stardust

Stardust

    

     Is my mother migrating again?  She didn’t have money but clearly the mighty DNA of migration has a greater calling power than economic means.  I can’t help but think that my mother’s part of a vast movement of people.  It’s sort of like the herds of caribou, millions upon millions moving across the wide stretches of tundra.  Lands so vast, so vast a movement, that they can be seen like the Great Wall of China from the upper atmospheres.   My mother is part of this vast, distant migration.  She’s gone off to the Wild Blue Yonder, sometimes as far out as the outer rim of the galaxy, past the curve of the Milky Way.  Who knows?  Obviously, I haven’t traveled there.  It’s a kind of wilderness.  But the rain, the wind, even the solar rays, brings stardust from there.  Stardust, working our streams and streaming; touching ours skin and settling in the cool shadows, floating on the water, informing the DNA of dolphins and riding the waves in with me.  I like to think that every day these little touches of stardust connect me with the people I love but lost.

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is from the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O

Resilience sleeps, creeps and leaps

“Cranes cover long distances leaving land storms behind.”   -  Edwin Way Teale

     These words bring me peace.  I think of the people I miss.  I’m living through the land storm.  There is peace. 

    

 It’s funny to think of my mother flying.  Finally.  How many times did I tell her that her bloomers were in danger of pulling the clothes line out of the ground?  Talk about fuel economy.  My god, where did she ever buy those things?  My mother, the crane. But I have to give her credit.  She was smart to fly away from the storm.

Sleeps, creeps and leaps

     Gardeners have a saying about almost everything.  Clematis, a plant with flowers cultivated on another planet: “Sleeps its first year.”  “The second year, it creeps” and, “the third year it leaps.”  Grief’s a lot like clematis.  I got one for Lynn because she missed Ro.  Ro’s family didn’t take care of the garden and eventually, they pulled it all out.  There went Ro’s clematis.  Besides being a tradition you can hand down and grow in your garden, flowers can remind you about the way things can work with grief. Grief holds you down.  Down like a wave.  First your spirit sleeps. Wasn’t it Melville that wrote “doom is darker than any sea dingle”?  You feel the doom. 

   

  Then life begins to seduce you.  It has an allure like the spring.  Remember, the first brush of color on the trees?  Whether you want to breathe or not, spring seduces you.

There are so many words for seduce, like entice, invite, even wheedle and inveigle mean seduce.   I didn’t know there were so many words for it until I felt as if I too had died and then life began, one way and another, to seduce me to join in.  First you sleep, then creep, then you leap.

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O

rucksack

     I have this image.  Every day this person is walking with a rucksack filled with rocks after the person he loved dies.  My alter ego. Walking around with a rucksack. Walking around the neighborhood.  It could be me or anyone else. Filled with rocks.  Pretty heavy.  Somebody sees him, “What’s going on?  What’s in the sack?”

     Another day, another friend asks him, “So, how you doing buddy? Walking around with these rocks?  What’s doing?”

     He answers, “This kind of holds me in place right now.” Makes him feel like there’s something still in his life. You know, the weight and everything else. 

     He goes back home. Next time somebody sees him he’s still got a rucksack. Now it’s filled with books. He’s working through the levels.  The rocks are gone the books are there.  “How you doing buddy?”

     “OK, not bad at all.”

     “Well, why you walking around with this pack full of books on your back? Isn’t it heavy?  What are you doing? You training to go for a hike?”

     “Yeah, that’s it.”

     He needs that weight in his life. He needs that weight. 

     Goes home. They part their ways. 

     This is the man’s life right now, carrying around weights.

~

     I told my brother that if Marshall really was his best friend he would

have let him die first.  He was my brother’s best friend.  I didn’t know how else to bring him comfort. 

~

     Time, like a wheel going so fast in one direction appears to turn slowly in another.

the wild blue poem series, this is the last poem from the section on grief. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O