clocks,

but leaving us—if we are lucky,
even as these mortal bodies fade—
with only the most tender snapshots

of a smaller, more beautiful world,
one in which we are not alone,
to carry with us for as long

as we are us.

(Noun: Music. A more or less independent passage at the end
of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.)

Neither my sister nor I thought it was important,
but the family photographer did, wanting to

take photos of us in the now-empty house
where we grew up, the one that, beginning today,

will be taken apart Humpty Dumpty-style and remade
anew for the next generation. And so we gathered,

we two girls, one silver-haired, one perennially golden,
to sit on the sky blue carpet in front of the fireplace

one last time—the room where we’d watch TV,
where I’d lie on the floor, and she’d sit on my back,

tickling me, prompting Mom to chuckle and holler,
Donna, quit tickling your sister! which made both

tickler and ticklee laugh harder, and Dad, too.
Where we posed for Christmas card photos sitting

on the raised hearth, the room that was the center
of family goings-on, including the matriarch’s departure

not quite three months ago. So we two sixty-somethings
posed for one of our beloved men as the other looked on,

none of us yet knowing that the next day it would all
begin to disappear, as it all morphs into pure memory.

We are happy about that. Really, we are. And the two
who bought this place in 1966 would be, too.

But still, as I look at the final photos in the house of us,
the coda to the long symphony of us, the last notes

dying away, a tiny piece of me rises inside, crying,
Encore! Encore! wishing, impossibly, for more.

•••

Our deepest thanks and love to our guys—Dick Schmidt and Eric Just—for their
decades of devotion and support, particularly in the last year of our mother’s life.

I couldn’t find it for months, the bracelet that
she insisted had to be on the dining room table,
the one I could not find on the dining room table,

nor in her bathroom atop the slender medicine
cabinet jammed with jewelry and all manner of creams
and emollients that she meant to use but didn’t.

And when I finally did find it, in a tote bag that was,
to be fair, near the dining room table (how on earth…?),
she was nearly gone. But it did not stop me from invoking

the name of our long-ago elementary school as I
hollered, “Eureka! I found it!” and relocated it to her
bathroom with the approximately 242 pendants

tangled on various hooks and jewelry stand, telling
my sister, “We are not losing this thing again.”
She agreed because Mother—who hadn’t worn

the charm bracelet in years and couldn’t have seen
most of the charms on it, having outlived most of her
vision—was frantic that we find it, but never said why.

My sister was all for donating it with so many other
pieces of jewelry, but I brought it home where I now
study the trinkets as if they contain the secrets

of the universe, which they might, for all I know,
in the 22 little silver milagros that held significance
for her—from the mini buffalo to the spiral shell,

the labyrinth to the sunflower, from the angel to
the cowboy hat to the headless horse, from the circle
of dolphins and the feather to the turtle to the seastar.

I keep touching the hand with its widespread fingers,
a cut-out heart in its palm—the place, perhaps,
where the love she so craved had leaked out,

the portal she hovered over for much of her charmed life,
trying to collect all the touchstones she could
to fill the unfillable hole.