Evidences

In the draw
a bulldozer is killing
a small sea of wild orange lilies
older than myself.


Near weed-fringed debris
of old barn's bones,
rest orange and blue halves
of my brother's baby basketball hoop--
I thought we hauled out
all our old junk.


In the place that was home,
rooms amplify sounds. A step, a sniffle
and the apricot kitchen
gives vacancy a voice: listen to
what isn't here. 

A Farewell

On Thanksgiving weekend, I learned that a significant portion of the original Our Place will be sold on Friday. (For a description of the place for which this blog is named, see here.) The physical Our Place is very dear to me, and I'm grateful that I managed a super quick trip back to say goodbye today. Perhaps I may find words to share about this. For now, a few pictures:

 

 

 

31, Epilogue

The year I lost the horizon--
could not see
the sky's relation to the earth.


Year I moved downstairs,
gained a yard and roses
which somehow reminded me
to miss my grandpa.


Year they tore out the fencerow--
end of many
youthful pilgrimages--
and my mother moved away.


Withdrawing year--
a sort of death
without funeral,
without body to face the east.

less

Forgive me, sometimes
my heart goes paging
through the catalogue
of absences--falling, always,
over the well-worn category:
home.

Last Impressions

Room where Dad died--
later remade for Mom--
blushed purple through curtains
and vacant.


Apricot kitchen
oddly the same . . .
must be the sink and
the blue and white valances.


Surrendering the flower beds:
here are the blue bells,
Dutchman's breeches,
don't mow the tulips
yet.


Boxes,
bare mattress,
brown thrasher in ash,
the sun:
a sliver
a coal
a circle--
the final good morning.

The Last Spring

 

Over fields flat and broad
as emptied rooms,
a sunburst cracks
this morning's horizon.

Dad's red tulips,
beneath the feeder,
almost bloom.

Grape hyacinths hoist
clusters of fairy-egg blue.

The forsythia blossoms
tatters of sunshine.

The sky has fallen
and is coming back up
in flowers.

The Practicalities of Ghosts

The Brock County Cemetery was not given to ghosts. It was small and orderly with far too many of those flat grave markers that make mowing easy. Jill Bright was not given to ghosts, either. Fairies, she thought, absently, working grass seed into the bald spot on her brother's mound. If I had to pick something, it would be fairies. The rainbow-y, friendly kind. A cricket sang, hiding from the hot sun in the grass roots around Freddie's headstone.  

Several plots behind Jill, a beheaded silk arrangement fluttered like a dead bird in the gust of a passing car. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. I'm getting sunburn, she told herself. I should have worn a hat. Hastily, she sprinkled water from her water bottle over the seed, then over a tissue she fished out of her pocket. She rubbed the tissue over the words "bravest of brothers," removing the mulberry-tinted droppings that grackles had splattered over her brother's tribute. And he had been—always the brave one, with Jill trooping along behind.

Her arms prickled now, the fine hair standing upright like fuzz. The cricket fell silent. She scrubbed until the tissue turned dusty between her fingers. Then she straightened up and stared over the flat cemetery. Impulsively, she took one big step onto the middle of her brother's mound and flung the tissue shreds away. "That's it!" she shouted. "Come out!" 

There was a ghost after all. "Isn't new grass such a hopeful thing?" it chirped. "Like a wound healing over. You're standing on the seed."

             

"Oh, for heaven's sake, who cares!" Jill leaned toward the ghost, "Shut up, Stupid. Just shut up and listen for once! You left him alone! You with your 'laughter is good medicine' and 'hope for the best' and your everlasting antioxidant-rich juices! You saw that look in his eyes. He was scared and he was dying, but you pretended not to know. He had to carry it all by himself! So you lost each other." 

Her voice grew soft, regretful: "You lost each other before he was even dead." She reached for the ghost. And throwing her arms around her own shoulders, wept at last.

On Endings

The family graves looked bare without
a re-purposed tin can of peonies centered
before each stone. The old aunt
who observed the ritual is gone, and suddenly,
I miss her and my childhood certainty.

Behind sparse pines, the barnyard
clearing paints pale sky--no corn crib
cupola's silhouette, no familiar bulk
of barn. Half-guiltily, I recognize
the bewildered ache of a near one's
passing away.

