Category: Aging

Accretion/Debridement

When House was new it asked for filling.

We complied with staples and treats and whimsy and hope, in their turns.

Repujado’s required tools are good for nothing else.  Parts of looms lay

akimbo in the nook upstairs.  Clothes of outdated sizes rotate to the back

of ample closets.  Business cards not used, now supplanted by better.  Instruments

upgraded.  Posters outgrown.  A chest with toys untouched for years is colorful

behind the vacuum.  Hats.

When Home comes it will demand spaciousness.

Surfaces easily wiped.  Doors wide enough for chairs and beds and the wagons

with the tubes and beeps.  One dresser with three drawers.  The clothes coming back

from the laundry may not be ours, but we will wear them.

Breathe in.  Breath out.  We open our hands, palms full of oxygen and memories.

 

City. Morning. Work.

The city surrounds me as intimately as night,

lights on late,

streets shower-slick and shining.

Amos Lee sings about the spirit

in my right ear,

and I’m singing with him.  Loud.

Tears for some reason.

There’s such a small space to wedge all this into.

I crack open the car door and push,

water-borne into florescence

and the hum of the machinery

into which I screw my lamp.

 

A Prayer to Black Bile

A humor, though not as humorous as one might hope,

you sit in the shade of my liver,

melancholy incubating in your bitter sack.

You taketh away my French fries and my mayonnaise.

When I sin against you

you waketh me in the witching hour and

maketh me to sit up through the night.

Oh, frost –

Oh, woolly caterpillar –

Oh, harbinger of my imminent winter –

have mercy on me

as you strip from me the luxuries of the flesh.

 

 

 

 

Bending over Backward

Tonight’s yoga lesson:  Backbends!  Energizing!  Heart opening!

The teacher’s confession:  She hates backbends.  And she’s not good at them.  In practice.  She can give you plenty of theory and information about your anatomy, but that doesn’t get her hands back to her heels in camel or her hips off the ground in upward bow.  She’ll skip bow, then.  Maybe offer it up as an option for those “who regularly use it in their practice.”  And she’ll teach half camel, which she can actually do, though she rarely enjoys it.  And so the class plan comes together, a gumbo of knowledge and reality, seasoned with a pinch of shame.

And so the teacher learns:  Not the poses, though god knows she tries.  She learns it doesn’t matter.  She stands at the door of the classroom, all limitation and insecurity, and she loves her students.  Casually, while shaking their hands, she slips them the gift of happy imperfection.

Dear Character Defect

I need to let you go now.

Because you interfere with my ability to experience the joy of doing something for the simple love of doing it.  Because you have me spending too much of the limited time I have in this head focusing on who or what is better or worse instead of what is.  Because you rob me of celebrating my successes and those of other people.  Because you are an aging artifact of the behavior of insecure, immature people who could not make good decisions but were in charge of my formation.

You are a portrait painted by hurt people, no less a construct than the fairy tales I was nursed on and rejected.  Believing in you perpetuates the hurt and fear of your creators; keeps that hurt and fear spinning out into the world.

This doesn’t mean I give up my right to practice discernment.  I intend to use brain and eyes to the best of my ability.  I intend to be right sized.

I have people now who hold me in their strong hands – neither blind to my faults and humanity, nor disgusted by them; neither dazzled by my gifts and talents, nor jealous, fearful, and dismissive of them.

I can breathe.  I can stretch.  I can fall.  I can get up.  I can smile at the mirror and at the rest of this raggedy family.

Reflections on a Winter Window

I stand before the glass – a shocking sight,

too white, too big, in stocking cap and coat

and glasses, too.  Is this the girl who wrote:

I’m god’s frail angel, trembling toward the light?

I could not be this woman in the pane –

What could she know of trembling heavenly bliss?

If I’d known back when that I would look like this

I’d have put a bullet in my trembling brain.

And missed the snow upon the redbud tree.

And missed the sleeping spaniel’s velvet ear.

And missed the graceful green frivolity

that rises as the turning of the year.

For though this flesh may less than solid be,

I thank it for the love it’s shown me here.

Why I Want to Draw

A dispatch from the 60s.

My sight is fading fast.

Every few months I buy new, stronger reading glasses.

In you never miss the water until the well runs dry mode I now realize how

much I’ve lived in my head.

In my own stories.

Literally not seeing what’s in front of my nose.

I cling to this soft pencil

hoping it will focus what’s left of my light.

Garage Satori

double-rainbowPulling out of my parking spot

I am meditating on whether kapotasana could be done in a chair,

whether one would feel enough pigeon-ness if she were seated,

when I awake to the chime of my front quarter panel kissing

the wheel well of my brother to the left.

Only paint.  Only paint.  No scraping, really.  I can’t handle this today.

The car will be fine.  The driver might not even see it.  I can’t handle any more.  

Out of the car, I spit on my fingers and rub along the Oregon Trail of Shame.

It’s fine.  I’m leaving.  Why should I be the only person on the planet to leave a damned note?

Drive out, heart pounding, hitting the brake at imagined vehicles.

Bring breath into belly, in and down, up and out.  Brain comes on line,

a light at a time, a Whoville Christmas in my neo-cortex.

I turn and spiral my way back up to brother Saturn to reveal myself.

I Don’t Want to be Her, to the End

A bright cake for me to deliver on a rainy day,

pinks and purples as requested,

reading:  Happy Birthday, Dorothy!

The baker asks me which birthday is it?

She’s 98 and in hospice.

I resist the temptation to say, “Her last.”

Her daughter keeps me waiting in the foyer

of the 60’s modern apartment building

with its kidney coffee tables and satellite chandeliers.

Her mouth twists as she takes the cake,

I’m sorry if she’s been a pain in the ass.

Not to me, I’m just delivering cake,

I grin, having been a daughter myself.