River rats

"Are you the new neighbors?" 

I watch them approach 

Both pink in the face 

The color of embarrassment or flamingos

People tell me never to assume 

But I assume that alcohol has lived in their veins

The way blood does 

It has a habit of changing the face and the eyes 

Glazed

I've seen this many times before 

I saw it in the face of my man that sold us our home, his voice was rusty with addictions 

and protective of the home as he handed over a key. 

They both reach for my hand 

An extention of friendship 

"I'm Steve 

This is my wife Patty

We are the old neighbors" 

He gestures with a lazy hand toward the house 

"You may be new here, but you might be here awhile...the river has a way of getting to you" 

When he says this I feel something in the wind 

I wonder how does it get to you?

Is it like a mold? Or a demon or a kind of food that you love? 

Does it have a habit of changing the face and the eyes?

"I've been here a good 38 years..." he says as he passes, repeating our names, assuring us, he will remember them. 

what will be come of us. 

Exodus

I watched the geese 

Wild 

Fly south 

I left 

Clair next to me clambering about reassuring me that everyone will like me there 

She is always chatty and I've always loved that about her. 

Jim 

Looked like a school boy

Unsure of how to hug me

Where to put his arms 

But he walked me to my car 

His arms empty

Lucas took Rosalie 

Promising to water her 

To repot her 

I felt a lack of confidence in his green thumb

(It's usually shoved in a baseball kit) 

But this was good bye 

And he was my last Genesis client

And he's been my client for years

And I watched him gro into a teenager 

Only you know how to deal with his collic

Mom said 

Mourning this great loss 

Writing

In good writing 

You can feel the sandpaper on your fingertips 

Or wilting in your knees 

Good writers can house 

monsters 

birdsnests, violins, scandal

And feasting 

In between two hardcovered edges 

...

What I want to learn

Jeannie Garlets

I was in bed when I read it 

Jeannie wrapped herself up in a quilt square and sent herself in athletic tape on a little piece of rectangular paper with tiny flowers on it and a few of Ruby's scribble marks and it felt just like Jeannie feels when you're sitting in a room with her 

She isn't too focused on you that she forgets her children and she isn't too overconcerned about whatever she's doing that she won't allowed her child to enter in 

And everything feels like it's stamped with wild flowers and quilt squares and yes if you've met her you'd understand 

...

Happy birthday to me 

Change

You know what I mean 

When your tongue feels like salmon 

And your hands have Alzheimer's 

All your habits are rusty with 

... 

change

River house

This place I'm moving is a 

Hummingbird 

Delicate 

Silent 

But wait for it

Somewhere in the fabric of silence you'll find 

The click of the river 

Maybe it can rescue me from the chatter 

And give my writing 

The dust I need 

To make it feel real

As if we don't have enough on our minds

You give us the news

The sleeve of your sweatshirt soaked with snot and tears

It's clinging to everything this month

And there were a thousand crickets in the room they plagued him all night long

2. 

I felt his body stiffen next to mine 

This was the last thing

The very last thing 

We expected her to say

Sentimental post

His skin is warm 

A gift 

I hear his heart still beating 

A gift 

To lay next to a person

To call him yours 

A gift 

To breathe in and out the same breath

The same life 

A gift 

To watch him like a tree 

Grow

A gift 

To have his hand wrapped around my wrist 

A gift 

All of this

we celebrate with rings and wine and social media 

The two long haired blondes who have just decided that forever 

No matter what may come 

They will get through it 

2. 

We cry

As your monitor beeps 

Your chin quivers 

You pull up the white sheet around your chest 

Nurses and drs in and out in and out collecting your time collecting your blood collecting your data so they can give you your news 

I don't want to know how long you will still be here 

And I do not want to remember you sick

I want to remember the grandpa who set up the train around the tree at Christmas 

Who rubs grandmas feet and legs when they hurt 

Who helps her put on her shoes and opens every door

The one who refuses to let someone else pay for our meal

The hidden cistern you must have in your belly for the jokes you create 

Not afraid to say how you feel 

My birthday present 

3. 

Life is marked by beauty and death

Both linger together as lovers 

Making the beauty more beautiful 

4. 

I'll become better through this 

Not bitter 

5. 

And this week and the next we will put our entire life on Davis in boxes and carry them to a new home 

Next to the river 

On willow dr. 

6. 

Through all of this I think of you

And how you must be hurting 

And I'm sorry. 

7. 

All of this

Is part of this life we call short 

What can we make of it

I wish I was not the only one who cried in this family

They find results 

Deep in his spleen 

In the tick of his heart 

They drive some sort of devise into his hip bone and tell him he will barely feel anything

We are simply getting some bone marrow

It was over a text that we find out because we are not all there huddled around the hospital bed

The results are not good. 