I walk the field sold to the man
who tore down the barn. Technically,
I am now a trespasser. But I mean no harm,
am careful of the knee-high corn, brush
gently between young blades smooth
and whirled up top like calla lilies.

They rasp, rustle, whisper in a gentle wind.
I listen around the ringing in my ears
and hope this emptiness is the hallowing
of another sanctuary . . . that it is only
the pause between exhale and breath.

Remembering A Friend

Window light bounced from the disc of music you sent
(a last sharing) to the underside of a violet leaf:
 red-orange-yellow living light, down to the blue-and-purpled
serrated edge. A moment only, but
you would have liked it.

Reply to a Poet

[My friend and fellow poet, Thomas D, wrote a poem "Tenth Letter to a Poet"  which touched me, and inspired the following reply.]


Your sunburst description
brings me at once
to bulletin inserts
in a little country church.
How the skies were torn
over fields of corn and soybeans,
over pastures and orb-eyed cows,
over dips of timber . . .
over land given, long ago,
in a dead daughter's name--
Estella, who wanted to be a missionary.

Ours was just one more tale
of frailty and faithfulness
as we left those white walls
and led the somber line
behind my father's hearse.
The gray October sky
cried light through thin places
of cloud. My mother took it
as a sign of God's presence.

Today, the children and I
read Jonah's story--
how God finds us,
how even a runaway and fish
may prefigure resurrection.
I am glad of your reminder
that God can find us even in
our weakest words.

Tombs

Absences eat words.
We can write and talk
about what's been removed,
measure the cavity--
an inch for every
thing we miss--
but the nothing
left behind
still dries our tongues.

Merciful Savior,
what must Your followers,
Your loved ones, have felt
when all that they had left
was the terrible yawn
of Your body
emptied of You.

You, Who felt what it is
to be forsaken, fill
these, our absences, with
Your most tender light.
Through emptiness spill
astonishing resurrections.

For N

In this, your last vigil,
love wings around you:
beloved hands, beloved voices
of beloved souls you mentioned
 in your letters.

I'll not step further
into this, your sacred space
(or linger over words I sent too late),
only commend you, my far friend,
with my small love,
to that Greatest Love.

Endings

I love this place, this corner of "forgottonia" where my family has lived for five generations. When I revisit the long gray stretches of winter fields with bins and bare trees silhouetted in the afternoon light, when night falls and I drive home with the black miles around me and distant strings of orange or yellow farmstead lights necklaced across the horizon, I feel grounded in a way that no other place duplicates. There is a steadiness and rhythm here: spring into summer into fall into winter into spring, again--with the same changes of foliage and sky. The earth changes its clothes, but it is the same earth, the same body underneath. This is a most comforting thing.

But on the human level, there is profound change and decay. My brother and I paused on our walk today (a short one, due to a bitter wind) to examine an old sign post just down from my mother's house. It stands sturdily, but embraced by a young tree's branches. Grass has totally overtaken the corner the signs once marked. Not long before my parents moved our family back to this area, authorities closed the train crossing which gave the corner purpose, choosing to maintain only two ways across the tracks that split the village in half. A good move, and one I appreciate, as it hugely diminished traffic past the house that would become our home. But in the years after the move, we watched that bit of abandoned road turn to grass and disappear before our eyes.

We also watched a house just down the road move from habitation to collapse. Soon after moving to the area, my sister and I met a blond boy with a dog named Oreo who lived in that house. After a while the boy and his family moved away. Eventually the front porch door hung open over sturdy red steps. We could see holes under the eaves. Now nothing remains but a pile of rubble topped, last I noticed, with a bit of the peak of the roof. Around here, you can watch a house and road disappear bit by bit, year by year, right in front of your eyes.

From the kitchen window, I look across the field to a ruin of bricks around one tall, definitive chimney--my grandfather and my mother's old high school. Swifts live in the chimney, flying from it to grace periwinkle evenings with their twittering songs and little paddling wings. From Mom's front porch--the part of the house facing the village rather than the fields, I see the shell of my grandparents' church, looming above the neighbor's little house. In earliest memories of visits to my grandparents', I vaguely recall a dim, high-ceilinged interior with big wooden chairs on a dais. My mother remembers that a cat once wandered in during a service and sat in the wooden chair reserved for the pastor. He, being a cat-lover, simply chose the chair beside it and let the cat enjoy its seat.

