Leave your worries on the pad
beside the bed—maybe it’s on the bed
next to the cat curled into oblivion.
She can sleep. Why can’t you?
The pad, the journal, the page
can take whatever you throw on it.
It’s a sturdy thing, after all,
and once you’ve scribbled the
what its, whyfors and whatnots,
you can let go of them
and maybe, just maybe—you
can pat the sleeping kitty
and curl up, too,
the words waiting for you
tomorrow, should you want
to pick them up again.
We’d walk to the driveway next door
to wait on chilly mornings, be dropped
off there on getting-hot afternoons,
the hulking orange school bus creaking
to a hard stop, Mrs. Capps with her
iron-muscled forearm cranking
the big handle that opened the door—
not a very tall woman, but not someone
you’d want to mess with, she having
seen more of her share of every manner
of kid clambering on and off her bus.
And it was her bus, make no mistake,
that took us to and from Eureka Union
Elementary School, we rural kids
plunked down amid oak trees
and poison oak next to a big lake
where some of us learned to swim
and others to fish and still others
to skim over the deep blue on fat skis.
But school was a serious matter,
Mrs. Capps the first gatekeeper
to our early educations, wearing her
perennially arched eyebrows that
I still see some six decades
after I rode behind her, as I follow
the 21st century version of her bus
through a subdivision where many
of my schoolmates once lived.
I park a respectful distance behind,
trying to discern the profile of the one
driving, knowing full well that
Mrs. Capps is long gone to that bus barn
in heaven, but still.
She drove us and drove us and drove us
day after blessed day, and I bet none
of us ungrateful kids ever thought
to bring her a valentine or a cookie
or even thank her. I certainly didn’t.
Until now.
There is someone waiting for you…
Driving west to pick her up,
I look skyward at fat sheep-fluffy
clouds
bordered by wispy white ones
where a hazy angel shimmers,
wings outstretched,
a virga cloud of celestial droplets
against the blue.
There is someone waiting for you…
It is Easter week,
and she is sleeping more,
at this moment cocooned
in pure oxygen.
I am on my way to collect her,
but I cannot shake the vision
of angel vanishing into cloud—
not unlike the coyote I saw
earlier as I drove through
the park,
loping leanly through spring
green in the opposite direction,
then shrouded by foliage.
There is someone waiting…
We catch glimpses of what is
briefly shown, all of us walking
slowly toward what we can’t see,
every step moving us to
the next place
where someone kind,
someone caring,
waits for her, for him,
for me, for you.
•••
Inspired by “Someone” from “The Book of Rounds” by the October Project
Now that there’s something to see out there,
spring springing, bugs bugging, sky blue-ing,
I’m looking through windows that could
use a good wash—on my car, which all
of a sudden are bird-splatted. This didn’t
happen all winter. Now the fly-bys
decide to alight on the trellis over
the driveway, poised over the car,
sitting amid baby wisteria emerging
from their budded cocoons and merrily
letting go? I consider this as I look
out the kitchen sink window,
which is winter-coated in schmutz,
too high for me to wash without
a ladder, and I don’t do ladders.
So that makes me think of Ernest,
wondering if he’s still doing windows,
that blesséd man who wears my late
husband’s middle name as his first,
who has for years shown up on my porch
offering to wash all the windows
for a ridiculously low price. I always
pay him more than he asks, running
to the bank for cash. And when I return,
the crack of his lightning smile breaks
across his kind face, as Ernest says,
Thank you, ma’am, though he is
somewhere in my vintage, and I’ve
gently told him that he can call me
by my first name as I call him by his.
That’s what you say to ladies,
he once told me. And I imagine
the mamas and grandmas
and aunts in his family who
brought him up right, who
insisted on such good manners.
Thank you, dear sir, for all the years
of clean windows. May I ask
if you might shine them up again?
My friend Laura
told me about writing poems
on bathroom mirrors with
dry erase markers—
the rainbow ones being most fun—
so I’m giving it a try—
six new colors rainbowing
down my reflection,
no idea, as always, where
the words will take me,
which makes it so much fun.
Because it’s going to crack you open,
showing up for someone else’s pain,
sitting with their suffering as you struggle
to tamp down your own.
