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
koimeterion
driving past the burn today
I finally name what it evokes in me –
cemetery:
the structures low to the ground
the winding streets now going nowhere
the arboretum of cultivated trees
the metal shapes like iron railings
delineating a family plot
so many memories interred
in each rectangular basement-crypt
nearly everything gone to ashes already
from the Greek word for sleeping place
where souls once breathed quiet midnight dreams
(or tossed fitfully, as it may be)
now there’s only the eerie absence of an old life gone
Imbolc / Candlemas / Groundhog Day
tomorrow we’ll be one day closer to spring than winter
though subzero when we wake
but we still won’t know where the spark started
my husband walks Washington
and says the burn looks like Syria
the devastated portion on the news
I stay away out of respect
and maybe out of not wanting the images in my eyes
and also simply out of staying out of the way
there are enough complications everywhere
without this body adding one more
this cross-quarter night
what safe candle can I light that leaves no ash
what flame might I set in my head
or milk in my hands to divine our future
what keening might heal the blackened hills
for we’ve no rushes to weave in this dry place
whether to know
two ways today I’m asked
if I want to know
what’s in the air we’re breathing
and the answer is
I don’t know
because we can’t stop bringing it into our bodies
and we aren’t the type to pick up and move
the numbers may tell us
what we don’t want to hear
but if we don’t know
at least we don’t know
Margaret says,
We’re doomed. And?
Sarah says,
Don’t give your worries swimming lessons.
I say,
When can I just breathe easy?
And, will my children ever?
fire dream
I dreamt ashes in our attic
soot on the windowsills
unnoticed for weeks
we’re all wearing ashes
on our foreheads these days
visible or not
the schools keep finding a way
when we said you can’t gather
they figured out how to get together
how to support our children
one living room to the next
when the towns were burning down
the schools sealed their ducts
so smoke stayed outside
and the buildings were saved
when flames chased toward the hospital
the schools called up their bus drivers
home on vacation, they drove toward danger
and rushed patients to safety
when whole neighborhoods burned
the schools reassured them –
you belong here with us
wherever you land
now they’re busing children
from the county’s four corners
so kids can have one bit of same
in this immense uncertainty
when the students had nothing
no backpacks no Chromebooks
no boots or winter coats
the schools greeted them
with a handful of everything
they set up free thrift shops
in the school parking lot
when we worried about the playground
they carted off the wood chips
when we worried about smoke
they tested the air
already feeding everyone
lunches for free
they added food pickup
for those whose pantries were gone
when I read that one-sixth
of Coal Creek Elementary families’ homes burned
(60 of 380 students’ homes are gone)
I began to understand
the immensity of the undertaking
to try to stabilize what has been deeply traumatized
to hold together a bit of the fabric
that once knit these families to each other
we ask so much of our schools:
our teachers, administrators,
support staff, custodians, paras, and kitchen staff,
school nurses, and counselors,
social workers, and bus drivers,
special ed teachers, psychologists,
registrars, front office staff,
and occupational therapists –
any title you think of at our schools –
we’re asking more of them now
than ever before
knowing that some of them
are also navigating their own loss
41 of them dealing
with their own new unhoused lives
while trying to stay hopeful
for the children they nurture
Annie’s Story
when her 8-year-old son kept saying
I don’t want to die today
she calmly explained
that wouldn’t happen
they were safe
the fire was a long way away
they would leave if it ever got close
a few hours later
trapped in gridlock
with the smoke plumes getting darker
her family split between
different cars and departure times and friends
she’s nearly overcome by the unbearableness of
stasis in the midst of terror
jammed in this long line of sitting ducks
straddling gas tanks
so she asks the traffic control lady
if she’s still going the best way,
and the lady shakes her head and says,
there are a lot of people getting hurt up there
(which later proved to be false,
but then she’d no way to know)
afraid to learn exactly how close the flames are now
she wills herself not to check the messages on her phone
instead she calls her National Guard brother
pleading for him to find her an exit
thinking to herself
I don’t want to die today
but even with his emergency ops experience
and all the info he is calm enough to marshal
all her brother can tell her is stay where she is –
north is the only way
now she says, everyone miraculously safe,
things aren’t the same
sometimes it’s like my nervous system is outside my body
she says
like there is no buffer between the world and me
I will never leave my husband’s side in an emergency again
she says
I wanted us to be together if something happened
I will never wait for an evacuation order again
she says
by the time they order you it’s too late
the roads are packed solid
I’m glad I took my rings
but I didn’t really need my wedding photos –
more of those exist
my main regret is I didn’t grab my grandmother’s box
it goes between my mom and uncles
so they have turns with her memories
my mom had loaned it to me
and I would have let them down
if I’d let it burn
one of the hardest moments was
picking up my daughter from her friend’s.
she asked me if our home was gone
and all I could say was
I don’t know
It wasn’t
I’m one of the lucky ones
and I’m still crying every day
