Güd wrtr

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.

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

—Haruki Murakami, from “Kafka on the Shore”

•••

I barely remember the storm,
though I know it’s embedded
in my bones,

and in poems attest to unrelenting
grief in the immediate after,
but dear one,

to say that, even 23 years after
this day when I sat on the floor,
your coldcold foot

in my lap, realizing This is it,
what you knew was coming,
what I tried to ignore—

what stays with me is how
I felt shot out of a cannon
into that tempest.

my molecules scattered, and,
so slowly so slowly, reassembling
into a being that looked like me,

sounded like me, but was
irrevocably changed. How, then,
did that storm

fuse your molecules with mine,
settle you into my bones,
where we have

walked together ever since?

•••

In memory of Clifford Ernest Polland
May 21, 1952–March 18, 2001

(for Cliff)

On the 23rd anniversary of your last day on Earth
I walk through one of the prettiest parks in town,
the cemetery where we used to walk Buddy,
where I long imagined I would put you some day.

It didn’t turn out that way, of course.

But as I walk, I look for familiar names—

people I knew, people you knew,
people we worked with, dear friends
and slight acquaintances—

You all walk with me as the trees
begin to flower, and the bees tend
those blossoms.

The years of their deaths on markers
embedded in soft green always surprise me.
How can it be so long?

They rest here with thousands of others
as you rest in my heart now and always,

amene.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
—Mary Oliver

•••

I see you there, taking shallow breaths,
as though your lungs can’t expand
to contain the wholeness of you.

But I think they can.

It’s your life, they’re your lungs,
but darling, I have watched you settle
again and again

for things you didn’t really want,
thinking that’s all you get, that the gods
who dole out the intangibles

—great love, scads of money, dream jobs—
passed you by, that you’ve gathered
the leftovers and made

a kind of life. And now, you imagine,
it’s too late. The decades and the losses
have piled up like last fall’s

leaves still mashed against the back fence,
and it’s spring now. Look up to the great
sentinel standing guard out there,

the one spreading wide its sculpted branches
with the tiniest buds preparing to pop
into baby leaves that promise,

every year, to grow into green flags bigger
than your hand. This season is all yours
to design to your specifications.

What will you make of it? What will you
gather in your arms just for you?
I know that you haven’t known

precisely what you want or, if you did,
how to go about getting it. But dear one,
listen: Breathe deeply,

exhale slowly and, with your whole,
far-from-small self, take one shaky,
trusting step into the unknown,

and begin again.

•••

(With thanks to Kai and Fia Skye—and, of course, Mary Oliver—for the inspiration)

that he is not doing well,
Diego, thinning and sneezing,
on the decline compared
to a year ago—

yet he still hops up on
the kitchen counter and
plops himself in the sink,
watching the goings on

of a sleepy house after
midnight, watchkitty
surveying the kingdom.
Lately he has folded himself

into a cat-shaped loaf
atop the stove, right in
the center on the griddle,
a new spot to sleep.

What is going on with
you? I ask, as he blinks
his silent response,
knowing that we are

looking toward the end
with two older kitties,
not to mention the elder
humans in the family.

I am not ready for you
to go, I say, because I
never am, not for any
of the four-footed ones

who’ve shared their
goofiness with me,
nor for the two-footed
ones either. As if

I have a choice. As if
I could keep them
sinking, blinking,
watching over me

forever.

(for Georgann)

You took me the first time
where we chuckled at the array
of clever gift items—
an only-in-Seattle thing—

and, since shopping was one
of our happiest outings (often
falling into the just looking sphere),
I cannot go through Sea-Tac

without stopping at Fireworks,
imagining what I’d buy to
surprise you. But this time, a few
bagged purchases in hand,

at baggage claim, late to pick up
my bags, in haste to make
my way to the ferry that once
took me to you, I left the

little bag behind. Realizing
my lapse only after whooshed
away by light rail, I sighed,
knowing you’d understand,

because, of course, you do—
you who are no longer you,
who no longer care about
gifts of the material kind.

A good ten days later, after
I returned home, a surprise
email: We are holding
an item from your recent

trip that we believe may
belong to you. And I thought,
You companion spirits do
work in mysterious ways,

as I filled out the return form
for some kind-hearted souls
at an airline baggage service
who wanted to reunite us.

Fireworks arrived today,
flown by Fed Ex, not Alaska,
plopped on my porch
in a sturdy brown box,

which I opened, slightly
stunned—even as I beheld
what had been lost—
that these whimsical,

misplaced gifts could
find me. But then again,
you always do,
don’t you?