The Dr., in is confidence 

His hope

He lied to us after all. 

Hospitals

1.

I hate hospitals 

Their shiny floors

And intolerable beeping

The disease that is on the loose in the halls

The weak ankles and dull skin of the walkers

The oil paintings strung up by nails that suggest this to be a happy place 

I keep my voice high and positive like I always have for everyone 

When the insides of me are water

My eyes raw from holding it all back 

His room is 5022

I see those silly rubberish socks sticking out of the sheet and his bruised arms are up around his head wrapped in oxygen cords and assorted tubes

I see my Grandpa lying there 

Loose and helpless 

(His chin quivers while they retell the story of his body over again) 

They take him soon 

For more testing 

More ultrasounds of his heart and

To check the size of his spleen and none of us know really what that has to do with his blood anyway 

2. 

It takes hours. 

We sit, the four of us. 

I tried to leave 

Claiming I had so much to do

I cried the entire walk down the elevators into the parking garage 

I made it all the way to my car and knew that this is me hiding

I let all of it out in those walls 

And I went all the way back inside 

To find my family 

To live in the today

And asked God to take care of the rest of it 

3.

Mom reaches over during lunch

The cafeteria is buzzing with Drs. & nurses and patients

We are lost in this building 

Unsure of how to order a hamburger in our grief 

Or what direction to pay in

Grandma tells a story of yesterday

" while Grandpa put on his shoes to come here he looked up at me and told me that these last 67 years of his life married to me have been the best 67 years of his life" 

She doesn't cry, but I do, because I'm a Gentry she says, they're emotional, she says, the rest of us keep it inside, she says

and my Dad tries not to look at me for fear of not knowing what to do with me (he must be a Grimm)

Mom reaches over and wipes at my forehead 

I ask her what she is wiping away 

She tells me lines

Worry lines

That have built their way into my skin

2.

Dr Brenner 

Is a quiet man with words that were solid and understandable 

He spoke slowly so as to try to help us understand what he's saying through his bramble of long words and definitions and capital letters that stand for things having to do with leukemia (the bitch) and bone marrow

But through it all 

He gives us good news 

But just enough

And not too much 

So that we cannot call him a liar later when the actual test results come 

4.

Grandpa was in good spirits then

And finished his pot roast and ice cream carefully with

His thigh exposed by the sheet, 

The white loose undies showing just barely on his hip

And under his buttocks as they move him here and there 

He thanks me for coming 

Twice

Tells me how nice it was, really 

5. 

Life is marked by so many things

Death

Disease 

You can hear it in the nurses voices 

The strain of hope that you find buried there 

But it is also marked by life and beauty 

And I know you aren't supposed to use words like life and beauty and hope in poetry

But I am going to be looking for beauty through it all 

And so it felt like a respectable place 

To put the word 

Hospital

Today I saw a man with only one leg and thought of how very lucky I am and how little I think of it 

Today I saw a man laying flat on his back with his mouth open wide and I thought how very lucky I am and how little I think of it 

Today a dr touched my grandpas bruising arms while she talked about his diagnosis she and told him what normal platelets look like and how they'll treat his leukemia and I thought how very helpless I feel like I have lost a limb or like all can do to help is lay here with my tongue exposed

2. 

I was all the way to my car

The doors closed 

Key in the ignition when I went back to Grandpas hospital room 

All of it can wait 

The paintings 

The editing 

Those people 

But if I were Grandpa 

It would mean something if I put all that aside 

And waited 

Gramps

I wonder what 

You said to me the first time you saw me 

You were twice my age when they put me in your arms 

And ever since you've told the world I'm your birthday gift 

Was your hair still red then at all? 

Over and over and over you ask me when

When am I going to make you a great grandchild 

And over and over and over again I tell you you have many years left that I don't have to yet 

Over and over and over again you ask me to simply stop over unannounced and I don't do it 

I always call

I always plan

It took Henry dying for me to change my schedule so that twice a month I can see you 

Twice a month I plan it 

Because otherwise I don't see how it'll

Happen and I just hope for more time someday in the future to play that game of cards we've been taking about since December 

2. 

And now they find that somewhere in you cancer has placed itself 

And even though I've know for years this day would come 

How can I explain to you how sad it makes me that I've never been what I wish I could be for you

That I'm sorry I never have the time for what I want 

That I wish over and over that you know how much I love you and That I'm worried my grief is more about what I can't give you and all this guilt then for what you must be going through inside 

Winter 2016

Winter 2016

Is pushing his sleeves up

Starting to sweat as he chips away at the iceblock preparing our snow 

I can feel it as I wake up in the morning 

The shadows are heavier 

It is harder to peel myself from the sheets 

Or beg energy to carry me into the day

Everything in winter makes me cry

As if a net of gray has been cast over everything 

Summer, sleep well

Spring, come soon

Chapter 1. Hutchmoot

And here 

during the litergies 

the responses

among the introverts

I found a stone in my throat

that was there for weeping

Chapter 1. Hutchmoot:On opening

I felt all the flowers

In me

Come open. 

