“Time for you to go out to the places you will be from” – “Closing Time” by Semisonic (written by Dan Wilson about the birth of his daughter.)

The drive home from the hospital
is a shared experience of new parents,

The abrupt re-entrance into the churning, unpredictable world
After days of soft whiteness, scheduled medications,
professionals hovering above the fragile life in your arms.

I was born during a snowstorm in mid-December.
I can only imagine my father’s eyes glued to the salted roads,
while my mother’s gaze anchored the precious bundle in her lap.

Two months ago, when I stepped out of my smoking car,
broken class sprinkling out of my hair,
looking at the passenger side doors completely crushed in,

it would be a lie to say I wasn’t utterly rattled.
My body felt like a cloth doll
when I saw how easily the metal frame had crushed in.
I saw but could not feel the cuts dotting my arms,
my skin the thinnest web of tissue,
torn by the tiniest fragments of the massive impact.

But in the hours that followed,
the thought that undid me
every time I finally controlled my tears and tremors
was of my parents thousands of miles away,
lying awake in a restless bed,
staring into the dark hard enough, almost,
to bring their baby home.

Birthplaces

Shame was at your big sister’s 7th birthday party,
When the colors and lights and noise turned you wild, high,
And when the giant pink expanse of cake appeared before her,
Dotted with the red melting candles,
Your breath exploded out of your lips
And swept out the flames,
Her eyes open before the mist had even settled,
Her wish cut off mid-sentence.
You were too young to understand the etiquette you’d violated,
But it was the first time you had seen her face crumple,
The first time the adults had looked at you with gravity,
Reflecting the power you had to shatter something so profoundly.

The Ocean

“And the ones who can know you so well
Are the ones that can swallow you whole.” – Dar Williams

There is a nostalgia bigger than the sky itself
when I step towards the surf,
an impossible longing
pushing me forward, cuffs pants shirt soaked,
each wave a visual echo,
a sweeping gesture to pull me towards the horizon.

The water is a thousand hands,
an endless maternal embrace
whose touch says, you are mine.
The way your eyes pour
and speak to us in salt,
my child – I would know you anywhere.
Come here to me with your wounds;
let me send you forward again, all clean and blistering pink.
I know you have been lost
for quite some time. It is alright.
You are here. Welcome home.

In Between Lives

Heaven is the basement of a friend’s house down the street and everybody is their invincible and arguably most attractive early-20’s self, and there are vaguely exotic-looking tapestries on the walls with flower and water patterns you just stand and look at in between conversations. You are in the strangest kind of family-reunion-meets-bookish-college-student-gathering, where people are actually talking at regular volume in groups of 2 or 3 and no one is fucked up, just buzzed enough to forgo any conversational formalities with their past reincarnations and greet their kin with giddy, open faces. A 17th century European doctor asks you kindly about your hypochondria. You listen to a Native American man with lines already indented across his forehead talk about his broken, scattered family, and instinctively tighten your crossed arms around yourself. You speak for a while with a skeletal Burmese woman, and you watch understanding deepen in her tired eyes as you describe the way you fought your way to the top of the business, determined to get what was yours. When she walks away, you let your gaze play over the snake on the wall, a perfect circle, the end of its tail obscured entering its open mouth. How horrible, you think, but you cannot look away from the snake’s expression, neither savage nor happy, but simply a weary determination, at peace with un-peace, resigned to eternity.

Etiquette

Last week, a mother told me, the only people present
at her daughter’s birth were her husband and her midwife.
“I didn’t want my mother or anyone there, because…
all the sounds you make…” She smiled and looked away,
looking embarrassed. The mysterious, primal memory
looked strangely anachronistic at the kitchen table
with red cloth placemats and blue sippie cups,
a blotchy Polaroid of a savage jungle,
the spectrum of wild colors and calls
rendered tame, boxed, just small enough
to be swept away with a polite chuckle.

Love Letter to Earth

Little dear one
sweet whirl of atoms
most precious mystery

unchain yourself
from the sorrow
they have woven
into you

the violence, the erratic
shifts and movements
of your tiniest parts

there is no peace but this
flow of unknown current
remember always
everything is traumatic
to a water droplet

step back
to the eternal moment
you arrived
in messy jumbled wonder

little firestorm
take comfort
in starting from chaos
and knowing
you will end the same.

Compost

It took me almost three weeks
of shredding stalks of okra and ginger
into the compost
to really understand what lay before me,
pulsing damp warmth
onto the skin of my arms,

To look into the slowly-warping
scraps of vegetables, the crumbling eggshells,
the thin white spinnings of mycelium,
the dark, hidden mysteries of bacteria
I could not see but only feel,

and see: next summer’s plump tomatoes.
The bizarre, golden swoops of butternut squash
two winters from now.
The tangled clumps of weeds
scattered across the chicken yard.
The eggs spooned onto my plate with a smile.

I wish a funeral could be so poetic.
I wish the preacher might paint a portrait
not just of how we saw someone in their life,
but of the failing student he tutored to graduation
that won the Nobel Peace Prize,
the dog she rescued whose puppy
was given to the widower who lived next door,
that slept in the chair next to his bed
and died days after he did,
the trees in his yard
that shed pink blossoms in the street
and piled against the sidewalks like soft, feathery candy.

If we saw so much life in a death,
maybe we would not rush to seal off a body
to put it in the ground.
As if death were the contagious one.
As if the living things needed protection from it.

Dear J,

I had a dream a few weeks ago
that I visited my grandma in the New Jersey facility,
and her eyes were big with a fear I’d never seen on her.
She told me she was going to die,
and that she didn’t want to;
it was so unfair.
I drew her to me gently,
feeling her bones through her feather pillow body,
and said softly in her ear,
“I am going to miss you so much,
but I am excited for your transition.
I am happy for you to move on.”
We came apart, and her face wore surprise,
but no anger, no fear.

I remember your 21st birthday,
the nurses and doctors handing you “shots”
(water in plastic medicine cups).
You started crying,
the irony unlightened by everyone’s efforts.
So many milestones in seven years
that passed
like the ghosts of smoke
from candles already blown out.

I know we enter this world fighting,
not knowing who or what or why
we are.
I wonder if you left it struggling for the same answers,

or if your body heaved a final sigh,
releasing every hospital birthday,
every college application date,
every diagnosis that was longer than your name,
every chance at normalcy that passed you by,
and nothing was fair
or unfair,
and twenty two years collapsed into a moment,

and instead of fighting to become separate,
you stopped fighting and became.

“Anyone pulled from a Source longs to go back.” – Rumi

On days when I wake up angry at you,
I try to be fair.
I remind myself how I envy cats,
their ability to curl themselves into
any shape, surrounded snugly with a body.
I remember, I fell asleep last night
with my knees drawn to my chest,
the gentle curve of my spine
a boat I entrust with my soft mess of self,
enclosed by a warm, liquid dark.

I do not know from experience
how to love someone
without making them into a womb.

Yet, my anger insists,
I do not know how you loved me,
the tenderness you wrapped around you in the dark,
while rejecting my poetry, my constant pull to the woods,
the forces that created me.

I do know, when I left,
there was a tear as big as the sky,
a void that swallowed every sound I made.
Your voice sounds different now,
no longer as close and thick as my own thoughts.
Even when your words do not speak grief,
it sounds lonely.

This morning, when you texted your most recent heartbreak,
I did not rush around you like the tide.
I went outside to the bed I’d built.
The young, green shoots surprised me –
I’d thought the soil barren.
They peered straight up,
as if to climb into heart of the sun,
unafraid of catching flame.