It is morning, the day before my mother’s funeral. My oldest son and I are standing by the French doors in the great room of my mother’s house. He is cleaning the windows and I am admiring the view of the pond when we both hear music coming from the mantle above the fireplace, six to eight feet from where we are standing.
I go over, thinking it must be one of her clocks. It is not. It is a music box, playing its song.
It played for a couple minutes, then the morning quiet resumed.
That was all.
Every once upon a time I take the girls
Driving in the dark
We look for places to call home–ramshackle garage, vape shop, dry cleaner with its window smashed
In the apocalypse there is still no
Room left in the inns of the world they ask
Why did she have to stick the needle in her arm? Why did she stick the needle in her arm? What was it about the needle that
Caused us to lose her?
The little one has poured her anger out over her minders all afternoon
Unwilling to face what it costs them
So I try to de Bergerac her through the necessary obsequities
I tell her I will whisper the words and she will shout–
I’m sorry
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry I was mean before
I’m sorry I was mean before
I was working out my grief
I was working out my grief
And sometimes there is anger in grief
And sometimes there is anger in grief
She has such a comical little girl voice
But when she says these things I know what God means
When He whispers in my ear
When we met Mary and Charles they had some vocabulary specific to the western Pennsylvania region. They used the word yins for the second person plural, the way a Texan would say y’all or a Parisian would say vous.
I’m-gonna-beat-yins-to-the-house! She would yell joyfully, running up the small hill to the porch.
Eventually she lost the yins
But I am praying that she did
Beat us to the House
He walks into every room looking for someone who might comprehend
what it is
he has seen and heard
He weighs their solemn waiting-room-faces
Do they have
Better memories now? Do they still need to write things down or
Know every word by heart?
Are all the lambs among them and
can we see their scars?
Who can end this waiting
By calling us out
Out into life
What happened to me, that in a moment of gargantuan hubris, I smudged it out? So what if it lived in the books or the play things? So what if it preferred the damp and closeted nocturne?
The moment before it was a glinty, wriggling alive
Then it was just an undoable regret
A life I should not have taken
We all have them–
Our ghosts, the ones we wish we could
Bring back whole
A parade of The Returned–
Uriah, John the Baptist, Stephen, Joan of Arc
Leaping and unfettered procession
Amidst the boundless sea of
The Redeemed
these trees of life
I could be a quark or an hurtling star,
A duck or a chicken
Living on one side of a beat-up plank fence
With knots in it, and scooped out holes
Signifying they all used to be trees
and the fence and the yard and the girl are just
Another kind of spaceship
Prone to sunset
Nothing can stop the Splendor from breaking through
Every hole in the fence.
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children
If only an ordinary person like me could
Cast a spell with words
Hocus pocus–live!
Abracadabra–live!
I alternate between believing
That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or
The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing
Calvariums.
Think about it.
Your darkest night
Your loneliest moment
The here-and-there times when it is either your own
Life or the life of the beloved
Taken from you
Faith I get
Love anchors
But it is my squint-into-the-sun-reticence about hope
Which drives me to speak
Of mountains.
Today darling the mountains
Are all shaped like crowns
Crowns of thorns or flowers,
The braided laurels of an imperial victory
He said, it is finished beneath these crumbling mountains
And I will wait, sometimes in tears
To see them all
Thrown into the sea.
Last time I call you darling
Birds fly across
Crane toward heaven,
still see/only shadows
As the crow flies
light flies faster
-sound far behind
But shadows, old friend
In cold pursuit
And you so sure you can
Outrun them
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