Güd wrtr

(for Henry)

What set of miracles had to occur
to set you in a backpack on your
the back of your grandma, who is
my sister, we two who came through
your great-grandma—our mama who
sheltered us womb mates?

And then your grandma made your
mama, who made you, and now a
small cross section of our family unit
comes together to shop at IKEA
with our second cousin Robyn
and her daughter Charlotte—all this
shared DNA bouncing between us.

And, following the prescribed path
through the great store, how perfect
is it that at just the right moment
we find ourselves smack dab in
the cafeteria with their famous
Swedish meatballs, so prominent
in our family food tree?

Your grandma’s grandma’s mama
came from Sweden and passed
her recipe onto the grandma
three of us knew—her crocheting/
quilting/brownie-baking hands
rolling meatball after tiny meatball,
counting every one that she first
browned in a skillet, then baked
in the oven and set before family
who gobbled them like bon-bons.

None of us in the succeeding
generations has been able to
accurately reproduce Grandma’s
Swedish meatballs, though culinary
queen Robyn has come close.

And you, little fella—riding high,
nodding off, waking for a bottle,
rolling along in the stroller—
you know none of this. But oh,
what you carry inside you—
mystery and history and genetic
code from other familial strands
tucked deep in your cells.

You can’t see it, though we can—
in your merry eyes when you laugh,
in your gummy grin, in your drool—
the molecules of your ancestors
who got you here, who got us here,

some of us craving meatballs,
as we imagine that you,
once you have teeth,
may someday
love, too.

Thank you, and yes, a splash of simile
and two full teaspoons of metaphor,
stirred with fresh images

and not a little rhythm to bounce
the lines merrily along, so smoothly
that a reader finds herself

effortlessly pulled along with every
bit of nuance, not noticing the
subtle off-rhyme,

which, it turns out, you didn’t intend
but there it landed, one of those
serendipitous bits of

literary sweetness that fills the cup,
all those letters floating on the surface,
just waiting to be sipped

into something, like this, that looks
like a poem.

Leafless now, they arc and curve,
swoop like stilled birds in midflight,
statues of gnarly grace that

have stood on this rise for generations
of men, cattle, birds, deer, creatures
of the earth.

I come to walk hills freshly greening
after the dry months, new grass
dampening my shoes

as I walk uphill to meet these
old-new friends, to linger and look
from their vantage

across acreage now reserved for those
no longer in life, but where the living
can come walk

and remember, as I do on the last day
of the year, under puffed-up clouds
barely moving.

I am rarely happier this late in life
than when I am outdoors keeping
company with the greatness

of trees far older than I, or ankle deep
in timeless seas, or looking up
at stars—odd for one

who has spent so much time indoors.
I am pulled by the gravity of increasingly
less time on the planet, as if,

every year, the whispers of waves
and leaves and sky, of sand and hills
and deep vertical fissures

of rugged bark grow louder—
we, deeply rooted here,
you, flitting by for brief visits,

retrieving a few fallen acorns,
tucking them into a pocket to remember
what needs remembering

before you head back downhill into time,
into a new year that, like us,
waits to receive you.

Waltzing into the last day of this year,
123123,

we cannot help but look back and reflect
on the woulda shoulda coulda’s.

But we also cast a hopeful glance forward,
123123,

trying not to imagine the inevitable
sadnesses, the potential falling aparts,

the departures of ones we’d much
rather have stayed,

and, feeling the end-of-year rhythm,
find a partner who might step in time,

123123,
into this new year with us,

so much better to face whatever
will be will be—que sera, sera—

hand in friendly hand.

He rings the doorbell, twice,
loudly, the old bell in the kitchen
summoning me as if to a fire.

But it’s Ernest come to offer
his hands for whatever tasks
he thinks need doing—today

clearing gutters and roof of
a forest of leaf litter. The rain’s
stopped awhile. I can get up

there and take care of that
mess, he says. He offers a
modest price that I know

I will enhance because
it’s a dirty job on the best
of days, and this, I want

to say, is far from the best
of days, drizzle turning to
pounding rain and back,

continuing to down leaves
stubbornly hanging on.
But Ernest will chase

the strays off the roof
and clean up the mucky
mess between showers.

He will wish me a nice
day when he’s done,
which reminds me that

it is, of course, a very nice
day, weather notwithstanding,
because a gentle man

who pops by now and again
appeared on my porch
to offer assistance I didn’t

ask for, didn’t realize
that I needed, but was
delivered at just the right

moment by someone who
shares a name with
someone I loved who

once lived here, too.

She is bundled, as she often is nowadays,
in puffy black vest and an equally puffy jacket,
shoes on, ready to go when I arrive at 9.

“Hi,” she says as I set down my stuff. “I’ve
been up since 5, and I’m resting.” She sits
in the recliner, feet up, blanket on lap.

“Where are we going?” she asks.
“Exercise at the church?” I suggest,
which earns me a frown.

“Starbucks?” I offer, and a familiar
Marilyn grin spreads across her face.
She’s already discarding the blanket.

“That sounds good,” she says. “Let’s
do that.” And so, on a morning showing
signs of blue sky instead of yesterday’s

spitty gray, we head out to my car.
I’m taking a tip from some of Marilyn’s
other chauffeurs who squire her hither

and yon, landing her at home bearing
the seasonal red and green cup.
“Do you know where it is?” she asks.

