telling stories

I was heading to buy cheese, pushing the cart

past the frozen chicken wings, when Ruth found me

and started talking about her life, then her husband's.

His father dying at ten, a mother filled with resentment,

commanding naval ships, med-evac missions in Vietnam,

a spinal injury, his lifetime stuck away in storage.

I did not really have a choice as I leaned

against the edge of the cooler.I settled into the story.

At some point I started worrying about my milk,

how it was growing warmer and warmer.

But then she said that Arthur was now in so much pain

that sometimes he just asks her to hold him.

I could could picture her crawling into bed with him,

just as I can picture you crawling into bed with whoever calls for you.

It's times like that I realize that a quart of 1 % costs $1.79

and even though love costs more than anyone will ever be able to pay,

it's free, absolutely free, at the very same moment.

Yesterday I got an email from a new friend who

told me her husband was hospitalized for depression.

Last week, my father and I talked about photographs

hanging on the wall. How we have to decide what to pack away,

and what we hold onto in the place we call home.

Betty told me about what

it is like to buy a furnace all by herself,

now that her husband has died.

I know a man who knows the man who discovered Ardi,

our oldest relative. My father's ancient mother,

and your mother too. Her bones were found with 36 others,

our first brothers and sister so long ago.

I do not know where this poem is heading,

only sure that it has to do with being on this planet,

drinking my mother's milk. How milk turns into cheese,

and cheese is not what feeds us. I am sure that

it starts with a word that is part of a story

that began in the Afar desert and will never end.

With its dust and bone. And the sense that we are always

waiting and wanting to be discovered.

Always talking, telling our stories,

unable to stop trying to make sense.