Güd wrtr

It’s easier than ever before,
what with our mini communicators
in our pockets, to fire off

an electronic love note or,
for the young ones, as a last resort,
to make a phone call,

which, now that I have reached
old fart-dom myself, I wish to
nudge the young ones

into doing, because, I have learned
with each passage of a dearest
one, that their voices are what

we miss most after they no longer
exist in life. Like my father’s voice,
garbled on my mother’s answering

machine, nearly impossible to
understand after 20 years gone,
touches me every time I hear it.

No matter how much electronic
evidence they leave behind, those
precious voices saying your name

in the way that was just so them,
you’ll hold only in your memory—
a different kind of cloud, and,

you come to realize, just as
unreachable as those delicate
filaments of cirrus drifting so

high overhead right now.

Even the rising temperature
of this day that’s predicted to
overtop the century mark again

when we so much wish it
wouldn’t. It might not, after all.
We can’t perfectly predict

the thorniness of what’s coming.
But we can pause, open the door
and walk into the warming yard

to look for what persists, even
now, nearing the end of summer
when so much has finished.

The purples springing
from the green bits in the
heart-shaped pot on the deck.

The wide-open crimson roses,
velvety courtesans flaunting
their delicate centers

before the ripening sun,
beckoning: Here we are.
Lean in. Inhale deeply.

Let us fall into your
open hands.

halfway between heaven and earth,
for that is the space you occupy
in this mystery of human life,

allowing the mind to rest, just
for a moment, in stillness,
in openness.

You and I and all beings
everywhere want the same
things: to be happy,

to be well, to feel at ease,
to be free of suffering
and the causes of suffering.

I breathe this in for you;
you breathe this out for me,
linking us breath by breath,

happiness arising lightly,
joy skipping like a puppy
delighted to see you.

Scoop that joy into your
arms; let it wriggle into you,
drawing a smile across

your face, alighting in
your tender heart. I will
join you there in that

flowering instant,
blooming with kindness,
awash in love.

•••

(for Mary Sand and her puppy Louise, with love and thanks)

I have so little French
in my vocabulary—
a soupçon, one might say—

which has nothing to do
with soup—a word wearing
such a graceful accent mark,

the cedilla that softens that
“c” almost into an “s.” But
when that little bit of a

word alights before me,
I imagine diving into
a sea of diacritical marks

of languages I don’t speak
simply because I like the look
of the diminutive accents:

the graceful swoosh of the tilde, ˜
the definitive paired overdots ¨
of the umlaut,

and oh, the tittle, that teeny dot
over a small i. There are many
more of their brethren who

bear lovely names: circumflex,
acute and grave accents, the breve,
the over-ring over an A used

by Norwegians, Danes and
Swedes. They summon images
of places I may never see,

or ones I have—especially
the ʻokina in Hawaiʻi
and macron in kahakō.

And there I am, happily
swimming in punctuation,
appreciating this vast

word ocean that, like fish,
we may not be aware of,
but one that eons of ancestors

have given us—we, the peoples
of the world, whose languages
swirl sweet music into my

thirsty ears.

The kettle does not agonize over
how long water takes to reach
the just-right temperature for tea.

It heats at its own steady pace,
doesn’t mind waiting, relishes
the quiet unfolding. All things

ripen as they will; everything
takes the time it needs. Life tucks
into winter-bare branches,

germination afoot that human
eyes can’t see. All things become:
The kettle steams; the tea steeps.

There is much to be gained by
sitting quietly—closing the eyes,
breathing, not hand-wringing,

not hovering, not clock-watching,
slowing toward patience.
We trust that leaves will emerge,

that tall trees grow taller,
reaching for sun over lifetimes
far longer than ours.

The imagined world—the one
we think we see—marinates under
sun and moon, as eons of waves

wear away rock, crumble it into
sand—reminding us to stand
in the light, faces into the wind,

to live with gentle calmness
and constancy and
not a little bit of faith.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.“
—Virginia Woolf
from her novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” 1925

•••

Of course, she would. She could choose
what she wanted that way, the just-right

nosegays and peonies with some merry
daisies thrown in for her party. And each

time I walk into the store where I intend
to buy groceries, I am distracted—truly

tempted—by the seductive bouquets
wrapped in their alluring mylar, whispering,

“You really want to take me home,
don’t you?” And I do—I so do—though

flowers just for me, for no occasion,
seems so frivolous, so unnecessary

when all summer long hollyhocks
and roses, cosmos and daisies have

bloomed their fool heads off in my yard.
But, now September, there’s nothing

vase-worthy in the yard, so I pause—as
I envision the fictional Mrs. Dalloway

might do—amid buckets so ripe with
greenhouse specimens that they barely

resemble anything most of us could
ever grow. And that’s the point—

to scoop up such beauty just for
the sake of loveliness, bring it home

and distribute it into one or more vases
begging for floral sustenance.