“I do,” I say. “What do you like there?”
And, without hesitation, Marilyn says,
“Latte with an extra shot.”

She’s on it, Marilyn, whose mind is
is working overtime to grow new
neural pathways after her stroke.

At the drive-thru, I order her drink
and mine (hot chai), then pull ahead
to the window where, with snappy

efficiency, a young woman takes the bill
Marilyn hands me, returns the change
and delivers two red and green cups

into my hands. We’ve rarely spent this
kind of time together—around a writing
table, yes, or at public readings, but

certainly not in a Starbucks drive-thru—
and would not be doing so if not for
a brain bleed caught early.

We find ourselves oddly grateful for
the gift of each other, of so many others
who’ve come to lend a hand these days.

Each week, each day, she improves as she
negotiates this rough road back to herself.
“How is it?” I ask as Marilyn, sipping

her latte, closes her eyes for a moment
and says exactly what I’m thinking:
“Good.”

Learn how to:
• Skateboard
• Dance
• Scuba dive
• Sail a sizable craft
• Play guitar and sing
• Speak at least four languages

Most important:
• Be born into human form again,
some time, some place.
Doesn’t matter where or when,
but preferably to kind people
who adore me.

Like the man I saw ambling
down the sidewalk
the day after Christmas,
a small boy with tousled hair
the color of Yukon gold potatoes

riding tall on the shoulders,
I imagine, of the one who
made him a boy, who contributed
the chromosome dubbed y,

which begs the question:
Why do this? In this lifetime
(please, let there be more)
or any other?

And there’s the answer:
strolling just to stroll, carrying
someone you love so they can
see the world,

someone who one day might
do the same for you—
offer you a new vantage point,
ferry you with great devotion
where you need or want to go,

singing in a language you have
come to know by heart.

On Boxing Day, the hub and the bub
having subsided, life resuming its
normal ebb and flow,

I errand around my ‘hood, deciding
that yes, I will tackle the traditional
post-Christmas chicken lasagna

that Dick and I have come to love,
so I stop at two stores and from
memory (a risky thing)

gather ingredients, pleased with
myself for recalling them all, when,
outside Trader Joe’s,

I walk past the surprise of someone’s
stray purple spectacles on the path
to the parking lot.

I stop and peer through my own lenses,
thinking of my mother and her
lost specs yesterday,

on Christmas, me fetching her readers,
not the bifocals, not where they
she thought they were.

I think of the poor woman whose
purple frames must have fallen
from pocket or purse—

a stylish woman, given the snazzy specs,
who perhaps this very moment is frantically
looking for them.

I pick them up, searching for someone
blinking in optical confusion.
Seeing no one,

I settle for a store employee who says,
after I ask, that yes, they have
a lost and found,

and I hand him the glasses,
hoping they find their way back
to their owner, as I was finally able

to do for my mother, after she recalled
where she’d last seen them. She
put the beaded chain

around her neck, her eyeglasses
restored to their proper position
on chest or bridge of nose,

the gift of sight one that we lens
wearers do not take for granted,
sighing in relief

when the world comes blessedly
into focus.

It’s been 33 Christmases since we’ve had
a baby boy to fuss over, and that one’s
grown up to be a band director,

and his sister, the high school photography
teacher, and her husband have thoughtfully
brought the best gift to the party—

their firstborn, a son, all of seven months
old, who provides all the entertainment
nine grownups could want. He’s better

than “White Christmas” on the big TV.
My sister and I don’t even sing along
when Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen

go into their “Sisters” number with their
gorgeous aqua dresses and feathered fans.
We are focused on The Baby, who is

Henry, and we take turns holding him,
jostling him, feeding him, soothing him,
not least my sister and brother-in-law,

the delighted grandparents who babysit
weekdays. He is a gem in every way, of
course, sweet and easily amused,

incredibly tolerant of all the holiday
hub-bub, tired but fighting it, not
wanting to miss the goings-on.

Next year we’re eager to see his
bigger version tearing into pretty paper
to see what surprises hide there.

Henry will be past this baby stage,
well into toddler-hood, and we
will, as humans do, miss this

drooling, bright-eyed boy with his
close cap of barely there red hair.
It’s all going so fast, his mama

will say, and we who remember her
and her brother at this age will
nod and smile, marveling at how

far they’ve traveled in these human
journeys, all of which come and go
so much faster than any of us

would like.

Christmas is coming. (future tense)
Christmas is upon us. (present tense)
Christmas joy spreads throughout the land.
There is no Christmas like snow Christmas.

Santa Claus is coming to town. (hopeful tense)
He sees us when we’re sleeping;
he knows when we’re awake
he knows when we’ve been bad or good—
the old stalker. (creepy tense)

O, Christmas tree, O, Christmas tree,
how lovely are your branches
(see the kitty, very much in present tense,
ready to leap into them).

For unto you is born this day a savior,
which is Christ the Lord. (present tense)
And this shall be a sign unto you; (future tense)
you shall find the babe wrapped
in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

That’s what Christmas is all about,
Charlie Brown. (Linus tense)

This Christmas. Present tense.
The gift of all of us together.
We are love incarnate, like the babe.
Breathe in the love molecules,
invisible bubbles floating
around us.

Future tense:
Tomorrow, go outside.
Exhale them into the world.

Rejoice.