Category: Grief
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March 2017
Slowly, slowly life comes back. Hair-fine roots far below the surface muster a wiggle, a stretch, and stir for us the unseen process of life beginning again. But not every capillary wiggles and stretches. Some just as mysteriously have clogged themselves up (been clogged up?) and no longer bring life back, no longer are alive…
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Early morning on Lake Shore Drive
maze of brown at the center, trees empty of leaves, row after row stretching to scattered hazel edging the lake, its soft fog settled, tissue-papers, still, grey, jade mist, dull pearl, kingdom come
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The heart needs good work
All that comes to me now is the prairie, how it is empty to the casual eye, how you walk or see for miles, alone, how you wonder ever why on the absence of your fellow creatures. Will you get another dog? it asks me, or a grandmother, or husband, or son? Do they make…
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Small endurances
Puddles of snow pool under shrubs – miniature glaciers for voles to cast through. Sparrows, geese, all as one gather round the warmth floating up from the subway grate. Frozen, withered leaves dangle under squirrel’s tiny pads stirring breath in the still air. Here, in a far corner of my heart a soft flutter —…
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11/20
Earth grieves each November, again finds itself wailing in sorrow, refusing to get out of bed. For its own tears and distresses, the world collapses into itself, spends the month grinding through cold damp, discordant winds, while its resistance slips away into the long lonely meditation that always follows death. ———- From Li Po, “Listening…
Poems from in between 