For, as a friend likes to say,
Flowers are always appropriate,

which justifies my swoon as,
standing among the dazzlers,

I allow myself to be enticed,
and choose a bundle, lift it

dripping from its temporary
home to take to mine

for no good reason.
Or just because—

the best reason of all.

•••

For Connie Raub, florist and friend extraordinare

(in memory of Nell Lester)

At the end of the afternoon
we three stand on the small deck
overlooking the unfenced yard that
yawns into a green swath of trees,
as Sue, after filling the big feeder,
also spreads a thick seed ribbon
across the deck for the birds.

Her mother kept the birds fed—
at their lakeside house next to ours
where we all grew up, and this one,
her last, in the foothills—and Sue
shows up a few times a week
to continue the tradition.

The birds don’t realize that
the nice lady who fed them flew
into mystery nine months ago, that
her tall daughter who offers them
sustenance does this as kindness
of wildlife as well as in tribute to
the one who fed her, who fed us all,

with homemade holey bread that
peanut butter adhered to like glue
and jelly fell through—along with
endless rounds of hefty cookies and
tuna and noodle casserole, which
still defines comfort food for me.

We three sisters under the skin—
who grew up next door to each other,
who walked to the bus stop and
Girl Scout’d and played in the band
together—gather as 60-somethings
to pull books off Sue’s mother’s shelves,
crack them open like time capsules
to discover tucked-in notes and delight
in flyleaf inscriptions in the hand
of the dearly departed.

Empty boxes fill; keepers find
their way to an emptied set of shelves.
Treasures emerge—her own neatly typed
poems, a tiny French dictionary that
Sue, age seven, inscribed in 1964 to her
mother, whose high school graduation
photo we pass from hand to hand to hand.

We three, who would not know her
till years later, admire this young woman’s
dark hair and shining eyes, her future
stretching ahead of her, this one who
loved birds and raised one of us to fledge
and fly, the one who, in so many ways,
helped the girls from Granite Oaks Drive
become the us,

the we who endure to this day.

(For Deb)

On a glorious windless morning
walk by the river, we admire
the longstanding trees still

loaded with the season’s
full complement of green.
Surely they must gaze

at their reflections on
the unusually glassy surface,
as we do, and think,

in this snapshot of a moment,
Lookin’ good, friends.
So, so good.

(for Mom)

Our shadows walk side by side,
yours pushing the apparatus that

helps you stand taller, ache less,
and in our shadows I imagine

a much younger you pushing
a much younger me

in a different kind of rolling
contraption, perhaps just as

slowly, with great deliberation,
moving the two of us then

from there to here. And
here we are now,

in a here we could not have
envisioned in the then.

But here we still are,
walking beside each other,

me and my shadow,
you and yours.

And this is what I promise
to remember in the someday

when my shadow walks
alone—our silhouettes,

just like this,
in the forever here.

We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails. We got tender.
— Jenny Hollowell from “A History of Everything”

If we live long enough, with luck,
we soften around the edges,
some of us growing doughy,
most of us wrinkly, even in places
that surprise us—the corners of our eyes,
around the ankles, like elephants, whose
famed memories we wish we possessed.

If we live long enough, we will watch others leave,
we imagine, before their time. Which means
before we want them to. This, too, tenderizes us.
We let go of old grudges; we forget long ago hurts
as we realize that we are not entirely blameless.

We remember things that surprise us:
the quality of light on her hair when
she said, “I love you,” or the tremor
in his voice when he said, “I’m proud of you.”

The way the baseball thunked into the mitt.
The shock of diving into cool water.
The way fall leaves annually performed
perfect pirouettes to the ground.
How we twisted or jived or jitterbugged
away that enchanted evening we hadn’t
thought of in decades.

If we’re lucky, we live long enough to let go
of unpleasantries, let bygones be truly gone.

We forgive and forget because in the end,
if we do this right, our hearts pump only love,
churn pure gratitude through our old blue veins
that river our hands, that hold each other tenderly—
our last, best memory.