November 23.20: Coping

Fear is served,

heaped, cold, on unseen platter

where empty table

speaks to us.

There was picnic once,

soda fizz

and bright mustard,

where now only air

teasing whispers from

dry grass.

In barren quiet

the words come:

what if I’m the only one?

 

 

In this country, dear reader, we enter Thanksgiving week torn. No: shredded. How do we celebrate isolation and dread? If we try to “count our blessings,” how are we not trivializing the losses among us?

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg for this poignant image.

 

May 8.20: Coping

Sometimes perfect form

is jarring to the brain,

absolute alignment

inhospitable, profane.

A disordered kind of order

comes with emptiness;

we’re healthier by far

with a little bit of mess.

 

 

This, dear reader, is not an argument for opening up

before we are medically ready,

but only my commentary

on what is.

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

April 28.20: Coping

I know it’s just pretend,

a world contrived for stage,

but I want to see some people,

some over-easy eggs.

Those stools were made for twirling,

the mustard made to squirt,

the door was made for swinging,

but they’re eerily inert.

The world’s a stage, the poet said,

for fools to strut and fret;

that may be so but still we miss

the people for the set.

 

 

And so, dear reader, we bungle on without people on our sets.

I hope you endure.

With thanks to photographer S.W. Berg

and, of course, to The Bard.

March 7.19

 

When words die

and lie

lightly in brown piles,

and slatted benches

hold no one

in their arms,

will the stones remember

warmth

of blood and bone,

do they

hearth-like

hold the meaning?

Or does meaning lie too

in the dry brown

awaiting its ride on the scattering wind

leaving the stones to their empty cold?

 

 

Thanks more to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

Connections: January 27.18

A writer has days

more often than not

when brilliance of insight

ain’t what it ought.

Mental chairs in neat rows

for ideas to be seated

but this is what happens:

nothing, repeated.

 

 

Thanks yet again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.

Connections

 

Connections: October 29.17

Deaf phone line

hard blue chair

what’s the point?

no one’s there

austere right angles

sterile, glistening

rigid vacuum:

no one’s listening.

You may think this

nihilistic

but caregivers know

it’s realistic.

 

One of the reasons I started my blog was to write about caregiving. I return to that subject from time to time although I continually grapple with the related issue of denial. It’s so much easier to deny than to listen because listening requires acknowledging. But denial makes the caregiver’s isolation unimaginably more damaging.

 

With thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives for this expressive, poignant photo.

 

Connections

Connections: August 18.17

Decluttered, depersonalized,

undecorated, denuded,

stripped, dismantled,

unhabituted.

Ghosts of stuff

in squares and rings

I’m a material girl:

I miss my things.

 

Connections

 

 

 

 

Connections: May 24.17

When the echo is all

and the used pages hang limp

what of the note?

Does it weep for its muteness

sleep

or

 does it

bee-like

   hover eagerly

     a yearning symbiote?

Even more thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.

Connections

Connections: October 18.16

 The eloquence of emptiness

wordless lexicon

invitation mute, dismissed:

Busy! Must walk on!

Thanks yet again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.

Connections