I don’t know if what I feel about you is grief or not. That is the sentence that was repeating in my mind for awhile as I worked to settle my thoughts on objects that relate to you. I had an idea for a table elegy the other week. I should have written it at … Continue reading Table Elegy
January Elegy #5 Preface I have not written much since he died. I should have forced my way through it, even if it sounded mechanical to me. Because I have now passed the rawest months I can’t recreate. Grief is, for me, I think, all about tiny events. And even Bruce’s dying was a series … Continue reading Blood Elegy
January Elegy #4 I brought back a gift for you from Bali. Salt from the north coast and your choice of two, small, white plates from a local pottery. One of the plates must have been made by pouring slip into a mold that gave it the form of a plate woven from some part … Continue reading Salt Elegy
January Elegy #3 Your glasses are folded upside down on the outlet box above the counter in the kitchen. You got them not long before you died. Your eyes were changing from the radiation. The lenses are smeared with blood I will never wash away, like the blood in between the floorboards of the kitchen; … Continue reading Horizon Line
January Elegy #2 When I wrote January Elegy yesterday, I imagined that I could write an elegy once a month for a year, which means I will already have missed 6. I could reconstruct them. But those earlier months had a rawness to them I can’t reproduce. The pain is not the same. My thoughts … Continue reading Ghost
I wish I had thought of it before now – a year of elegies, one for every month since you died until we get to July. Perhaps July gets 2? But I didn’t think of it until just now. And I hadn’t thought about elegies at all until Lana sent one about Bluebells and you … Continue reading January Elegy #1
Mammalia means one who suckles - to feed a baby from a breast or teat. Londa Schiebinger writes that when mammalia was chosen, there were two other terms in contention - aura caviga, meaning hollow-eared, and pilosa, meaning hairy. But nursing one's baby was politicized, in the time of Linnaeus, for noble women who would … Continue reading
September 15 1. I was vaguely reading all of the signs in the car - because words are like that, demanding to be read, sometimes begging, sometimes pleading - when I saw the message that surprised me with its unexpected positive directive adjacent to the negative one: Do Hold Each Other/Do Not Lean On The … Continue reading Remembering Summer on the 1 – #26
August 19 1. The snake is almost liquid now, merging with the earth, sunken and rank. 2. It had pulled itself into an infinity loop, looped twice, tucked its head under one of the inner curves of its body, and stopped living. I touched it, wanting it to untwine and disappear. The snake's body was … Continue reading Convergence – #23
July 19 1. I got salt in the mail from you. It reminded me of King Lear and his misunderstanding of his daughter's assertion. So I felt loved, though that was a misunderstanding of your intention. The salt was from Bali. I don't know if it was from the north coast or not but I … Continue reading Love Notes – #20
Tiny Events 