She Is Who Wakes Me
A Poem inspired by Jane Hirshfield's "Imagine Myself In Time"
Twenty years on, facing old age
who will my young self be?
What will she look like when I look back
from future mornings? The quality
of those mornings, a hidden mystery—no telling now
whether I'll find birdsongs, or birds.
Looking at old age, when it's closer at hand,
will I remember the way words matter now:
guardians of my heart, gates to others'?
Maybe one loss will follow another,
and widowhood will be less sudden.
Or I will walk naked into a sunny morning, forgetting
how cold the world still is at dawn.
I wonder if my older self knows how
to enfold time, piling years
onto her current moment,
now to then, then to now.
Saying, "it is only ever now,"
so that neither of us can utter a reply.
She already knows about me. Time folds.
She is who wakes me, today.
I started writing this poem in June but has evolved quite a bit since, and it felt time to share it with more people. It feels like it tries to capture a sentiment (or series of sentiments) that are close at hand for me this summer. If you read it and have any associations with it, or want to provide other feedback, please do!
Friday, July 24, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Laughter, After
Laughter, After
(On "Faith Healing")
One can hear the phrase "Faith Healing" as the healing of wounded faith (as in: faith, healing). Or as the way faith, like nothing else, heals. I guess that it does. This way: I sit on a porch and I stare at the ocean, believing that this is time well spent. I understand our whole lives together hover above a small area of the Pacific and I stare. I listen to the family of quail looking for food on our porches, and it is literally a family: mother, father, and a very spotted baby. I am giving myself time, on a Sunday, a day you left, and have none left of. I trust that this is what I need and I listen to the quail, and I hear you say, about the baby: That. Is. So. Cute. And I am grateful for your voice in my ears. So my faith gives me gratitude which leads me to tears of what can only be called joy. So it has happened again: faith led to time led to gratitude led to tears led to joy. I am not past-tense healed, but I am healing. You are healing. Me. Despite the paradox. I bless you for being the wound and the salve simultaneously. Render and mender. Woe-er and Sew-er/Sower. Tearful and cheerful. Latitude/gratitude. Attitude/platitude. Food chewed. Mood-lewd. Quail-wail. Laughter, After. You are cracking me up, and I am back to real joy, and if I weren't writing these words in a roomful of people there'd be real tears, too.
(On "Faith Healing")
One can hear the phrase "Faith Healing" as the healing of wounded faith (as in: faith, healing). Or as the way faith, like nothing else, heals. I guess that it does. This way: I sit on a porch and I stare at the ocean, believing that this is time well spent. I understand our whole lives together hover above a small area of the Pacific and I stare. I listen to the family of quail looking for food on our porches, and it is literally a family: mother, father, and a very spotted baby. I am giving myself time, on a Sunday, a day you left, and have none left of. I trust that this is what I need and I listen to the quail, and I hear you say, about the baby: That. Is. So. Cute. And I am grateful for your voice in my ears. So my faith gives me gratitude which leads me to tears of what can only be called joy. So it has happened again: faith led to time led to gratitude led to tears led to joy. I am not past-tense healed, but I am healing. You are healing. Me. Despite the paradox. I bless you for being the wound and the salve simultaneously. Render and mender. Woe-er and Sew-er/Sower. Tearful and cheerful. Latitude/gratitude. Attitude/platitude. Food chewed. Mood-lewd. Quail-wail. Laughter, After. You are cracking me up, and I am back to real joy, and if I weren't writing these words in a roomful of people there'd be real tears, too.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Reasons
I am starting this blog because on May 17 of this year, I lost my best friend Jamie to sudden, acute myelogenous leukeumia (AML). There are hundreds of facets of my life that feel affected by this loss--our shared love for our gardens and our homes, our shared appreciation of a good fig and a great olive, the way I turned to Jamie at every crossroads in my adult life and gained perspective, and on, and on.
One passion we shared was for the written word -- for the power of poetry and language to enhance, shape, give meaning to and sometimes make sense of a life, our lives. Over the past 2 decades, we had shared the particular journey, challenge, obstacle course, of staying connected to language and our own words while living in a world that doesn't always nurture that. Once, I came up with an exercise which involved sending other several lines of poems on a postcard that asked for the other to fill in lines as pairs to the first lines, without worrying about final narrative or sequence. The point was to respond to language with more language, and to let the process continue for a series of postcards. I recently found the collaborative "product" transcribed in my computer , and will post it at some point. Another time, Jamie created a website where we could each post short poems or writing in response to assignments we gave each other or ourselves. Again, the aim was to provide a context for writing, and then to provide some forms and an audience in each other to nurture these parts of ourselves. We didn't publicize that website, although it's still public and available.
The line about the wheel (in the title of this blog) comes from the collaborative postcard poem; I don't know anymore who wrote the line, but it seemed to speak to my need to let the ink move on the page (I still start poems with ink, and edit and revise later with a keyboard). I do not know what wants to be written, these days, but I do know there is language for the emotions I feel and the experiences that I'm inside (and that feel like recursive lessons in my own voice, since Jamie's death). So I am building a place to write more, and a place to write freely, about grief, friendship, love, and anything else in my heart and mind. I am certain that I wish Jamie was still in my audience; she was my first reader when I was working on a poem and wanted to start seeing how it sounded in the world. I had been working on a poem named January (her birth month) late last year; I wish I had shown it to her. Creating this spot here is one act of nudging myself a little further, taking a little more advantage of the time I have alive, demanding that I experiment with sharing writing sooner, rather than thinking there will be time for it to reach others later. It is also an attempt to relearn about audience.
I keep turning, not knowing.
One passion we shared was for the written word -- for the power of poetry and language to enhance, shape, give meaning to and sometimes make sense of a life, our lives. Over the past 2 decades, we had shared the particular journey, challenge, obstacle course, of staying connected to language and our own words while living in a world that doesn't always nurture that. Once, I came up with an exercise which involved sending other several lines of poems on a postcard that asked for the other to fill in lines as pairs to the first lines, without worrying about final narrative or sequence. The point was to respond to language with more language, and to let the process continue for a series of postcards. I recently found the collaborative "product" transcribed in my computer , and will post it at some point. Another time, Jamie created a website where we could each post short poems or writing in response to assignments we gave each other or ourselves. Again, the aim was to provide a context for writing, and then to provide some forms and an audience in each other to nurture these parts of ourselves. We didn't publicize that website, although it's still public and available.
The line about the wheel (in the title of this blog) comes from the collaborative postcard poem; I don't know anymore who wrote the line, but it seemed to speak to my need to let the ink move on the page (I still start poems with ink, and edit and revise later with a keyboard). I do not know what wants to be written, these days, but I do know there is language for the emotions I feel and the experiences that I'm inside (and that feel like recursive lessons in my own voice, since Jamie's death). So I am building a place to write more, and a place to write freely, about grief, friendship, love, and anything else in my heart and mind. I am certain that I wish Jamie was still in my audience; she was my first reader when I was working on a poem and wanted to start seeing how it sounded in the world. I had been working on a poem named January (her birth month) late last year; I wish I had shown it to her. Creating this spot here is one act of nudging myself a little further, taking a little more advantage of the time I have alive, demanding that I experiment with sharing writing sooner, rather than thinking there will be time for it to reach others later. It is also an attempt to relearn about audience.
I keep turning, not knowing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