I don't know where I'm going with this post. Perhaps it is the melancholy of knowing my visit to western Illinois draws to a close--but I feel this evidence in front of my eyes (I've grown up with this evidence) that the lives we build and the things we build don't necessarily last. The seasons with their beauty and trouble will roll around again, but maybe not for us, maybe not for us in this place . . .

A Few Thoughts

As I move through the rhythms of a richly blessed existence, I find myself suddenly reminded of the fragility of life. One friend's unspeakable tragedy occurs against the backdrop of several friends' joys . . . joys that could quickly (and seemingly, senselessly) turn into the same gaping loss. Life is a wonder,  a small blossom of flame full of intricate brilliance and energy, vulnerable to any sudden gust. Nearly every day, I watch little children run into their parents' arms, watch the flash of delight between the large and small beings, witness something warm and sure and precious. I hear laughter, but just now, the air also seems full of Rachel weeping.

I walk to work, noting the handful of leaves still attached to the end of each branch of an almost bare ornamental maple. For the first time in years I feel anchored, present with the turn of the earth. Rather than feeling uneasily left behind as seasons change, or struggling to catch myself on details beyond a personal fog, I feel pretty much all here. Which is beautiful. But I find it difficult to express my profound gratitude and wonder over finding myself in this place. It is new and tender, and perhaps I fear it may fly away. Then, too, I cannot say how marvelous this is without acknowledging the anguish of before.

Someone has said that we must learn to hold the feather and the rock, because both are present in our lives. Joy and sorrow mix, certainties and uncertainties walk together, presence and absence and essence mingle in inscrutable ways. I play with students. We yell jubilantly. We chase over the blue and yellow play equipment. At the back of my heart, from a long way away, I feel the crying.

Unnamed

Oh, that I could reach
down in myself and wrench
a skyfull of lightning,
a broil of blue-black clouds--
and thunder! the kind that
splits one right in two,
leaves soul bare and blinking.

But I suppose that might be
a bit much. I have instead
these rows and rows of sunflowers
beside the highway,
and he saying that things were sad,
and I: "They weren't so bad"
and not
Why, why, why
did we all carry
the thorn?

Donald Hall interview and poetry reading

The Old Barn

                 1

She's dismantling, you know.
To gain an extra edge of field,
they're pulling her down--
piece by red-flecked piece,
bit by bit, skin and sinew--
all the way down
to her chambered heart.
What last stories sigh
as the orange-white sun
crests the fields' edge
and first light blesses inner rooms
from brown to gold?


                 2

The neighbor made a wren house
from her salvaged sides.
It sits atop my desk--a bit odd,
like a box of ashes on the mantle.
The window behind it frames
a long tooth of ice and a single city star.
The neighbor says the birds nest soonest
in old wood.

10 years later

Today, I allow myself to be as I am. Today I let slip my striving to make it make sense, to shape it into a thing that I can manage. I acknowledge that it was, and that it was too much for me. Belatedly, I allow myself to have been frightened and sad and lost . . . and even angry. Grateful to be found, to be allowed to be too small, I am gladly quiet. I am weary of the hard and the cold. I am learning to be comforted.

Leave Taking

We have sold the old barn.
In the hayloft, light pocks
from missing shingle squares:
blue through the sky,
green through the leaves.
The barn slants,
infinitesimally each year,
toward the earth,
the red flaking from gray
and lavender sides
under the sun,
the warm tan wood
waiting inside, dimly protected
by that slowly sinking shell.
Thick stall boards
scallop up and down
where draft horses nibbled
before I was born,
before old used-up things
peopled the silent space
the horses left behind.
Most things leave:
the swallows every fall,
the sunshine every night.
In that great, empty loft,
in my sanctuary, I played
a wild song,
a Job song,
"Great Is Thy Faithfulness,"
as my father lay dying . . .
'most everything leaves.
 Almost.

Lost World