Last week, Pixelita Press published Behind Us the Way Grows Wider, a collection of my poems from 1980 to the present. To celebrate, I am sharing some of the poems and my commentary about them. As the title suggests, the book starts with my earlier poems and continues through my latest poems.

Here is one of my earliest published poems, written after my preschool aged daughter took a serious fall. At the time, I was studying in poetry writing workshops at the University of Washington in Seattle. After my daughter’s hospitalization when she was back at home, I told the story of her accident. To tell it, I found myself using the images from our most recent weeks before the fall; the things she said and did and participated in lent images that showed her spirit and life and all that we hoped would continue:

Folding

You are folding the clothes of a child
and thinking about this afternoon and the month after next
when the ghost of your husband carries the ghost of your girl,
“She’s fallen 6 feet from the porch rail to the sidewalk,”
and the child sleeps in his arms breath shallow as at birth.

Touch her skin and you feel it collapse like a parachute.
Watch her eyes flicker open, they are murky, do not reflect
even the clouds up there waiting to come together,
and now the future waits,
all of you suddenly pinched behind the neck.

In the next minutes she will respond to her name.
You can see in her waking
there are clouds in her eyes
and you remember her saying this morning
her friends believed god lived in the sky
but she knew she would have seen him up there
riding the clouds and anyway she’d heard on television
that god had a purple head.

The hours in intensive care you will watch
clouds sheet the sky like hospital linen
and hear the chirp of heart monitors like crickets
out of place in the night.

This night you are a stage mother pushing
your child to perform for neurologists and nurses
in the reciting of names, her own, her brother’s, her dog’s,
in the telling of how many fingers
and the matching of her finger to theirs.

After this only waiting is left.
Hours unfold out of themselves like a telescope
and you watch the sky turn the lightest shade of purple.

Then you pray to her god and to all
the grape popsicles in the freezer, to her purple crayon,
to the foxglove and alyssum in the yard,
to all purple things that they may keep their color,
retrieve it from her bruised forehead, ear, stem of her brain.

This poem appeared in Poetry Northwest, and, of course, I was pleased when then editor David Wagoner accepted it for publication.  I knew deeply after writing this poem how poets receive pleasure from using language to discuss even the saddest and most frightening aspects of living, how they know both the stirring and the soothing aspects of arranging words that allow them to feel feelings we many cover up with shock or with relief or with avoidance. 

To Martha From Port Townsend

There are seven windows here
and outside them all, the Straits.
Odd, how much like witches’ fingers
each blade of beach grass seems bent in wind;
how much like crude and clumsy fingers, the foamy surf.

I am at terrible fault in love, Martha.
So full of tides, I grab away the shore;
so full of gales, I can not see eloquence in boundaries.

Waves swell like arguments, my darker side
unseen and dangerous as undertow.
I am frightened I have missed the last boat
out of this self that is not myself
but a maiming like oil on birds’ wings.
I want to survive in my right element,
but an old and ugly anger blows.

I’m like my seven-year-old who casts
his line over and over directly into high winds
because he can go no further by himself.
How few the two who are a passage,
who make and gracefully remake
what healthy vessel carries them.

La Push, Kalaloch, Pacific Beach must wait.
The ocean dwarfs me now. I travel in.

I was influenced, I am sure, by poems in Richard Hugo’s slim volume 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. There are things that you can learn best about yourself by telling them to someone else (in this case, my best friend who wouldn’t judge me) and listening to what they are hearing. Poetry plus the letter form remains a powerful writing practice for me. It wasn’t long ago that I wrote “Letter to My Daughter From Istanbul on Mother’s Day.”

The Coastal Route After Arguing

As we drive, I see wind
moving the dune grass
like flames on the hillsides.

This is how river light
looked as I watched canyon walls
today, you diving upstream.

I’d hollered that great noise
between us again, mountain tops
of stone pulverized in air,
you like an unaware camper
caught in dark, descending ash.

Now before dusk, the sun burns
a hole in the sky and the sky
turns grey around that wound.

What will you do with the hurt,
wet outline of your trunks
showing through the jeans you drive in?

For a moment, we look at the sunset,
orange wings of a monarch
spread behind clouds.

This poem is a confession, an apology, a statement of having to live with the after-effects of anger. There are times when I can’t find the words to express my feelings and as a poet, in those times I am profoundly frustrated and that frustration comes out as anger. Poets are known for living at the edge of their nerves, I’ve oft heard quoted. This poem showed me that living so emotionally can have serious impact on the ones you love and on your relationship. But who would want to give up being a poet?

My husband sometimes reminds me that this was the first of my poems he showed up in and wasn’t the kind of situation he was hoping for! But, he says, when I showed him early drafts of this poem, the words helped him to see into my psyche, to feel less hurt, to understand that I knew that I was working out something important.

