Saturday, December 27, 2008

For me, too

A flat, leggy chicken keeps company with more full-figured wooden squirrels and moose; long sparkly white icicles with warm, colored globes of light. I sit in my chair across from this Christmas tree, the one I picked out, stood by steadfastly while Chris explored the lot for other options. A smallish, crooked glowing thing; my clue, my symbol that this holiday is for me, too.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Old House

From the bathroom, this house looks like the old farmhouse it might have once been. Not encumbered with a shower head or curtain, the claw foot tub looks like one my grandmother might have used when she was a little girl. The cabinet, second-hand, hand painted, could have been born here with the house seventy years ago. I feel now like I have been born here, too.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Chill

The leaves on the rhododendron fold lengthwise and bow low, as if curling inward against the cold. Trees shed and go bare in winter; this bush stays put, keeps everything, shows everything when the chill comes. I sit on the porch and feel it for myself, my first stepping out after a few days of sick. In pajama shorts I curl up too, not ready yet to go back inside.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Great Fall

Twenty-two years ago, this day was a Sunday too. This was the day my father, like a great giant, fell. Not from a tree, like he had years before that, surviving in traction with a broken pelvis. This time he fell from bed, knocked still by a blood clot; still, except for one hand, gripping an aspirin. None of us thought he would stay down. But three days later, his eyes told me goodbye.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Waiting for Breath

It's when I notice my own breath, how I have to pull it in like a thin rope, how the lack of it pushes at my eyeballs, how it leaves behind a burn and a cough. If it weren't for that, I would not think about it, not the way I notice wind in trees or rain blown sideways. To not notice feels like a gift, the one I earned in the children's wards of hospitals, behind oxygen tents waiting. 

Waking Up

From the bathroom window, I watch the rain tap, drip down; pooling on the flat roof. It's like watching music being played with the sound turned off. Light inside, dark outside like predawn or a nap that stretched across the borders of the afternoon. Time outside of time, the distortion of just waking up. The silence before the gears engage and the stillness ends.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Autumn Closing

Yellow leaves, almost petal shaped, shake down from the pear tree under the weight of heavy rain. This tree is the last to hold on; the nakedness of everything else makes the yellow yellower. A surrender, autumn closing its eyes, I open my own hands to let go of whatever is left of the no longer present. Today the leaves are falling, have fallen, and the tree is still here.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Shoulder Season

Water swells in what they call shoulder season. It carries the burden of the change, from winter to thaw. There are still places one can't go; where white caps of mountains and slopes could warm up enough to lose grip. There are places we could not see; waterfalls, wilderness. What we have is this water, growing bigger and milkier, from ice and silt washing down and away.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Flurries

Surprised in the morning by the white crusty lacework, left sometime when I was not here to see the quiet softness fall. This feels like the coldest winter in some time; about time, we say, we who wish this were the mountains. I feel that feeling again, what it was like turning on skis in deep snow. Snow that falls for months without melting, no matter how the sun shines.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

December Beach

A bleached, swept roadway; we know it, see it behind our eyelids when we are only wishing we were here. Sand creeps over the lines on the asphalt, into our winter shoes, into my eyes and mouth, where I taste salt on the grit. I will not touch the water this time, but feel fondly beaten by it, by the exhales it hurls across the parts of the earth it can't reach with its fingers.

My Cricket Dream

In this dream I am a shepherd, a guardian. Across the city, some city somewhere, we traverse one small grass blade or concrete crack at a time. Me, and a cricket. I feel close love, a familiarity. It is either not an option, or just not okay, to pick up my bug and whiz him (he is a him) to the outskirts of town, where he will continue without me and I will have to let him go.

In Here

Words swirl in an orbit, I sit in a chair, the kind they call easy. The dogs stretch on their backs in the warm bake of the gas logs. Words from four different books; the tao, the blues, the counting of syllables and lines, the nature of meaning from four different directions. Somewhere is the center, but not out there. In here. This swirl, us, unfixed objects in our own glow.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Happy Forty

Sometimes I forget there was a time when I was without her; or even that she is a separate person from me. Maybe I've made her up, my perfect other. I knew her when I heard her voice, when I saw her thick, black hair traced with some grey. Today she is a little greyer, tomorrow she will be forty. I am hungry for more decades, more of her natural, brilliant joy.