Category: sadness

Turned to Stone

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Our shadows bring them from the shadows:
a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern
like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales.
A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple
and a patch of gray. One with a gold head,
a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins
like half-folded fans of lace.
A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one,
and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water.
They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us
as we lean on the cement railing
in indecisive late-December light,
and because we do not feed them, they pass,
then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop.
“Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them,
like a subplot or a motive, is a school
of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned,
perhaps another species, living in the shadow
of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white,
seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses,
unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet.
~Susan Kolodny “Koi Pond, Oakland Museum”

The boardwalk,
a treachery of feathers ready
to receive another broken bone,
looms just above the surface.
Step deliberately when approaching.
With few exceptions,
ice has claimed this part of the pond.

This is where you see her,
moving through what
free water remains:
a sluggish ghost in the shadows,
slow, conserving the fragile heat
she still has in this late winter.
A canopy of juniper dressed with light snow
overhangs, watching.

Last year, a quorum of her kind was lost,
turned to stone, to frigid silence.
She doesn’t know that story,
but some instinct guides her to keep
what warmth she can, to cruise
in stubborn torpor.

In her drift, she remembers the summer,
her long, languid vowels,
the accompanying texts of her companions.
How they interwove manuscripts,
narrations of sky, tree, sun, and moon.
Warm days are a memory now,
and thoughts rest lightly in her body.

She has held the same posture for an hour.
Her bones have reached a conclusion—
an idea about hope itself—
there, near the indifferent bridge,
inches from the force that will take her
~Carolyn Adams, “Koi Pond” from Going Out to Gather

The water going dark only
makes the orange seem brighter,
as you race, and kiss, and spar
for food, pretending not
to notice me. For this gift
of your indifference, I am
grateful. I will sit until
the pond goes black, the last
orange spark extinguished.
~Robert Peake from “Koi Pond”

Koi and goldfish thrived in our pond after we covered it with netting, finally thwarting the herons arriving at dawn for breakfast.

Thus protected, our fish grew huge, celebrating each feeding with a flurry of tail flips and gaping mouths as I tossed pellets to them each evening.

When the pond cooled in the fall and sometimes ice-covered in winter, the fish settled at the bottom, barely moving silhouettes of color in the darkness. Spring would warm them to action again. As the water temperature rose, so did they, eager and hungry to flash their color and fins again.

Two winters ago, the chill winds and low temperatures lasted longer than usual. As the pond ice began to melt, the fish at the bottom remained still as stones. Netting them for burial felt like burying the sun and the moon and the stars, relegating their rainbows of light and color deep into the earth.

No longer would their colorful glory shine, an illumination now extinguished.

I haven’t had the heart to try again. I need a pond heater, a new filter system, and a total clean out of the pond if I am going to restock.

But then I remember the joy of feeding those flashes of fins and fish mouths, so I just might try again.

Rainbows promise to return, even from buried stone.

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Lyrics
From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me O God
From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me O God
And I shall not want I shall not want
When I taste Your goodness
I shall not want
From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me O God

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A Solemn Ache

barnstormingblog1 Comment

A day is nothing if not a disappearing act
held fast by ropes of sunlight and breeze until rain comes
or a tree coughs to shake night along;

then there are the shadows that feel like yesterday’s distance
but become only apparitions when we haul them into light
or move beyond their pull—

I wish for mornings, still, days full of violets—
and the beautiful clouds, where in their always-
disappearing, their solemn ache, I find poems.
~Sarah Etlinger “Evanescence (with Clouds)” from The Weather Gods

I look for poems everywhere,
even in colorless misty mornings,
chill and stormy winds,
humid breathless afternoons.

It is as if a Poet is saying to me:
I feel this ache today.
You too?

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An Undivided Wonder

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One grief, all evening—: I’ve stumbled
upon another animal merely being
             itself and still cuffing me to grace.

             This time a bumblebee, black and staggered
above some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop
             at what I think is dying

             to deny loneliness one more triumph,
I see instead a thing drunk
           with discovery—the bee entangled

            with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossom
gathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly
             I receive the cold curves and severe angles

             from this morning’s difficult dreams
about faith:—certain as light, arriving; certain
            as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.

            How many strokes of undivided wonder
will have me cross the next border,
            my hands emptied of questions?
~Geffrey Davis “West Virginia Nocturne” from Night Angler

So much happens in the lives of creatures in the world
above, around, and beneath our feet.
The dewy immobilized bumblebee,
the ladybug floating, rescued by a cloverleaf,
the translucent spider hiding in a blossom fold.

