Sonnet to Orpheus II, 29

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space

around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring.

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke

A woman with a mind

"We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light."

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath.

Scrub Pine

Top of Spruce Pine, 1938, Samuel P. Adams

I have yet to put words to the way the Scrub Pine forests reached for me when I moved to Florida. There are not a variety of trees in these parts but I do love these creatures, from the large flaky bark to their long leaves. They are unassuming trees, and survive in dry conditions.  Florida is desert like really, despite its summer rain. The landscape is flat, the karst spreads beneath, its pores once pumping with spring water. I do miss finding rocks and boulders on the ground, but I have found the absence of the familiar makes space for a kind of living I need. When you question everything, there is so much you can learn. 

A Litany for Survival
Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak
we are afraid our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Grandma Ruth

Grandma Ruth was my stepfather's mother and a sweet, devout, modest woman.  She was a daughter of sturdy mormon pioneers. She worked for years on the first floor of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, her desk tucked in a corner next to an old mantal and beneath an oversized antique painting of Joseph Smith. She loved a yappy dog for thirteen years, named Clementine, who died more than a decade ago but whom she referred to continuously in her final year of life. On occasion she would call me in Florida and marvel at how much I had moved and travelled. I tried to see her one last time to say goodbye this fall, booked a ticket to Salt Lake City and she was already gone. I always liked the way my stepfather talked about her, and to her. There was a kindness about her even if she was simple. She married once and lost, and lived the rest of her life single.  She was a quiet presence in my life, even if not physically, I always felt her in the world.  Her leaving has been a reminder to me about death, that thing that once pummeled me but for the most part has just flicked me in the eye once in a while.  I have lost family members over the years to anger,  to prison time, to broken and unrepairable trust. To grieve someone who lives really is a terrible thing.  But to lay someone down to death is a natural experience, one of loss and it's finality a reminder that life is a gift, that love is all tied up in it's string.

And Soul

My mother died one summer— 

the wettest in the records of the state. 

Crops rotted in the west. 

Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. 

Empty deck chairs collected rain. 

As I took my way to her 

through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly 

behind houses 

and on curbsides, to pay her 

the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something 

I remembered 

I heard once, that the body is, or is 

said to be, almost all 

water and as I turned southward, that ours is 

a city of it, 

one in which 

every single day the elements begin 

a journey towards each other that will never, 

given our weather, 

fail— 

       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, 

cloud color reaching into air, 

the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, 

salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, 

as if that wasn't enough, all of it 

ending up almost every evening 

inside our speech— 

coast canal ocean river stream and now 

mother and I drove on and although 

the mind is unreliable in grief, at 

the next cloudburst it almost seemed 

they could be shades of each other, 

the way the body is 

of every one of them and now 

they were on the move again—fog into mist, 

mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze 

that lay on the railings of 

the house she was dying in 

as I went inside.

-Evaan Boland, 

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Rexburg, Idaho

He wore black 501 levis, his wallet in one back pocket and his tobacco in the other. He owned his own print shop in a small mormon town, when printers were galvanized hunks of metal with levers and weights, painted army green. He was abused as a child, adopted by two widows who married one another and wanted to raise another child. His adopted mother was Maxine, whose cookies I can still taste fresh out of the oven when we came running through her door. We rode our bikes everywhere in that little town. Grandma Maxine, who would greet us with all smiles and the warmth of the sun, and scold her son later on for not knowing where we were.

Michaela Kukovicova

"Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.” 

-Marie Howe

       
One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, spent much of her young adulthood in the solitude of nature,  in the intimate company of authors she loved. Discovering her writing opened up rivers in me that had been stopped up for years. I know it when I hear it, the way a title can communicate the rhythm of a writer's heart. Some writers literally do nothing for me, the ones that hide behind their wit especially.  So many stories get lost in the writer's inability to go far enough or deep enough, and I can sympathize. 


Wendy Mnooken, a talented poet that lives in Boston, read some of my poems a while back, and told me I had a lot of material to work with, that my question was where and how to enter my story.  A poem I wrote about sitting in church with my mother, she aptly caught the moment where instead of moving further into where the pain was I took the poem elsewhere.  I took the poem to a café and sat for two hours, trying to approach that wound and could not write another word. Sometimes I wonder, if words will not cheapen the beauty of my survival.  


This is why I have not been able to finish two of my favorite author's great works.  Marilynn Robinson's books Gilead and Housekeeping. Her ability to capture a spiritual realm in her imagery and in her metaphors is unmatched in my reading.  I could feel the beating of her characters' chests, the very cold in the bodies of the young girls whose father was deep in the Idaho lake where they lived.  Writers who pay attention to their own hearts and to the pulse of the world are what stab me so deeply that sometimes I don't know if I will survive the truth they know.  Writing so beautiful that I feel grief at the prospect of finishing the work, especially when I sense that a character is going to die.  


Terry Tempest Williams, who changed my life. I read the title "When Women Were Birds," and gasped.  Holding the book close to my chest, I opened it slowly, read the first paragraph about her mother, and to my astonishment discovered she was a woman of my own tribe, a daughter of an Pipeline builder in Utah, a woman who with her voice has preserved acres and acres of sacred canyonlands.  A writer with a quiet and stunning power to stand up to the leadership of the LDS church without standing down to threat or reprisal. 


My mother wrote 100 pages of memoir when I was in high school.  She was far into the entangled bramble of a mental illness diagnosis, that I feel did her and our family more harm than help. I do not need a degree in psychology (which I have), nor extensive training in diagnosis (which I am undergoing), to know that repressed memories can turn into monsters that can take on a life of their own. Her memories are mysteries to me, hard to comprehend and even more difficult to corroborate because she was so young. The abuse that was real was warped by a tale her therapist spun with her that both rewarded my mother's narcissim and excused her own abusive behaviors.   I believe her mother was selfish and cruel, and when I read some pages of my mother's writing, one thing that was certain was the darkness of her world, the pain thick and the lies searing with poison.  My mother will always be something of a caged tiger to me, held back by her devotion to what is right, but always capable of a ferocity that she is neither willing or capable of controlling. I fear her retaliation if I speak the truth, I really do. And there is the dilemma of my writing, which I legitimately love to do for its own sake.  I wonder sometimes if my skill is a match for the complexity of my history, if my own heart can handle the beat down of creating a work that liberates myself and others.  


Poets I aspire write like: Marie Howe, Louis Gluck, Rupi Kaar, have approached the secrets you are not supposed to tell in ways that feel like art and not just expose.  I am trying to avoid the kind of attention that would turn me into a meme, while not letting the stories of my life be lost in some literary enclave. So much of my battle to write is the battle of my life, to believe that my voice matters, to say the dangerous things I need to say.