Was it a crime for the man in the silver truck to exit his vehicle to drag the wounded doe to the median?
Then leave her there.
Was it a crime to drive past her
her immobility
As she lifted her head
in pain and wonder
At all of us, terrible Samaritans
Leaving her to die alone.
Your love
is like
the mints I fish from the bottom of
my purse
Methuselah lived 969 years, which means that at just over 100, my grandfather was a spring chicken, as lifespans go. That notwithstanding he got a lot done. Married, participated in at least three wars, fathered children, buried some. Lost a wife, found another, called me his oldest unmarried granddaughter for as long as it applied.
I loved him in all his iterations, in all his familiar imperfections, but I know Someone who loves him more.
The One who is the Road
The All and Only
Road Home.
Psalm 116
Pretend for a moment that a woman who vaguely resembled Condoleezza Rice had once been in love with the spitting image of a youthful Bill Gates, what if they met years later, at a cafe, perhaps in a train station, people going from here to there in a hurry, what would they say to each other, would they recognize their former selves in the people they had become? Would she touch his face tenderly? Regret the years which came between them? Or would they just pass each other by, as though someone else’s face had been taped hastily across
All they had been together?
Unsparing means “receives no mercy.”
But I prefer just unsparing prose which would be the writing equivalent of the clean kitchen I wish I had. No moldy bread, no stale potato chips, everything organized and wiped clean,
Bare.
If my prose is bare enough, then I can strip from it the insomnia and the anger and leave only the facts.
The truth without adjectives.
Simple, awful, but so far, still sparing,
Because we have so far, survived.
I have known for some time that using the clipped, incisive, deliberate forms associated with poetry was one way to write about the devastation caused by my adopted son.
I started writing the poetry publicly when the prose seemed too difficult for people.
You could call this the “it’s too awful” syndrome, or you could call it the complicity principle. People either do not want to face the devastation and intimacy of sexual assault or they have their own story and do not really want to scrutinize how their story was handled. Notice the passive tense–change the passive tense–how they handled their story.
We have debilitating and unwarranted stigmata which we apply to the victims of sexual assault in a highly prejudicial and unscientific fashion.
All cases of sexual assault are woefully underreported, yet we claim to understand rape victims.
You cannot have a principled, scientific understanding of a condition if you force the sufferers of the condition into silence.
Nor can you ever separate the “symptoms” of victimhood out from the original crime or the subsequent, devastating consequences of enforced silence.
Every victim of a crime deserves relief, but in rape, the victim often faces subsequent harm.
They are told to be quiet or they will be marginalized.
That marginalization never stops. It can happen any time a victim shares their story.
I know because I just watched it happen again, and again, and again when my daughter wrote her college entrance essay on her rape story.
We are collectively surprised at how ephemeral the boat is, balloonish, easily punctured. As are we. I wonder if the others have drawn the same conclusions-we have become ghosts in our erstwhile stories, still haunted by the house, by the spouse, by the hope we left behind.
Only Lazarus whistles a chipper tune. Why is he so happy? Because nothing is a cool hand to lose.
We sit in the shade, it is all shade here, so incorporeal, so many of us, all waiting for a voice, for a light, for The Before The After, the now and forever, we talk of sunsets, the way the sun might send one last piercing shaft of light up through the darkening sky, faith-hope-love coming for us, they say, these men who have seen the-greatest-of-these-is-love
But when? How long until
We are irrevocably
Called to life.
I bought a boat in the hill country, she says to herself,
In this place where the Sky always becomes an ocean
We have lost so much, but I will have this beat-up John boat, recompense for years ago when I
Told you, leave your anger and walk home from here
As though we all don’t have to do that
As though there is any other way for stone-cold prodigals to
come home
It is just an email for something fun for the kids, but it reminds me of my former squalor, the way you might try to love someone who treats you like the bars, the cage, the meal set before them.
I could tell you all the symptoms and all the chaos, I could tell you the inadequate advice, the befuddlement of friends, the tragedies of children, or the strange calm caused by heavy psychotropic drugs, doctor’s office fish, surely unaware of the storm of a girl in this office by the sea.
I wake up from nightmares feeling that way again–mornings of dread, a low-grade fear of all our tomorrows.
What will become of them? Children without possessive pronouns
To guide them home.
Carrying Light 