Carrots

I like food.

I mean I guess who doesn't. 

I used to like the process of it too, before I had hobbies. 

I liked the sound of potatoes being ripped out of their skin and the sauce apples made when they bled in the oven, the taste of cinnamon in the corner of your nails. 

I think more than the preparation, I liked being in the kitchen with another human, the music loud, the feet all lined up next to mine. If it was Christmas those feet would have socks on and the toes would bounce to music, in the summer the toes would be exposed and hairy, and still clicking to the music. The water would be running mostly, humming over top of vegetables or cherries in wire baskets. 

But then I got hobbies. I learned I love my hands soaked in oil paint (which will probably be the death of me, what with their toxic chemicals) & I also found writing along the way.  I think if I cook it's so I can write about it. 

Once in awhile after a heavy and lengthy trip to the groceries store, when my arms are steaming with a variety of flavors and cheeses and when there is a bottle of wine I will choose to cook.

 I will lay all the bags out on the floor, open the mouth of my refrigerator and start putting it all away. This process fascinates me. I make lists of all the different meals I will make and i start to feel very domestic and in charge of my adult life and think about how very very proud my husband will be of my accomplishments and how restful he will feel with a nice hardy homecooked meal. 

You know how I feel a few weeks later? when the spinach is cremating itself leaf by leaf and the apples are bruising themselves all jostled up against each other like buttcheeks? I think, what has become of you and how have you declined so far in these two short weeks? 

Some perspective: The other day someone gave me a lasagna after we had a church function and it wasn't eaten. It fed us for a few days. Listen, I cooked this thing. That counts? Right? I turned on the oven, i set it,  I cooked it but left the lid on and the cheese stuck to the top of it. I cut up some potatoes into small squares (and my dog scratched at my pant leg until I gave them to her, she loves vegetables. Yes potatoes are vegetables.) I looked at my multi-colored carrots thinking about how much work theyd be to peel. They were all hairy and their skin was kinda cracked like Grandpas knuckles and I had so many paintings to do that I just cooked them that way. Hairy. My husband told me they were delicious. 

We might die early, but at least they were organic. 

All is not lost 

What with my legs mixed with yours

And my hands a part of your waste

Your hips are my hips

And then 

How can we be lost 

They all watch us untangle 

And yet they call us all tangled up 

Like two wires

That you can't bend back straight

You have bent me 

And I used to want this

I am afraid of your hands for years

And yet how I want them Desperately 

there is both

And though we are untangled 

Feel more tangled up than ever before 

Softness

I like softness because 

It plays so well with others 

Some people

Hate me for that

_________________

The hardest part of softness 

Is letting the long war of life 

Break you down

Into it 

_________________

I've seen it go the other way before 

Writer, musician, predator

He is a stiff man

Like my brother, really

With the controlled emotion of a cement wall

The bark on his face is carved purposely almost like an Amish man & was the color of the ocean 

deep and gray like a gloomy day

The kind of day my friend likes 

Where it is gray on gray on gray and it seems it would never go away 

But she would not like this kind of man

I would imagine him to be the sort that is a writer 

Or a musician

Alone in his house 

Mad with ideas and notes flying off his desk so many piles of them taped to walls and collecting on the floor like snow that he can not even finish one chapter or one line in a song 

Or it could be that he is 

A predator 

Someone who had a skeleton of sorts hanging between a wall somewhere

 but nobody knows about it except for himself   and he hates himself for it 

(in fact)

I can't even write about it it's so secret and everyday that he hates himself for it he 

Starves himself 

Lonely in his house 

But there is a chance this man just lost his wife twenty years ago and desperate with love for her had chosen to stay lonely 

She was a very good cook i imagine and so now without her he eats ravioli out of a can (but sometimes adds Parmesan cheese) 

I'm only guessing of course 

He stands behind me in the line at mejier with today's newspaper and one single yellow banana 

This tells me a lot of things 

1. He has more time on his hands than he wishes he had. He should join a chess club or get a dog with a small bladder so he can take her out to pee. He has so much time on his hands that he goes to the store to buy each meal, separately because he wants to fill the day or 

2. He is a writer like I am and takes brief and purposeful trips out to collect characters for his book & this entire time I am sizing him up he is sizing me up in my baggy shirt and my two clumsy hands full of pizza