It can’t save the ones you love most,
but it is a gift, the breaking of your heart,
to have loved so fiercely, to show up
at their most awful moments,
not to try to fix it—because you can’t.
That’s not your job. Yours is to appear,
in person, if your dear one can bear
the presence of your own ravaged heart,
stitched back together after so many
rips in the seams. The love leaks out
that way, infusing those whom you’re
accompanying on this journey of
healing or decline, grief or joy.
Simple old you is all that’s needed—
all that you can offer anyway—
your hand, your kind smile,
your patchwork quilt of a heart,
which, without prompting,
pumps compassion into the world
with every persistent beat.
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
—Jane Smiley
•••
Call it insecurity, an unwillingness
to part with old friends—though
I have, lots of them.
Still, so many remain bookshelved
throughout the house, stacked in spots,
too. Some exist only in book form—
poetry mostly—or classics that I held
in much younger hands. I know we have
to part, old friends,
I think as I put handfuls into boxes bound
for the library resale shop. Thank you,
I whisper. I hope that fresh hands
will open and new eyes adore you,
as I have. I’ve already bequeathed most
of the Shakespeare
to an English teacher friend, but the
P.G. Wodehouse—some first editions—
I still pull off the shelf
now and again, chucking at Bertie
Wooster’s silliness as Jeeves swoops in
to rescue his employer
again and again. It’s the “again”
that means that I will likely die with
a goodly number of these books
hugging these shelves—the ones he
built in my office when we moved into
this house, some of them
bowed with age and weight. But oh,
the worlds they hold, the language
of long-dead writers
singing from these pages,
a familiar choir softly humming
keeping me company as I type—
may it never stop.
Before I start writing,
I step outside to take a sip
of spring, well aware
of the poetic cliché,
the unearned enthusiasm
as if we’ve just weathered
the longest winter of our lives,
a series of unenduringly,
unending gray days.
But some of us have,
I think, standing in the first
day of spring sunshine
for just a few moments,
watching the breeze
jostle new hollyhock stalks,
realizing that the iris blossoms
that popped up last week wagging
their long white and purple tongues
are already dying. I can’t write
again about simultaneous
beginnings and endings,
I chide myself, about the glory
of a stunning sunny day,
but here I am doing just that
as, over the driveway, tiny wisteria
bundles prepare to burst into
lavender showiness—
the ones I noticed as I stood,
robed and slippered early this
morning to watch the first dawn
of spring creep over rooftops
across the street, enlightening
what I think of as my world,
which, of course, is your world,
this planet of bugs and blossoms,
of comings and goings, of this
endless, blesséd cycle that we
call a life.
Spring now in both hemispheres—
equinox meaning equal night—
we northerners spring-ing,
the southerners fall-ing, though
in truth, it’s only roughly equal.
Yet, symmetrically on these twice
yearly occasions, the sun rises
due east and sets due west, which
is why you’ll find me searching
the eastern sky in the pre-dawn dark,
waiting for the moment when our star
makes its first spring appearance,
lifting into this new season, as always
let-there-be-lighting the world with
supreme confidence and shine,
as you will when you enter this
new day and the ones that follow,
sharing your beaming self
with the rest of us
delighted to bask in a bit
of your brightness.
I do not have the heart to chase
after this earlybird that zooms
into the house through the open
back door—because it’s far too fair
out there to keep it closed.
I hear him buzzing the kitchen,
though I don’t see him till I’m sitting
at my desk, and he zeroes in on
the light over the computer,
noodling around the edge,
daring to alight on the bulb,
which I’d think would be awfully
hot on little fly feet.
I know that before long I’ll be
annoyed by this fly and its brethren
that will follow, that I’ll be relieved
when the flies disappear with
the cold weather—which makes
me instantly long for spring.
But flies—along with the exploding
wisteria pods over the driveway,
scattering their button-sized seeds
all over before the purple flowers
pop from the nubbins of buds—
signal spring on these sunny,
green-grass and early azalea days.
Even those of us who have not
weathered months of ice and snow
grin like little kids hunting for
Easter eggs,
delighted by the discovery of
the familiar reappearing. Even
pesky flies like the one waltzing
across the wall in front of me—
onetwothree, onetwothree—
exploring this strange, new land.
Güd wrtr 