Pinched Offerings
I read about the fire victim gift cards
with funds drained before they’re swiped,
victims victimized again
who is spending their money how?
I don’t understand it
but it galls me
now I worry that we gave Jerry
who brings our mail each day
worse than an empty envelope at Christmas –
one full of broken promises instead
but I’m not sure how to politely ask him or them
if our gift let them down
another town’s children comfort us
Inspired by notes sent by Bradford K-8 students in Littleton to Louisville Middle School.
I only read the first forty pages or so
enough to be reminded
of our immense capacity
for compassion
(ocean-sized –
no, sun-sized)
here it is:
in the hearts dotting i’s
and the T-rex making the bed joke
in all the rainbows and hearts
the I know how you feel notes
and the I can’t imagine’s.
the children of another town
have written to us
marshaling all their worldly experience
to say
we’re so sorry
and
it’ll be alright
Grey Silence Descends
it was as if the blaze consumed
all the color in the landscape
where there had been the jolt of flowers
or the questionable taste of bright paint
now there is a nearly uniform grey
the quiet whispered shade of ash and charcoal
the palette of Schindler’s List
what’s left is: concrete slabs and twisted steel
detritus the shade of clouds heavy with rain
or month-old snow
and all this must be lifted from the earth shovel by shovel
or one patient backhoe scoop at a time
before any new brightness
might take hold
Escape
I’m dreaming of a little place
in tall trees
lit by sunshine and snow
and golden aspen light
a place so flush with water
it bubbles out of the ground
and you can float on a pond
when you need to let go
I’m dreaming of a small space
with not too much to burn
that heats up quick
with the strike of a match
I’m dreaming of a break
from ash and scrap
where I can settle my head
deep into down
and dream blue white green dreams
where all breezes are innocent
all sparks kept to the stove
mapping the damage
We don’t know the world
the way the crow flies
or embers blow.
So when my friend says her sister
across from Warembourg
is displaced, I don’t understand why.
But where did the ash come from there?
I ask, puzzled.
From our street! she says (with the obviously! implied).
I think about it,
consult the map,
and of course she’s right –
it’s straight east of Mulberry
in a way the winding suburban streets
and bike paths make you forget.
There are burned chunks
of other people’s houses in her attic
she says,
and I finally grasp
how one sister’s home could have
lit the other’s up.
But, thankfully,
my friend’s house held
and they were both spared that fate.
Now they try on simpler smaller lives
in different parts
of this parched brown valley.
We’re all relearning this landscape
with a new level of intimacy,
a gift we wouldn’t have asked for
that changes us anyway.
Lost Bounce
Inspired by a prompt from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s Loving the Self: A Poetry Playshop.
the sight of all the burned-out trampolines
flipped over, blown far from their families
silver u’s sticking into the air
like uncomfortable metal bridgework
puts a little hollowness in me these days –
you know there are not-laughing children
to go with each one
trampoline, you raise us up and encircle us
make a safe-ish place to be wild
test limits and bump up against our edges
you launch us into that part of childhood
that’s more about risk than safety
and make a quiet screened place
to whisper with friends
black and blue and endlessly round
you teach us how to lighten up
and we feel the pleasure of becoming buoyant
internalize that we are capable
of reaching much greater heights
than we ever thought
we love you for your whiff of danger
the broken clips and snagged nets
blue borders always shredding away to nothingness
your tenuous connection to earth
and warm embrace of sky
our muscles absorb how to bounce back
we integrate the feel of resilience
how to float and sink and go
with what the moment demands
rather than stiffly thudding through each jolt and jar
so each abandoned naked metal circle
makes my mouth go sour
makes my heart sink a touch lower
it gets worse / better
Inspired by a prompt from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s Loving the Self: A Poetry Playshop.
gazing into the fire
asking what do you have to teach me today?
all I hear is
the old toddler parenting mantra
it gets worse
before it gets better
friends
it could always get worse
but what if we willed ourselves to believe
today we’re one day closer to better?
Post-fire Helpfulness Spectrum: Three Case Studies
Insurance patiently yet insistently explains to my friend
how her ash-covered mattresses
(which Insurance concedes cannot be salvaged)
may not be disposed of
until Insurance has the chance to
unsuccessfully attempt to clean them,
and Insurance is all booked up
unsuccessfully attempting to clean
other ash-covered mattresses for weeks.
My bewildered but equally patient and insistent friend
explains to Insurance
that the mattresses are stinking up her house,
that Insurance is sending people to scrub her home’s air next week,
that the mattresses need to go,
that the city has invited people to put their ash-covered mattresses
out on the street this week to be hauled away for free.
Let’s do it, and save us both time and money! she pep-talks Insurance.
But Insurance rigidly Ma’ams her back
and explains how things must be:
Insurance will pay someone to pick up the ash-covered mattresses
and pay to package them to protect them from further damage
and pay to haul them to a storage locker
and pay to store them in the locker until someone is available.
Then Insurance will pay
to unsuccessfully remove the ash from the mattresses.
Insurance will then admit defeat
and pay for the mattresses to be hauled away
and will pay to dispose of the mattresses.
My out-of-patience friend sits silent on the line
nothing left to say.
On the other end of the spectrum,
Abby Draijer-Kidder bakes pies
and writes
Just come and get some pie.
Jennifer Cooper Gulley stocks her coolers
with 25 free home-cooked meals
and writes
Come and get it!
nursing the world
Written in response to “Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell, which you can read here or listen to Galway read here. Inspired by a prompt from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s Loving the Self: A Poetry Playshop.
Galway Kinnell tells me
how to press a palm
to a flower’s brow
until its cellulose walls
feel, through the warmth of that kind, gentle hand,
the radiant energy of that soft, undemanding touch,
the truth of the flower’s self-realized loveliness.
Oh, Galway, and Saint Francis,
and yes, the flower’s green leaf,
and the sow’s muddy hoof,
press yourself to my temple
until this blessing sings through my limp limbs
so I might do the same.
All anyone wants
is to be enough.
To have warranted the atoms they’re made of.
To have patiently pressed their palm
to another needy being’s brow
and then watched them shine with joy.
how we have been changed
the Californians speak of fire hardening
ask if we’ve done it
no, but perhaps it’s been done to us
so many of us are like the survivors
in a forest after flame
you see the blackened triangular fire scars
for decades reaching up from the earth
marking the moments
when the tree might have become wood
but there’s also fire softening at work now
a new tendency to give others the benefit of the doubt
to not question whether they might have
had their misfortune coming to them
to give whole-heartedly, finally
embracing the there but for the grace of God
or a shift of wind
go I humility we all ought to have
it’s much too soon to see
how this fire will mark us
how we might now meet the world
what tangled undergrowth might have been
cleared out of our chests by
such a fierce blaze
