Güd wrtr

At the VFW hall on a damp Wednesday night,
Ma sings tenor with the gals and the guys,
with approximately 1,800 years of barbershop
harmony in their hearts.

They sing the oldies—the real oldies—
for the cowboy-themed recital:
“Home on the Range,” “Don’t Fence Me In,”
“Back in the Saddle Again,” and, of course,
“I’m an Old Cowhand.”

With some twists and a nod to local history,
the wild Irish rose morphs into the beautiful
Roseville rose (after “the 39th largest city in California,”
notes the narrator). And Roger with his Magic Rope
(the father of one of my high school percussion
buddies) spins his lariat for the admiring audience
of mostly family members ready with camera
phones, even if, Roger says, he can no longer hop
through the circling loop,

My mother, the slight one with the blaze
of white hair, stands tall at the end of the row
of ladies, singing out her tenor part
to “Country Roads” with a substitution:
“California, mountain mama, take me home,
country roads.”

I watch from my place near the back, thinking,
in the inimitable words of Harold Hill,
“Singing is just sustained talking,” offering
a little prayer to the gods of harmony:

Please, you daddies who sang bass,
you mamas who sang tenor, let my mama
keep singing till she sails off to join that big
chorus in the sky. And please let her find her
dearest Sweet Adeline

buddies who’ve gone
before her standing tall on the risers, in
fringed flapper dresses and an abundance
of blue eye shadow, singing their heavenly
hearts out:

How can there be any sin in sincere
Where is the good in goodbye?
Tell me what can be fair in farewell, dear
While one single star shines above

How can there be any sin in sincere?
Aren’t we sincerely in love?
Oh, we’re in love!

•••

•••

The Buffalo Bills sing “Sincere” in “The Music Man” (1962 movie starring Robert Preston as Harold Hill):

(Sacramento, California)

We still have roses.
we still have pale asters,
and the neighbors’ leaping
cosmos and white azaleas

roses in fall yellow and orange
are blooming as if they think
it’s April. At this latitude in late
October, some of us think it’s spring,

never a bad thing, especially after
a little bit of rain and cool have
given us a taste of what’s on its way.
My hollyhocks still haven’t gotten

the message, growing tall, sporting
frilly tutu blossoms and fresh
leaves the size of saucers, showing
no intention of giving up.

I imagine them stunned into
withering when frost comes,
when I will go outside and
croon as I clip the dead bits,

You’ll be back, you self-seeders,
have a nice sleep now, see you soon,
you morning glories, you glorious
poppies.

You head outside and walk past
the ruler-straight line of the front
yard where it meets the sidewalk,

and there, atop the profusion of
lava rock not far from the bush
of the same name, lies an errant

chunk of lavender sidewalk chalk.
You stop, look around for a child
or an artistic adult who might have

wandered by and lost a stick from
a fist or a pocket. But you see
no one, so you pick up the gift

and chalk the first thing you think
of onto the sidewalk between
a few crusty sycamore leaves.

You stand back, admiring the
sentiment, and put the chalk
back on the nearby rocks,

hoping that another passer-by
might just pass by and feel
inclined to respond with

whatever offering they’re
holding in their heart.
Like this.

(for Walt Wiley)

Mr. Wiley used to call me now and then
from his desk at the local newspaper.
Good reporter that he was, he knew just
when to catch me between classes, often

sitting in my office with a student journalist
editing the third draft of a sports story—
me asking dumb questions like, “Will
people know what an inside cut is?”

And Walt’s voice would twang in my ear:
“I’m suckin’ wind here—whaddya got
there on the campus?” He always made
me chuckle, and I’d run my hyped-up

brain over stories the students had done—
or should have—to offer to the local
columnist looking for items. I think of
Walt often now, happily retired from

the newspaper game and living nearby,
especially on afternoons like this one
when I lace up my tennies and head out
into the day for a walk, eyes peeled for

items of interest that might find their
way into poems. I’m suckin’ wind, too,
Walt, but you taught me to trust that
there’s always something out there

that’s news to someone, that a snippet
or an anecdote just might prompt
a smile or a shake of the head
to someone reading this very piece,

and saying to a some other one in their
vicinity, “Well, wouldja listen to this,
Erma. The little poet lady has gone
and given us another poem.”

You’re walking along a sidewalk,
scuffing over divebombed leaves,
more of them every day, and your
feet brush an ordinary page,

white, dirty, a piece of clear tape
affixed to the top, and you stop,
look down, to see faint writing
there, in wobbly pencil:

miny market
←

with a definitive, left-pointing
arrow, and you bend to pick
it up, to puzzle it out. Was this
the work of a young (you imagine)

entrepreneur with a tiny sidewalk
grocery store? Was it staking a
bold claim as “mine” with a wee
misspelling?

You fold it in half, put it in a pocket,
carry it home, thinking that you will
dispose of it properly. But days later
it sits on the counter by the phone,

your old-fashioned, plugged-in-the-
wall device that only a few people
think to call you on these days, and
the sign catches your eye every

time you walk by, imagining a girl
behind an upended cardboard box
parked on that sidewalk, offering,
say, apples on a fall day. You hope

that kind passers-by stopped at
her mini market, hefted an apple
and paid her with bright coins,
just to see her gap-toothed smile,

to hear her small voice thank them
as the charmed grownups grinned
at her clever sales strategy, and,
not least, her creatively spelled sign.