Most of the time we are oblivious,
absorbed in our own joys, fears, and sorrows,
struggling to understand our own place in the world,
unsure if we people are the only image of our Creator.

But life’s drama doesn’t just belong to us.

It is the baby bird fallen from the nest too young,
rescued from mouth of the barn cat.
It is the farmyard snake abandoning its ghost-like skin.
It is the spider residing in the tulip, ready to grab the honey bee.
It is the praying mantis poised to swallow the fly.
It is the katydid, the cricket, the grasshopper trying to blend in.

When I struggle with my faith in this often cruel world,
I realize not every question, not every doubt, needs answers.
It is enough, as a trusting witness of all that is wondrous around me,
to pray someday it will no longer be mysterious.

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No Reason to Fear

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I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.
~Mary Karr “For a Dying Tomcat Who’s Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature”

José was our front porch cat for years.

Not our garage cat, our upper barn cat, our lower barn cat or those that come and go on the farm because we’re a hospitable place where food is always on the table.

He was the king of the farm cats.  No one questioned him (usually) and no one occupied his front porch bench/throne without his express permission. His Majesty showed mercy to any who showed proper submission, and every once in awhile, that included the dogs.

He trained every pup here over the years.

He was the official front porch farm greeter, rising from his throne cushion to investigate any newcomer walking up the sidewalk, mewing a cheerful little “chirp” of a meow in welcome. Then he turned around and returned to his perch.

José was a performance cat, having been trained in his younger years to ride on a bareback pad on our Haflingers, at walk, trot and over jumps (sorry, no pictures). This once again proved his ability to get any creature, large or small, to submit to his will.

The only love of his life was our daughter, Lea. As José arrived to our farm at an indeterminate age, we didn’t really know how many years he would be with us. Before Lea headed off to college, and when home on breaks, they had many happy snuggles together for nearly 15 years.

During our harsh winter storms, José would move to a warm farm building with all the necessary provisions until the storm was done, then reclaim his favorite spot on the front porch when he deemed it cozy enough to be worthy of him.

After one particularly nasty storm, when the cold northeast wind went away, José didn’t return from his hiding place.

I looked, I called, I left goodies out. But no José. No chirpy meow, no yellow-eyed gaze, no black velvet fur to stroke, no rumbly purr to vibrate in my lap. I think this tough cat chose a bad winter to leave for warmer quarters far far away.

I suspect – as I still keep an eye out for it — there must be a velvety black coat he abandoned somewhere here on the farm.

He simply didn’t need it any more and unafraid, he left it behind.

On our last visit, when Lucy was fifteen
And getting creaky herself,
One of the nurses said to me,
“Why don’t you take the cat to Mrs. Harris’ room
— poor thing lost her leg to diabetes last fall —
she’s ninety, and blind, and no one comes to see her.”

The door was open. I asked the tiny woman in the bed
if she would like me to bring Lucy in, and she turned her head
toward us. “Oh, yes, I want to touch her.”

“I had a cat called Lily — she was so pretty, all white.
She was with me for twenty years, after my husband died too.
She slept with me every night — I loved her very much.
It’s hard, in here, since I can’t get around.”

Lucy was settling in on the bed.
“You won’t believe it, but I used to love to dance.
I was a fool for it! I even won contests.
I wish I had danced more.
It’s funny, what you miss when everything…..is gone.”

This last was a murmur. She’d fallen asleep.
I lifted the cat
from the bed, tiptoed out, and drove home.
I tried to do some desk work
but couldn’t focus.

I went downstairs, pulled the shades,
put on Tina Turner
and cranked it up loud
and I danced.

I danced.
~Alice N. Persons “Meadowbrook Nursing Home“ From Don’t Be A Stranger  (Sheltering Pines Press, 2007)

photo by Lea
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You Think You Know…

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Wind and the sound of wind—
across the bay a chainsaw revs
and stalls. I’ve come here to write,

but instead I’ve been thinking
about my father, who, in his last year,
after his surgery, told my mother

he wasn’t sorry—that he’d cried
when the other woman left him,
that his time with her

had made him happier than anything
he’d ever done. And my mother,
who cooked and cleaned for him

all those years, cared for him
after his heart attack, could not
understand why he liked the other

woman more than her,
but he did. And she told me
that after he died she never went

to visit his grave—not once.
You think you know them,
these creatures robed

in your parents’ skins. Well,
you don’t. Any more than you know
what the pines want from the wind,

if the lake’s content with this pale
smear of sunset, if the loon calls
for its mate, or for another.
~Jon Loomis “At the Lake House” from The Mansion of Happiness

I thought I knew my parents as well as I knew myself,
certain that their love for each other
was the foundation of our family.

