Wandering in

Last week, at this time, I was in Dallas with a friend. We went to an outdoor sculpture garden. One of the installations was hard to figure out. There was something that looked like a sealed off stainless steel service entrance. Heather and I approached and, I tucked my head back in surprise. It was a door made of brushed glass. Then, upon entering, a black hallway that wrapped around to another double doorway. We opened those doors and stepped into a room with soft sandstone benches and, above us, an open window to the sky. It was a space, in this beautiful place, where we were asked to stop. To look up. To see what passes by. Just sit and see.

And when the sky rolls by like that, in this fabric of grays -- something I would ordinarily clump together into one dismissed color -- I could see it. The way the shapes shift. The way the shades evolve and fold into each other. Then a patch of lighter white. A bauble of blue.

Today I spent six hours watching a television show, the whole series in one day. Some people would say that that was a waste of time, but, not for me, today. The main character has cancer and she first turns radically self-indulgent, then she backs her way into love. Into slowing down her life. Into seeing her husband, her son, her neighbor, her brother. Her life.

I think that's way it needs to be with me. I need remind myself to see. Maybe it's slowing down. Maybe it's focusing on one small patch of my life. Maybe it's not permitting the blur.

I suspect that I am in the process of backing my way into love, too. Not like Cathy, with stage four cancer, but by just being the age I am, closer to the terminal end. It would be easy for me to lash myself for all of the time I wasted, all of the years I clumped it into one blob of gray, but all I can do is realize that I am here. On this night.

I wandered into a coffee shop to write a letter to friend, and there was a bluegrass group called "Porch" playing. The lead singer, here in Cleveland, had a star Nashville voice. Amazing. Near the end of the show, the lead guitarist's niece got up to sing a Gillian Welch song, Miss Ohio. She's sung in LA at the Whiskey-a-go-go. I really do not know how to adequately tell you of my marvel. At the music, at the ring of family supporting the group, at this young woman's voice. Her uncle's harmony. The bottleneck blues. I was smiling at the woman, and the women watching the woman, and, even this capacity to feel part of a family -- if only for a moment -- that I will never know.

I just wandered into it. This moment. Just as I wandered into that installation last week. I don't exactly what it all means, but I know it is something. Something I'm going to straighten it out sometime. For now, I just must give thanks. For that square of sky. The quilt of gray. The tv show. My inclination to get out of the house into the world that holds the sky. It all brought me here. Sitting. Looking. Seeing. Hearing a stunning song in a small beautiful box of time.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

The rooms were full of relics,

ornate boxes and vessels for holding remnants

of the saints. Shoulder bones

and teeth, tunics and corners of burial shrouds.

The people believed that if you saw or

were touched by something that had once been

part of the holy, you could be healed and holy, too.

One box was my favorite. It was filled with

sacred objects, treasures of heaven. At the top

of the box there was a hole through which

water could be poured. The water would seep

in and around the relics and then fall out of a lower hole.

People could drink this water, or clean themselves

with the water. Baptized, again, with hope.

My friend, Nikki, went to the river yesterday to

fill up a bottle with its thanksgiving flow.

Her life like the Cuyahoga, is moving to the silty sweet delta,

somehow, on a crooked path,

the same way drinking water runs to

the low spot before it can be taken in.

She makes necklaces from red glass,

she throws a slobbery ball to her dog Bill

over and over again. I collect

acorns and black stones with magic white bands.

My neighbor places her childrens' stick leg drawings

into boxes marked, "Keep."

I do not know what you do,

but I know you find small holy things to hold onto.

A peach pit, the college ID with the good haircut,

a piece of birch bark, a golden bracelet with

links shaped like leaves. I do not know what you do,

but I know that something some time kissed your palm

and your fingers wrapped around it and held on.

Held on the whole night long.

Racing sticks in the river

I did not know what Ruth meant when she wrote me last week

and told me to come out. Come Out. “There is room for you here.”

But today I saw it happen. How I left my body and watched myself

ride tangent to real time and place. Yellow light living,

merging cautiously, one foot on the brake and the other accelerating.

The volume turned down low, every misstep rattling in the trunk.

I wanted to tell Emily that I was mesmerized by the ladder legs

on her black hatted warbler. I wanted to stand in front of the books,

and memorize every title. I wanted to run my hand on the red orange walls.

I wanted to give Bill a head hug and lay down on his wide bed.

I wanted to ask you where you slept. Wanted to use the hula hoop,

try on a silver beaded ring. Wanted to stand in the river.

Pick up acorns and whip them at trees. Throw them hard.

I wanted to take back what I said about my dream.

Take back what I said about everything, supplement the text.

I wanted to go into the kitchen and get my own glass of water.

Touch the purple skin of the eggplant. Taste the pesto.

I wanted to sit down on something green

and say nothing at all for a long time.

