Witness to the Wounds

When you ask how I'm doing, I don't know how to answer. 

I mention the weather, how the gray has finally, just today, peeled away to reveal a swell of blue like some kind of hope. The weather inside me is barometer of every fresh pressure.

It's not what you want to know, and yet isn't it? We speak in signs and symbols, trusting we share a common language. 

-----

"Later I will try to recall the names of all the places I went, the spaces I passed through and passed through me, their location, their feel, like a gouge in the granite of some northern mountain,” writes Natalie Singer, in California Calling: A Self Interrogation. “But I remember so few details, so much feeling and so few facts.”

-----

Now, more than a year has passed and still I must convince myself: Of course she loved you. 

There were pedicures and phone calls, banter and laughs. There was a shorthand of love, wasn’t there? There was, right? Yes, yes, of course. But so few photos. I have no evidence, no photographic proof. 

But yes, of course. After the storm and silence, after the thaw, there was understanding. There was love. 

I envy those who love easily, to whom love is a given, an “of course.” Those who don’t think, just know. I envy that ease, the key that fits and locks, the tidy closing. No jiggle or grease, no certain angle or point. The key slides in, turns and opens, or closes. All done. 

-----

At the nursing home where I work, a small woman with a small voice looks to me with wide eyes: Do you know me, she asks. Do you like me?

My words are quick and easy. Yes, I say, tucking my hand in hers. I like you very much. 

-----  

"Gouge, the word," writes Singer, "is so close to gauge, as in measure, as in witness, as in all the minutes and hours and days spent silently gauging my own level of comfort, or discomfort. My belonging. Gauging the likelihood of my voice catching in my throat.”

-----

Adele is crying softly when I stop in to visit.

Family, she tells me, her voice reaching for firmer ground. “My daughter doesn't understand me. I would never do anything to hurt her.” 

I lean in to give a hug but she waves me away. She will not take comfort, so we sit together in the quiet, each of us holding our hurts. Sometimes, still, I have no words for all our aches. 

“Family,” I say finally, “sometimes knows us least of all.” 

* As always, names and identifiers have been changed to protect privacy. 

Landscape as Metaphor

Absence, photo by Drew Myron

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in   

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

— Mark Strand

I have absence on my mind. A sort of seamlessness. Land meets sky with no distinction. Someone called this blur an ordinary loneliness.

Somewhere is a center, then a horizon as a single grounding line — of fence or hill or endlessness — holding us in or keeping us out. I'm not sure which. 

As often happens, I discover a poem that holds what I feel but can't articulate. Poem as map, as landmark, as grounding and center. Thank you Mark. 

Tell me, what's in your (emotional, physical, mental) landscape?

Thankful Tuesday: Find, fancy, forget

Island House by Andrew Wyeth

Because it's winter and we need an early and extra dose of gratitude (and Thursday is just too far away), it's Thankful Tuesday. Please join me in a pause and perspective shift by expressing gratitude for people, places, things and more. 

On this Thankful Tuesday, I am grateful for:

1. Andrew Wyeth 
For this:

A landscape becomes a stage for a crisis of thought.

And this:

"I think anything . . .  which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"

—from The Art of Andrew Wyeth 

2. Unaswerables
The Book of Questions, by Pablo Neruda, is a slim collection I often forget, find, fancy, and forget again. Like a horoscope or fortune cookie, today I dip in and find: 

Is it true sadness is thick
and melancholy thin?

and this:

In winter, do the leaves live
in hiding with the roots?

What did the tree learn from the earth
to be able to talk with the sky? 

3.  Thrum of Winter
People are dying, still and again. In my personal life, my professional life. Even this season — winter — feels like a deep thrum of silence. 

Yes, yes, I know, where there is darkness there is light. This is life: births, deaths, hellos, goodbyes, and the great stretch of dailyness in which we are stretched between dishes, laundry, office, errands and chores.

We forget this is living only because it seems like existing — until it ends, and then we cherish the mundane routine as if it were a gripping movie we wish to see just once more. We are actors and audience. We are clapping, then nodding off, in a loop of begins and ends. 

I don't want to count the bodies, tally our grief. And yet, we do, don't we? We justify our agony. This is why, and this and this. But grief isn't logical,  so the score means nothing, and yet, everything.  

4. Maudlin
Am I maudlin? Yes, I am, if only to wake myself, to stir the sadness with something more than understanding, to stir the understanding with something more than tears, to stir the tears with something more than surrender.  

5. Rowing 

but I am rowing, 

I am rowing

though the wind 

pushes me back.

— Anne Sexton 

6. Blast from the Past
 The Mary Tyler Moore Show

I cannot stop watching this landmark television show. I'm on a binge, cheering for Mary Richard's burgeoning career, independence, friendship and fashion. Thank you 1970s. 

And that theme song!

Love Is All Around 
by Sonny Curtis

Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day
And suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

Well, it’s you girl and you should know it
With each glance and every little movement you show it

Love is all around, no need to fake it
You can have the town, why don’t you take it?
You’re gonna make it after all

How will you make it on your own?
This world is awfully big
And all this time you’re all alone

Well it’s time you started livin’
It's time you let someone else do some giving

Love is all around, no need to fake it
You can have the town, why don’t you take it?
You’re gonna make it after all
You’re gonna make it after all 

Your turn: What are you thankful for today? 

On Sunday: Shift

  Writing doesn’t heal things; it shifts things.  

By writing something down, you move it from

your heart to your hand, and that distance is

often enough to do something else with the

feelings.

 
— Kate Gray

Envy is exhausting

Headlined 

 
The chicest people

you've never heard of

wake up with more energy

eat better, sleep longer

feel happier + find

more time for balance.

Some days it feels impossible

to rise, shine, believe

in good and

heartwarm

the world. 

— Drew Myron

This is a poem "ripped from the headlines."

Also known as a found poem, a cut-up poem, a warm up poem & an exercise for the writing muscle.

This poem is also a reminder why I should give up fashion/lifestyle magazines. 

Tell me, what are you writing?