When it fell apart, I came apart too.

It was as if I no longer knew myself,
since I came from them.

It took a decade of tears
for them to find their way back
to become family again.

Even so, the scar remained,
although glued and smoothed,
a love that once seemed so solid, so forever.

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Wondering Where Life Has Gone

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For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke

Every poem of death        
should start
with my mother’s love        
for birds.
Finches and waxwings        
her favorites,
though she wasn’t        
one to quibble;
an eagle dragging a carp        
across the sky
would do.

There are worse things        
than being dead.
You might be swallowed   
by the daily minutia
of the great mundane,        
to be spit up
years later        
wondering where
your life has gone.

But loving something        
can save you:
the way finches        
stack a feeder,
meddle in each other’s        
business until
a woodpecker crashes in,       
littering surrounding
shrubs with wings.

Last summer my wife        
found a hummingbird
on Mount Pisgah.        
Its emerald wings trembled
as its feet tried to grasp        
her fingers.
A ranger said        
that their lives
are so short anyway.        
What a curious reply,
I thought, but later        
reconsidered.
Perhaps any time       
 being a hummingbird
is enough.
~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm
when I hid in the wisteria
and watched hummingbirds. I thought
the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats
was the honeyed blood of flowers.
They would stick their piercing beaks
into a crown of petals until their heads
disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings,
and the breathing I heard
was the thin, moving stems of wisteria.
That night, my face pressed against the window,
I looked out into the dark
where the moon drowned in the willows
by the pond. My heart, bloodstone,
turned. That long night, the farm,
those jeweled birds, all these gone years.
The horses standing quiet and huge
in the moon-crossing blackness.
~Joseph Stroud “First Song”

Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing.
From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.

The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.

There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.

Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.

How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt,
once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion,
lying stilled and silenced
as if simply dropped from the sky,
a wee bit of fluff and stardust.

Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree.
And so it is the way of things…

We are here and gone.
Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded.
…but not forgotten.

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More Precious than Roses

barnstormingblog3 Comments

I am not resigned to the shutting away
of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look,
the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses.
Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.
Fragrant is the blossom. I know.
But I do not approve. 
More precious was the light in your eyes
than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay “Dirge Without Music”

Each Memorial Day weekend without fail,
we gather with family, have lunch, reminisce,
and trek to a cemetery high above Puget Sound
to catch up with our relatives who lie there, still.

Some for over 110 years, some for barely more than a decade,
some we knew and loved and miss every day,
others not so much as they are unknown to us
except on genealogy charts,
names and dates and stones and stories:

the red-haired great-grandmother who died too young,
the aunt who was eight when lymphoma took her,
the grandmother who dreamed of world travel too late,
the great-grandfather Yukon river boat captain,
the grandfather logger and stump farmer,
the great aunt unmarried school teacher who hid an oil well,
the two in-laws who forever lie next to each other
but could not co-exist in the same room while they lived and breathed.

Yet we know each of these
(as we know ourselves and others)

could be tender and kind, though flawed and broken,
had been beautiful and strong, though wrinkled and frail,
was hopeful and faithful, though too soon in the ground.

We know this about them
as we know it about ourselves:
someday we too will feed roses,
the light in our eyes transformed into elegant swirls
emitting the fragrant scent of heaven.

No one asks if we approve.
Nor am I resigned to this
though I know:
So it is, so it has been, so it will be for me
someday.

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Trying Not to Cry

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People have said, “Don’t cry” to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, “I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings.  Don’t cry.”  I’d rather have them say, “Go ahead and cry.  I’m here to be with you.”

~Mister Fred Rogers

I cry easily, always have. Certain songs and hymns will trigger tears, and of course, any rituals surrounding baptisms, funerals, weddings, and graduations.

Tears don’t bother me, whether they are my own or someone else’s. My medical office and exam rooms were always well- stocked with boxes of tissues as a safe place to cry it out.

One of my routine mental health history questions was “what will bring tears to your eyes – dicing onions doesn’t count?”  