(for Henry)

So once upon a time, before there was Aunt Jan,
there was just Jan… no, wait, there was her sister,
Just, Donna, who married Just, Eric, and they

wanted to have a little Just or two, and they did—
first Lauren (who little brother Kevin called Nonen
because he could not say l’s or n’s for a long time)

and then Kevin (who became Kebbin Kebbin
Bo Bebbin). You know these two as Mama and Uncle
Kev, but they were the people who made Aunt Jan,

well, Aunt Jan. Little Nonen and Kebbin had an
Unca Kiff, too, who was married to Aunt Jan, and
we miss him muchly, as we do the grandma

and two grandpas who are no longer with us,
though GG, your great-grandma, is (I know, this gets
complicated), your grandma’s mama. And after your

mama grew up and married your papa, oh, how
they wanted a you, but you took a long time to show
up, my boy. We weren’t sure there would ever be a you.

But there you were one day, growing inside your mama,
as babies do, and there were a whole lot of friends
and relatives of your mama and papa’s waiting

to see you. And now you’re here, and I know this
is a whole lotta people passing you around
and smiling at you and holding and feeding you.

Like Aunt Ashy, married to Uncle Kev, who
seems to be one of your favorite people, along
with third cousin Charlotte and her dad Johnny,

whose lap you slept in this afternoon. And cousin
Dede, who is Charlotte’s grandma and mother to
Robyn, who is Charlotte’s mama. Not to worry.

You don’t have to keep track of who’s who and
who goes with whom. That’ll come later.
This is all to say that I’m Aunt Jan—actually,

Great Aunt Jan who goes with Great Uncle Dick—
and, as I told your mama when she was born
on my 29^th birthday:

You’re gonna love me. I’m gonna buy you things.

But mostly I want you to know that some people
(and you are a people) believe that we choose
our families before we land in these bodies,

and if so, you picked a really good one. Yeah,
I’m a bit biased, but look at you on the floor,
rolling from your back to your tummy.

You go, Henry. Keep on rollin’, little guy.
You gotta whole bunch of fans
here cheering you on.

The tiniest thing can make a poem,
I say, when people ask where they
come from—

like the grasshopper who inadvertently
hitched a ride on my windshield
on the drive home after a massage,

stiffening my shoulders with concern
for its welfare. Should I pull over
and find it a grassy spot to live

out the rest of its days, which,
surely, at this time of year—even
on an 86-degree October afternoon—

are numbered? Can I gently
cup it in my hands to transfer
it safely, to do so without harm?

In meaning to extend a kindness,
our actions often yield the opposite,
however unintended,

like the grasshopper scrambling
for purchase on the glassy surface,
and, as I debated, disappearing

in a whoosh. So I drove on, wishing
I’d handled things differently, helped
this one or that one or the other one

touch down in a soft landing place
when we find ourselves where we
don’t want to be—amid so much

turbulence, so much uncertainty
in the rough and tumble frenzy of this
bewildering world.

which is almost as odd as saying,
Lauren is a mama,
because it was just a little while

back that Donna birthed Lauren,
who arrived earlier than
predicted, and tinier—

smaller than cousin Marryn
and Robyn’s Cabbage Patch dolls—
and now Lauren’s a mama

(though wasn’t it just a few
minutes ago that she and little
brother Kevin splashed around

in a blow-up pool in the back
yard?), and that old adage about
time whooshing by as we age

turns out to be true because not
only has my baby sister retired
after a long career, but today it’s

her birthday, this happy grandma
to Henry, a whole four months old,
though to me Donna Gail is still

that cute young mama with a
brand new baby girl, the one
born on my 29th birthday, who

grew up to marry Gerald and
made this baby boy grinning at all
of us googly-eyed relatives in

a wee scrap of a sweet moment
here and gone in an eyeblink,
a heartbeat, a sigh.

(for Jill Batiansila and the Together We Heal
community, with love and gratitude)

Whether we want to or not, like
acorns released from their jaunty caps,
dropping from valley oaks like arrows,

we crack, we split, not for any reason
we can determine, but because it’s time.
And the challenge becomes not to try

to climb back up that tree, attempt
to reattach to the stem we called home,
not to wish ourselves back to what

we used to be. Cast down into the dark,
we are surprised to find sunlight
stretching its long arms in our

direction, warmth embracing us.
We can’t believe that what’s
emerged from brokenness is love,

that in being cracked open, in falling,
our most tender selves exposed,
we can find the peace of place

in this spot where we’ve landed,
among others not unlike us—
there and there and there.

Just here. Just now.

Diego walks in the house calling
and will not stop until he finds me.
He’s not seeking food, just reassurance.

Where are you? There you are.
You were gone, and I couldn’t find you.

I’m here! I call,
knowing without looking that
he’s paused in the doorway
as I type. I hear scratching
in the catbox, and I know
he’s found another kind of
comfort, which makes me
shake my head:

You were just outside;
you could go out there.

But no, he covers, hops out
with sandy feet, comes to me,
still typing. He sits, looks up,
purrs.

Poki joins us, hops up
on the box next to me,
four penetrating eyes
relaying an insistent message
before they wander off
to curl into naps:

Here you are.
Here you truly are.

•••

(Originally published with the title “You Are Here”)