What They Found

A container of wrapping tape, three
cookbooks with handwritten notes,
fifteen hardback journals filled
with rhetoric of homespun, volumes
of poetry with sticky notes holding
fast as lightning, dried flowers crumbling
at the touch. In another room, outlines
of an English garden and plans to extend
the back room, replete with French
doors and a deck, boxes of baby
items, each neatly noted, half-worked
crossword puzzles, some with notations
scrawled in the margins regarding the idiocy
of language, dental floss on the bedside
table & Kleenex wadded up and scattered
like magnolia blossoms after the storm.
Room by room, they go, these who were left
behind, these who thought they knew.
In the kitchen, this: colorful asides
on the O'Keeffee calendar pages, musings
on the finer qualities of cabernet, Almanac
facts regarding the heat, enigmatic inscriptions
with no apparent relevancy: No phone call
from B , 15 Maybe 20 at the best, trade offs
seldom pay off. This is all that is left
of her life, all that remains of a body
that lived among them, attached to them
like tendrils of wisteria vine, clinging
tightly to the closest storm-proof refuge,
rising and falling above them like no sky
they had ever seen, below them like strange
organisms of the deep they considered
a time or two when pondering the mysteries
of the unknown. Work not done, they enter
a sanctuary, a refuge when they were frightened
in the dark and the straight way was lost,
the room where she held them to her breast
and stroked their small heads as they clung to life,
where she kissed tears and patted the shoulders
of worry when the long, long nights turned longer,
where she curled herself up, fetal position.
There, a lavender pillowcase littered
with fine brown strands, some smeared mascara,
the stains of a mouth-breathing sleeper,
panties cast off in the night, no longer willing
to be confined or defined, a ceramic cherub-embossed
bowl with trinkets and jewelry, a mother's broken watch,
a dead friend's toothed necklace, a strand
of Job's Tears beads they never saw her wear,
a class ring with some forgotten sprinter
breaking the tape in a race that mattered
far too much many years ago, a faux Celtic
pendant engraved in runes, a shiny and radiant
lock of auburn hair, clipped in a moment of abandon,
saved for a purpose, for a memory of a time
when cutting a lock meant something.

One Cell

...contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content,
than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.
--Richard Dawkins, from The Blind Watchmaker

So in our beds or in the beds of lovers,
when we leave we leave volumes
of information, the book of our days
lost to ourselves, sloughed off into the world.
As we wander a filthy city street
we grow new cells, pungent with the old codes,
so we can stop walking, remember
the day we wept openly for a man
in a casket, the night we touched a glass
to our lips and saw all creation
in a stranger's face. The pain of childbirth
comes back, the scent of magnolia, a song
from a commercial, an afternoon carnival,
a choir. Our cells retain it, pinhead
sponges soaking up whatever we need
to keep walking, to keep stumbling into
the blinding darkness ahead.

Dorianne Laux, from Facts About The Moon

Leonard Cohen - Bird on a wire

For the last week, I have gone to sleep with this song in my head and I wake up and it's still in my head.

Like a bird/on a wire/like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried/in my way/to be free

31 years ago today...


I got married.

Can't remember what time of day the big event occurred.

I remember it rained. I remember worrying that my borrowed
wedding gown might get muddied up, soiled, marred, damaged
beyond repair.

I remember that 2 hours before the time (whatever the time
was), the rain stopped.

I remember my husband's brother telling him he still
had time to make a clean getaway.

I don't remember where we went that night. The lake?
The city?

I remember that bottle of Blue Nun someone
gave us exploding in the suitcase (quite an appropriate
demise for a blue nun and for Blue Nun--which tastes
like what it is-- cheap wine).

I remember a week or so later, a box with two broken
Phaltzgraff soup bowls and a note from my mother
wondering where I was.

I remember not knowing where I was for a very long time.

*

Happy anniversary to my husband who has stood beside me
all these years. Who has watched me suffer and tried his best
to help. Who has watched me in the happiest moments of my life
and been made happier because of those moments. Who has
not understood so much of who I am but who tries to understand.
Who doesn't like much of anything I like (except my food) but
who supports me just the same. Who has been a hard worker,
and many times, absent father, but whose heart is always
in the right place. Who doesn't give up on me. Who has not
ever given up on me.

The Heat

So sick of it. We set another record yesterday--
104 actual degrees. With the heat index, it was 110
or so in the shade. Day after day after day of nothing
but heat, humidity and watering plants!

Allergies have been killing me too. Everything
is so dry. It looks like fall here with all the leaves
turning and falling from the trees. We may get some
rain this weekend, but it doesn't look promising.
We've only had 1.10 inches for the month of August,
and I think that fell on about the 2nd day of the month.

Molly and I continue to take our walks, but she doesn't
tolerate the heat any better than I do, so I let her run
loose at the track (if no one else is there), and I just keep
going even when she gives up. She gets next to the car
in the shade. I always take her water and some toys
so she just waits there for me to finish my walk. I am
walking 2 miles a day at least 5 days a week.