But I did not. I do not. If Summa Health Care asked me

to take a drug test, I would come back negative for everything:

smoking pot, drinking whiskey, dancing until I busted a knee,

writing with permanent ink, loving another living being,

giving a friend refuge, feeding a dog bacon, sleeping soundly,

rubbing the chimney head of a baby, walking on a thin mountain path,

driving 12 hours to get anywhere, swimming in the ocean,

folding a fitted sheet, fucking, letting a man kiss my back,

baring my back, baring my shoulders, baring my dry elbows,

holding out the white wrinkled palms of my hands, asking for this.

Knowing I would never live in a town like yours,

I took the long way home. Read a book in Darrow Park.

Bought gas in Twinsburg, stopped in Hudson

to see if they had a shirt big enough for me. Two Xs, one L,

enough room for who I am and all of the layers

that keep me from being me – keep me from coming out.

The woman there told me about the way the Japanese

fold shirts. They criss, cross, then pull up with two fingers

and the whole shirt collapses into the right shape.

They said they wished they knew how to do it,

but loved to use their folding board which worked just as well.

I thought about shirts for next eighteen miles, the sides

that are never seen when they’re on display. The belly of the shirt,

the hem of the shirt, the back, the tail, the inside of the sleeves.

Then origami. The folds within the swan. The flaps inside the peace cranes.

Then I thought about paper, paper so durable it can hold anything.

How it is all just lines on the paper. Lines that make the drawing,

lines that make the letters. Letters that make the words,

words that record the life, stabilize the confusion, bring understanding.

Then I thought about the wood pulp that makes the paper,

the trees lining the banks of the low Cuyahoga River.

The sticks that we raced under the bridge. How that moment

felt real to me. How I was there when that was happening.

How you knew to chose a thick stick, a dense stick,

and I kept selecting thin quills. How your stick found the current,

and mine was never solid enough to slide.

How, despite the weight of me, I am too buoyant.

Not really in it. How, then, it became my instinct to find a better stick.

A wider stick, a bulky stick, something with living marrow.

Not to beat you, but be close enough to be close enough

to see how you are surrendering to living,

so that I can give way to living and surrender my second skin.

The one that keeps me shorebound as the river moves around me.

coming out of the closets

...the t-shirt I bought to remember Tybee Island and our house with the pool,

the Saugatuck sweatshirt, the dress up capris for out-to-dinner,

the Steelers sweatshirt I wore when we both cheered their Superbowl victory;

at half-time, we ate homemade food that was all black and gold.

The skirt my mother wore to Theta conventions, because when we

were packing up my mom's clothes, she said it might look nice.

16 non-matching socks, a fisherman's knit sweater that will never fit again.

A dozen teaching skirts in various tones of blue jean and khaki,

that shirt she made me buy even though I never liked it.

The Three River's Arts Festival t-shirt we both got to remember a great day,

those shorts I wore in Ithaca, much to her disdain,

the shoes I wore when we first kissed, and every other pair of stinky Merrells.

The sheets we slept on in the downstairs bedroom,

the pillow cases too. Her beach towel, her washcloths.

And five other big garbage bags full of stuff my body

wore when my body was with hers.

Including these shoes, the ones on that day

when we were tourists in a graveyard in Savannah,

walking among the dead. All of it now, like bodies

carried out by a coroner, in black bags.

How do I say “I love you” to the one not on the path?

In tenth grade we learned about the way electrons

float in the outer shell of the molecule.

That these negative particles wander from the nucleus,

searching for a positive force that will pull them in.

Then they attach to the empty space on another’s atomic orbit.

A whole new substance is created in this bonding.

Ionic, it’s called, I think. It’s hard to remember,

I was so taken by Pam Robertson’s curly blond hair.

And, while I never had any reason to use that information

in the ensuing thirty years, tonight it is the thing I need to know.

There have been times when my electrons huddled

as close to the core as possible. I had an internal entropy,

and did not need nor want to wander, looking.

And there are other times that I was just a fired up particle,

jittering from one person to another, looking for

anyone and anything to coax the sting from my charge.

I groped at respect and security; I flirted with admiration and approval;

I made love to achievements, making it nearly impossible

for others to not douse me with high regard.

How hard I could hit the ball, how far I could hit the ball,

how many skip I could plant in a river stone,

how I could wind the words around a fictional story,

and how I could mesmerize the children in my life.

How the photos culled out the spirit of the person,

the mountain, the praying mantis. But all of that

was just a string of a million minuscule electrons

leaching out of every cell trying to find comfort.

Tonight, when Nikki asked me to ask the question again,

I realized that it is different now. I am willingly in the far reaches

from my nucleus because I finally know my own nub.

And this part of me that is longing for belonging

does not have a quivering within at all. My electrons

are on a purposeful pilgrimage. They know the proton they seek.

And while I know her, and could transfer my self to her self,

creating a whole new being with its own

atomic weight and strength, I will wait.

And I will say I love you to everything I see until I see her.

I will say I love you to this cold cup of coffee to my right,

I will say I love you to the keys clicking under my fingers,

I will say I love you to the red thread wrapped around my wrist.

To the red car that just drove by, to the man driving it.