Some patients would look at me blankly, not sure they ever remember crying, and others will weep at the mere suggestion.

No matter what the reason for someone’s tears, it is a powerful outward expression of human feeling, like a laugh or a grimace of pain. I watch for those cues and sometimes feel their emotion as surely as if it were my own.

Even tears can bring peace – like a river.

I am with you.  And always intend to be.

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Like Light and Cloud Shadows

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…you mustn’t be frightened …
if a sadness rises in front of you,
larger than any you have ever seen;
if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows,
moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness,
any misery, any depression, since after all
you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?
~Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

…difficulties are magnified out of all proportion
simply by fear and anxiety.
From the moment we wake until we fall asleep
we must commend other people wholly and unreservedly to God and leave them in his hands,
and transform our anxiety for them into prayers on their behalf: 
With sorrow and with grief…
God will not be distracted.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters from Prison

During my decades as a primary care physician for a university health center, my clinic days were often filled with young adults who were so consumed by anxiety they were immobilized in their ability to move forward through life’s inevitable obstacles and difficulties. They were so stuck in overwhelming feelings, they couldn’t sleep or eat or think clearly. They tended to self-medicate, self-injure and self-hate. Unable to nurture themselves or others, they withered like a flower without roots deep enough to reach the vast reservoir untapped beneath them.  In epidemic numbers, some decide to die, even before life really has fully begun for them.

My role was to help find healing solutions, whether it was counseling therapy, a break from school, or a medicine that may give some form of relief. 

My heart knows the ultimate answer is not as simple as choosing the right prescription – light and cloud shadows differ for each person – it can feel like the sun is blocked forever, all that is left is rain and snow and gray.

I too have known anxiety and how it can distort every thought.

We who are anxious can depend upon a Creator who is not distracted from His care for us even if we have turned away in our worry and sorrow, unable to look past our own eyelashes. 

Like a thirsty withering plant, we need to reach higher and deeper: asking for help and support, working through solutions with those helpers, acknowledging there exists a healing power greater than ourselves.

So we are called to pray for ourselves and for others. Self compassion and caring for others can disable anxiety and fear by transforming it to growth, gratitude and grace.  

No longer withering, we just might bloom.

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Stars on the Pavement

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Holes in the shape of stars
punched in gray tin, dented,
cheap, beaten by each
of her children with a wooden spoon.

Noodle catcher, spaghetti stopper,
pouring cloudy rain into the sink,
swirling counter clockwise
down the drain, starch slime
on the backside, caught
in the piercings.

Scrubbed for sixty years, packed
and unpacked, the baby’s
helmet during the cold war,
a sinking ship in the bathtub,
little boat of holes.

Dirt scooped in with a plastic
shovel, sifted to make cakes
and castles. Wrestled
from each other’s hands,
its tin feet bent and re-bent.

Bowl daylight fell through
onto freckled faces, noon stars
on the pavement, the universe
we circled aiming jagged stones,
rung bells it caught and held.
~Dorianne Laux “My Mother’s Colander”

Many of my mother’s kitchen things, some over eighty years old, are still packed away in boxes that I haven’t had the emotional wherewithal to open. They sit waiting for me to sort and purge and save and weep.

It is as if I haven’t wanted to say goodbye after her death at age 88, now seventeen years ago.

This particular kitchen item- her old dented metal colander – found its way to me when I moved into my first apartment some 49 years ago. She had purchased a bright green plastic colander at a Tupperware party so she felt the old metal one was somehow outdated, overworked and plain, and ready for retirement.

It had held hundreds of pounds of rinsed garden vegetables during my childhood, had drained umpteen pasta noodles, had served as a sifter in our sandbox, and a helmet for many a pretend rocket launch to infinity and beyond.

Dented and battered, it still works fine, thank you very much, for all intended and some unintended purposes. It does make me wonder what other treasures may surprise me as I begin to open and sort my mother’s boxes. Her things have remained in suspended animation, waiting to be rediscovered.

I know there will be tons of tupperware, carefully saved yogurt containers with lids, and quite likely a hoard of pickle jars. As a child of the depression, she saved anything that could be potentially used again.

Perhaps these items have waited patiently to be touched lovingly and with distinct purpose as they once were, and be remembered for the part they played in one woman’s long sacrificial and faith-filled life.

Maybe, just maybe, it will feel like I’ve unpacked Mom once again and maybe this time it can be both a hello and a goodbye.

To infinity and beyond…

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