Pill Box

From under the seat in your car

I retrieve an aqua pill box

left behind

when everything else has been sorted,

sifted through, carried away.

On the lid, a filigree of birds

in navy and white

worn from riding

in your purse, your pocket.

Inside, a salad of pills

unsorted and unmeasured,

generic tablets

pawed through by a fingertip

in search of the right one

93 318, Taro 6, M40.

But the box had slid between the seats,

gone from your mind.

You who lived compassion

who offered your heart to each encounter,

boundryless

pills reined in your heart

thinned your blood

lowered its pressure

set its rhythm right.

and, in the end,

rupture

flood

your thin blood pumped into cavities

intended for air.

With the box in my palm,

my eyes fill and spill

with too-thin tears.

Sifting

I pull books from shelves, novels, memoir, poetry, blow dust from tops that bristle with paper. Each marks your favorite passage. As I read, you surrender completely, eyes closed, chin lifted, ingesting each word.

But by night the stars themselves glimmered from the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the darkness underfoot as well as above. [David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous]

We shared books the way some people share gossip, spooling out the latest find over an hour on the phone. Gemini, you confessed, I buy two of everything. A copy for me, a copy for you. In your shaky hand, you inscribed a quote to entice me into reading on.

I dream of January. Of dusk at four in the afternoon. Of the careful slow pace of below-zero living. I imagine I that I will wrap myself in winter: five months of gauzy light; the sweet stultification of the cold. [Mark Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction]

I ease bookmarks, receipts, tissues, torn corners of envelopes, post-its, squares of toilet paper from between the pages. Passages you returned to, or intended to. Books whose presence defined your life. Books you no longer need.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

[Mary Oliver, The Summer Day]

Hudson River Line, Southbound

On the Hudson brash ice

rafted and hummocked a tumult

of fragments.

I press my forehead to the glass

windows and watch.

In a fracture,

a merganser paddles into flight,

wings flapping white against open water.

Plates of ice resemble

the texture of human skin

magnified, grey

under a grey sky.

A black smear

mars the ice, stirs.

black wings bear

the ponderous bird aloft

he banks

revealing

bald head, tail.

Past the platform and parking meters

perched on a fractured ridge

He clasps the crag with crooked hands.

Beyond, an eddy of eagles

swirls

disturbed at the approach

of the train.

In the empty slips at the marina,

a bufflehead dives,

bobs to the surface.

Across the water

the Palisades rise, columnar

their roots in the river.

Each small beauty I see

through your eyes.

You ride with me, south

then west. I travel 

to meet your death.

[Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Eagle]
photograph: my mother and aunt at Limantour Beach, Point Reyes, CA, 2009

Emergency - Gail

Black characters on

a white screen

leave little room for emotion,

but this email says it all.

Strained.

Seeking.

I wail.

I begin the business of finding out.

Words are thin.

A veneer of syllables

across the surface of a

life, fading.

Bleeding on the brain.

And then the call to confirm

what I already know.

My mothers' voice

sifts compassion,

wonder, and

sorrow

into my interrupted dreams.

Too early to rise,

too late for sleep.

Each cell abuzz,

a mitochondrial earthquake.

Rifting.

I book flights

and cancel,

             cancel,

                    cancel

everything else.

Vacation plans evaporate.

Library books return unread.

I sleep, I think,

curled around my partner's shirt

as if those empty arms

could offer comfort.

The Latest Journey

This blog began three and a half years ago as the chronicle of a journey. From the drivers seat and on foot, I explored the contents of this country and was amazed. Each place etched itself in my memory: the swollen sun setting over an Ohio cornfield; a three-toed woodpecker feeding nestlings by my campsite; my toes seeking secure footing as I followed a dipper downstream; redwoods, tallgrass prairie, the Medicine Bow, Pyramid Lake, red rock.

But as I drove and hiked, I sifted through the contents of my inner landscape as well, a journey without and a journey within. I found fear and shed it. I sunk into solitude, relaxing into it the way I relax into water, floating, letting it hold the whole weight of my head. Other journeys played out in these pages. A trip to Tamale, Ghana, and another along the spine of the Andes through Ecuador.

Recently I found myself again on a plane, and again using my pen and paper to sort the thoughts that tumbled through my mind. This journey, however, has been different. This journey has wended through death and grief. This journey began with an email in which I learned that my beloved Aunt, whose name I have carried all my life, was once again in the Emergency Room. In the following hours, I learned that this time, suddenly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, she was dying.

 And so this journey begins. The latest journey. My journey through the landscape of grief.