To the street under the wheels, and the earth under the concrete.

To the rock now forming from the pushing we place upon it.

The grains in the sediment. The tiny shining within the stone.

I will say I love you to the sky that holds it all,

the things seen and unseen, the things known and the things revealing.

I will say I love you to all that is here

Then I will say I love you to all that is on its way.

Waiting for the deer

It’s far more satisfying to see them,

hunkered down on the woods path,

than to walk the path trying to spy

a patch of brown, a flicker of a tail,

the worn heels of horns sticking out

from the mix of branches.

Tonight I went to the river’s edge

to find another miracle, and

what I found was a locked garden gate,

a dog, unleashed, weaving between gravestones,

two school buses and the herringbone

flash of a falcon moving from a nearby tree

to the deeper part of the woods.

Even the sycamore tree who held

our worries and wishes has been chopped down.

The leaves are beginning to turn,

and the vast landscape of the northern shore

looked more like broccoli stapled to the earth

than anything spectacular. It all made

me think that miracles are wily

beasts able to chart their own arrival.

And tonight they are tending to someone else.

I am sitting where the nuns walk after dinner,

yet no one, this evening, has come

to enjoy the wilting light. It is just

an ordinary plastic picnic table.

a patio made with Home Depot molded stones.

A place of this world and not the other.

There once was a woman who loved the sound

of my feet crunching in the snow,

and tonight, I know she would have

heard the way the dry acorns shattered

under the weight of my steps.

I can see the way she would have smiled.

She is three miles from here, though, lost to me now.

Another is ninety-two miles away. And the last

who loved me because she knew I needed to be loved,

is resting in her bedroom seven states away.

How do I say “I love you” to the

one not yet on the path?

By walking it? By staring down into

the woods for anything familiar?

Do I hinge it to a word, just one,

seeing the way it shines inside out,

as if lit by the western light?

Or do I walk away? Knowing the deer

are grazing elsewhere and in time

they will come out, hungry for what

I can feed them from the palm of my hand.

History

The football coach was my history teacher in high school.

We'd spend Monday and Tuesday reading the next chapter's text,

Wednesday answering the chapter review questions,

Thursday watching a relevant movie, then on Friday we would take the test.

I do not actually remember this man ever talking to us.

Occasionally, a football player would wander into our class

and they would lean together in hushed tones while we read or worked.

I think, I largely gathered enough stuff into my head for the test

(which I promptly forgot) then the whole cycle started again.

The book was red, I remember that. And I remember Amy Paulus

laughing with me as we passed notes and chatted. Yes,

the best part of history class was Amy Paulus.

In the last few months, I have become the keeper of the family documents.

Boxes and boxes of letters, discharge papers, marriage certificates.

In some way, this is an ironic choice. Who will I, the single one, pass this onto?

For now, that is not my worry. I like having the boxes in my attic,

and the contents spread out over my dining room table.

My grandmother's photo album from 1922 when she was a young woman.

A paragraph about my mother washing me in a German sink.

My grandfather's manifesto about his quest to Maine.

Stories of all the men my mother dated in college. Branson, Beau, Dick.

A picture of nine Cowan children, a picture of my father holding up

his first baseball mitt. My brother's genius test scores.

The last letters between my aunt and my mom as Papa was sent to hospice.

And, my favorite today, this photo of Grammy and Papa Reinhold

up north in Wisconsin. Just look at them.

I do not know why there was a war of 1812, or anything

much beyond the tea dumping mythology of the Revolutionary War.

I have no clue who our allies and enemies were in World War II.

I know we slaughtered Native Americans, and that we conquered Hitler

a little too late, but who does not know that?

I did not know about Chernobyl when it happened,

and I was a full-fledged mortgage paying adult then.

I still do not know a Sunni from a Shiite.

If you asked me to name and locate three eastern European countries,

I would ask you if you would like a lemonade and some guacamole.

The box is like those bible verses I skim over, someone begetting

someone else, one lineage following an older lineage, showing that

we all come from one source. But this box, I could not ignore.

This is what I can tell you: My grandmother loved my grandfather,

there is not one picture with him where she is not smiling.

My other grandfather was on a lifelong journey to improve himself,

and that included marrying a preacher's daughter from Tarrytown, New York.

My aunt was born with curly blond hair. My mother, years after.

When she was 5 or 6, she fell and bit the tip of her tongue off.

In high school, she got a C+ in Latin. And a C- in "Foods."

She wore girdles that she bought in New York City.

Sometime, on all those waist cinched dates, met my father.

Years later, he left the service to make her happy.

They had dreams of living in Chicago or Arizona.

My brother was the happiest baby on the planet during 1965,

even though, he crawled backwards

for a long, long time to get where he needed to go.

And, before I could talk, I knew how to whistle.

That's all the history I need to know.

That's the only history that will ever really matter to me.

And the best part, there is no test. No review questions.

It's all just reading and looking, smiling at people alive

before I was ever a person. Linking one love to another

until they all end up here. On this day, with me.