The way I cling to this ranch house
with its many useless rooms,
for yet another season
though my man (and our children)
have rooted elsewhere now.
Another summer folds into another
autumn and it is October 3 again
when he was carried out past midnight.
I still sleep in that bedroom
a whole decade later
steadfast on this crag like
one of those devoted watchdogs
that curls on its master‘s grave
till some kind strangers pry
her away.
with the sun and the garden, flitting
from thought to thought to thought but
after dark I turn into a woman
who sleeps in a bedroom strung
with tiny lights (my magical, secret cinema)
not to brighten my empty bed but
the glow reminds me of him
who flutters about the room
mute as a moth escaping the night
for the remote village of our bed
just to let me know
this remains
his permanent destination.
One-legged now, my daughter can still unwrap my gifts
without her man’s help.
That man—blind in one eye, lame, on dialysis—pushes
and locks it in place.
He is what mercy looks like in a world
ruled by chance.
(How did this woman of 44, carrying so many diagnoses,
recognize her luck?)
They met a decade ago as she smoked on a park bench.
He sat beside her, hoping to bum a smoke and
moved straight into her heart.
Without him, she couldn't understand a single sentence
in their application for special needs housing.
Without him, she would still be pacing
from one man to the next.
And without her, there would be no
one to tuck into his bed after the cold hum
of the machine that, 3 times each week,
scrubs his blood.
No one to look deeply into his
one good eye.
Each would suffer a terrible lack—
their nights pitch black,
no one to save them from the grenades of drugs, poor diets,
those unexpected maladies
that can stop any of us dead in our tracks.
Their home is a place where ashtrays overflow
in every room,
where walls smell like turpentine,
where her insulin accidentally lands in the freezer
and clean laundry lies unsorted on the living-room floor,
stained with soy sauce and orange chicken.
My daughter sits in her wheelchair,
the many errant hairs she’ll soon ask him to brush
falling across her face as she unwraps
the gifts I brought,
while he uses a magnifying glass
to set the timer
that warms their dinner.
let a wound
on her 43-year-old foot fester
for two months until it sagged
to a blue mush,
until that leg was chiseled
down to half today.
Now I can’t decide whom to blame
for this latest catastrophe.
She wasn’t dealt a good hand at birth
my husband always said
about her disability—this mind
that can’t count change,
and trusts too easily.
But I was the one who let her leave
the board and care home to live
with the boyfriend.
Still, how much blame is mine when
she kept running away
to him anyway?
I can’t blame the boyfriend either.
He does all the laundry, all the shopping,
all the cooking
despite being legally blind
and on dialysis.
Blame isn’t black or white.
It bleeds across a spectrum,
in pale grays and starchy whites,
and bruised blues
like a rainbow.
Blame leads to talking to yourself
and feeling stuck
and wondering if things had gone
better for her
if my husband hadn’t died.
But blame is also myth-making.
And offers second chances, ways to build
one more version
of the past.
Stepping out mornings into my sunny garden
Coffee mug in one hand, I turn on the hose
with the other.
Cool water showers the herbs and I hear
a quiet applause rise
in me for their perseverance—
those deer did not return.
I pinch buds from the basil and the scent
bursts like green confetti into
my nose and move on
to my mother-in-law’s orchid.
It’s lived 13 years without her now —
Lived with her a decade before that
neglected by her and now by me
who neglected both.
And yet it endures.
Like her, it keeps on giving.
I’ve pruned my guilt about it but
it grows back like her orchid’s improbable
blooms, a sweet gift and a silent
rebuke.
Back in the kitchen,
the basil’s scent won’t let go.
Each time I brush hair from my eyes,
a wave of green spice fills
me up and quiets the sting
of that regret and of children
who take too long to call.
But when they do, it’s not the basil’s calm
but the sudden, soaring thrill I feel
when seeing that orchid bloom again.
The sewing needle I thread to fix
my boy’s belt loop
drops from my fingers and
vanishes
into the beige bathroom rug,
impossible to find until
I flick on the ceiling lamp and
instantly
a silver streak lights up that needle
like a stage spotlight.
I have learned that light consists
of tiny photons, each one racing off
in every direction
forever
and each one holds a record
of where it’s been, like a postcard stamped
with the return address of a star or a moon
or a ceiling lamp
that my eyes read in a language
I don’t know I know
and suddenly—needle…. there.
A miracle the universe sends
messages all the time, telling me
Look, this is what’s here,
this is what’s real,
this is what you belong to.
The real miracle though isn’t the light
but that there’s a me
to surmise the wink on the floor.
Oh how we hang on
even to our ficus, making sure it leans
toward the light and keeps greening up,
hoping our orchids only play dead and
will burst back into bloom--
and stay there.
We want every last leaf and frond
and fern to make it,
also our cloudy-eyed German Shepherd--
may she sit by my feet forever and
may the cat keep watch in the window and
may our kids and friends--all--
hang on—
our own selves especially—and
leaf out again and again
without end.
Oh how we hang on.
We sit on the porch and sense eternity —
right here, beside the Rosemary and Mint.
And when the bougainvillea finally gives out,
when the dearest friend doesn’t pull through,
we stare down at the ashes and
make something infinite
out of that smoke, see a world
glowing at the edges
without end.
Oh how we hang on.
Grief gets strange like that—rank and holy.
Even though we follow the science,
and nothing about forever makes sense.
My husband died ten years ago.
His ashes fell soft as snow into the sea—
no words fit for that world beyond
atoms and forces, yet mind holds
him intact and some part of him
keeps glowing in the dark.
Oh how we hold on
and pray for the soul to slip
into the sky
like a bird let out of a cage,
and there is a lasting flame
at the center of things
that never goes out.
Oh how we how on,
tell ourselves that flame was never born,
so it cannot die.
A whole forest of priests agrees with us.
But it’s the wind through the oaks and
the way the moss clings to stone that
persuades us we will hang on too.
The part of us that longs for
the ever ripe apples
in our never rotting hands.