 

A New Theology

For Seth Bender, 1975-2000

Who has no likeness of a body and has no body
is my son, now five months dead
but in my dreams, my dreams he brings the peace in gardens.

And I see him in his smile and he is hardy
in the rolled up sleeves of his new shirt, well-fed
when he has no likeness of a body and has no body.

I see him next to me in conversation at a party
and I believe that he is fine because this is what he said,
because in my dreams, my dreams I sit with him in gardens.

The nights he comes, the cats moan long and sorry.
I believe they see his spirit entering my head,
he who has no likeness of a body and has no body.

In my life, accepting death comes slowly,
but the midwifery of sadness and of shock bleeds
afterbirth, dreams that bring the peace in gardens.

I know that he is far and he is here and he is holy.
Under sun, I feel the energy it takes to come away from God
who has no likeness of a body and has no body
who is in my dreams, the dreams that bring me gardens.

Yes, who would want to give up being a poet? Poetry gave me a way to work through my grief when my twenty-five-year old son died in a snowboarding accident in December 2000. I don’t know how else but by writing poetry, I would have absorbed his spirit into myself, into my life to carry with me all of my days, to know that spirit as I would have if he were alive.

This poem is written in the form of a villanelle. I tried my hand at writing one because the poet Edward Hirsch has described the form as one that circles around loss and retrieves it. That seemed like a good enough reason to write one then. When the two lines that would be repeated occurred to me, I realized I could write this poem and that it would be about acceptance of his leaving this earth, acceptance of the idea that he was okay.

 

While My Mother-in-law Lies in Her Hospice Bed, 2,000 Miles Away

My husband holds a phone to his mother’s ear
and I tell her I am pulling weeds under high clouds,
that my strawberry plants have berries just starting,
and two small blueberry bushes I left in pots are blooming.

When he returns to the line, he tells me she has dozed off,
and I don’t know if I’ve said the right things to a person
who is dying, talking about what thrives, communicating
how expansive I feel in the daylight when she is bedridden.
He offers me this: his mother has said she is ready to leave
and he knows she is happy the rest of us still stake our places.

Comforted by him when he is the one in need of consoling,
I return to pulling plantain, patches of it growing too
close to strawberry runners spread on this given terrain;
I notice leaves crisping on the raspberry canes I transplanted.
There is no way around it: however graceful, loss parches,
and my husband is too far away for me to hold in my arms.
I bring buckets of water to pour over the berries I hope
will live to ripen, the tart in them turning sweet.

Life is full of losses. When my husband was with his mother as she was dying, I felt awkward on the phone with her, not knowing really what to say at such a distance. After the conversation and after writing this poem, I felt the way even those leaving this earth, savor its beauty and the pleasure those of us living here take in this beauty. I realized that poetry is about savoring this beauty, holding it still in small capsules.

 

Finding the Word I’ve Been Looking For

However long it takes you to retrieve a word is the length of time it has taken your brain to build a new passage way to it.

–Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics

Devalue
Degenerate
Degrade

Design
Deliver
Denigrate

Denote
Deter
Detonate

Detour
Demise
Dissuade

Debark
Disembark
Deciduous

Debunk
Decline
Diminish

A gap where the word I’m looking for
should sit in a bottle ready as pills
counted out by a pharmacist.

I want to pay for the word. Can’t afford it
it seems for months; then ohmygod it comes:

Depreciate
Depreciate
I want to shout the word.

Sad, but how
Delicious!

This poem is perhaps the most playful poem I’ve written. While students in a workshop were doing a freewrite, I began to list words in the hopes of remembering one that had been escaping my tongue for weeks, maybe months. I knew it started with a “dee” sound, but I couldn’t find the word. Once again poetry came to my rescue. The image of a bottle of pills counted out by a pharmacist came because I see those bottles weekly as I prepare my mother’s medi-set. Just like the images of my daughter’s days filled my poem about her fall and images of the place where I was upset with my husband filled the poem about my outburst and images of Port Townsend filled my poem to Martha as I struggled to find out what was happening with my feelings, so the pharmacists counting of pills into a bottle brought an interesting simile to this poem.

Since 1977, writing poetry has meant the world to me. It is my writing “homepage” the place I go to start and start again, to find what is at the bottom of my heart and mind, to remind me that what I see, hear, taste, touch and smell is what I must use for meaning making, for creating a path to articulating and evoking the truths of my experiences. This keeps me on course. As Theodore Roethke wrote in his poem “The Waking“:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Writing takes us to places we didn’t know we were going and leaves us, at the end of anything we write, knowing more about where we are.

May your writing be poetry or borrow heavily from it. May your writing keep you steady and keep you traveling.