*****************************

Still no job. I had to make a decision the other day
to stop beating myself up about it. I will keep trying,
and hopefully something will come through soon.

Not only is it hard for me to be home, jobless, I am also
trying to deal with letting go. Wes is 16 1/2 now, and he
has his license, so he can take himself to school now.
This is the first time since 1981 that I have not had
to transport a child to and from school. My oldest
started preschool in 1981, daughter started in 1984,
youngest started in 1994, and in between all of that
came elementary and high school, so when my oldest
got his license in 1994, I was still driving my daughter
and my youngest. Then daughter got her license in 1997,
but I was still taking my youngest.

In a nutshell, I feel lost.

I have always enjoyed the time in the car to and
from school--time to say How was your day? and just
to talk. Life was so hectic with me working full-time,
going to school full-time (some semesters) and part-
time other semesters. Going to school in the summers
too. Then I also had everything at home to do--the yard,
the cooking, the laundry, the housework. Though my kids
helped with things around the house (and my husband
helped as much as spossible), I did most of the work.

Now, here I am. Not in school for the first time since
January of 2001. Not working. Not taking children
places. Just home with the cats and the dog and
my thoughts.

I went from a very scheduled routine to this do-
what-I-want-to-do-when-I-want-to-do-it thing
and I am not doing well with it.

*sigh*


*********************

I went to see my mom yesterday for the first time
in weeks. She only lives 3 blocks from me, but
going over there is so difficult. She made me
smile, which totally shocked me. It's not something
she's ever made me do very often. I took Molly
with me, and when Mom opened the door, Molly
jumped right up on her. I am trying hard to teach
Molly to quit jumping on people. All of Wes's
friends just can't stand her because she jumps on them
(and, if she's really excited, christens them too!), so
I am used to having to continually pull her off people.

But when she jumped up at Mom, Mom just took her paws
and said, Oh, you want dance? and then she just waltzed
Molly around.

It's just too hard to go there now, no Dad to go see. No Dad
hug. No Dad kind words. No Dad in his chair sipping coffee
or reading the paper or working in the garden.

No Dad.

In The Heart Of

Six men still lay beneath
the earth, beneath solid ground,
far from wives and girlfriends,
sons and daughters, far from food
and water, fresh air and sunlight,
far from their homes and lives, far
from a Friday night out with the guys,
far from reviewing that day's homework,
far from feeling the cool waters
of a shower rinse the dust from every
cavity, far from making a phone call
to say, it's okay, I made it out,
far from rescue. In the heart of coal
country, I know this story well,
one friend who became a widow
in a flash-fire that killed her husband
and nine other men, that took fathers
from their children and children
from their parents, that took youth
and the choice of where to lie
down for the final time away,
that took hope and possibilities
and dreams of a lake house and some
acreage quick as the fire took
their breaths. Not many days
pass that I don't think of that day,
all of the friends gathered in the kitchen,
waiting for her to come home, the smell
of roast and fried chicken, the sounds
of small talk and optimism, the look
on my face when she was brought
in the back door, supported by a sister
and mother, that look I can't erase.
I was smiling about something someone
said, something unrelated to the tragedy
that was yet to unfold, something not
funny but needed. There is no scream
like that of a child who has just been
told her father won't be back, no
nightmare that could equal the frozen,
distorted faces of friends gathered
in her kitchen when we knew she
had no choice but to tell, but to say
the words we could not hear
but knew, but to hear the weeping,
the screaming, the pleading, the quiet.

How Easy To Be: An Early Fall

Two of them hopped
around in the tall
grass of the infield,
mouths full, happiness exuding
from their bushy tails.

Can they think
the seasons have changed already,
these busy squirrels,
who take me away from me
long enough to matter,
who chase one another up a tree
and across the wires, who think
nothing of the loneliness of wires
and phones that won't ring,
who look funny with some large
green things in their mouths,
jaws nearly as large as their heads,
who will not feel anger from me
because they refuse to acknowledge
my presence, who will not miss me
when I get in my car and drive
away, who will not look for my face
again nor wonder what I may have to say.
How easy they make me feel, no
expectations, no disappointments.

My reverie ends as they hop
out of sight. Now only the sound
of my soles slapping the crumbling
pavement holds my attention,
feet so unforgiving after
years of neglect, legs carrying
the weight of all my mistakes.
I make myself, force myself,
to do this, this pretend-to-care-
about-me routine, this practice
session for a day of reckoning.
And as leaves drop from the summer trees,
nestling in the verbena and vinca,
and wedging themselves inside the gaps
of the yellowing azalea, I accept
the truth--

I can only know what
a glorious thing it is to stand,
to make legs and body move forward,
to revel in the watching of small
hunter-gatherers, because I have known
the intricate nature of falling. Again.
And again.