"R"s
Tuesday mornings clasped me to a table with a hard woman in capris
who didn't know me
who didn't want to be known.
Before me
she scattered matching games, enticements, and bright-eyed shame.
Her easy exaggerations
"Ca-ar—car—She dr-ove the red car a-round the curve"
caught and strangled between my tongue and throat.
I flattened my frustration
was polite but didn't practice.
I despised
absolutely shriveled
when the school rushed past the room.
They peeked at the woman and snatched at my secret.
She made me cry, once
I got home, away from her and my crust of nonchalance.
The waste made me cry:
my forced effort, thin but long, washed useless against habit.
My future, dried up because I couldn't talk right.
("Right" is easier to say than "normally.")
The warmth of my mother, lost in a waste of nags.
I love my mom now.
I gave a valedictorian speech.
Why does the shame still sear my memory?
Where were you then, Lord?
"I was the grace which stopped the children from asking.
I stopped the adults before your breaking point.
I wrapped your brother's thoughts at taunts in mercy.
I trained your tongue.
I sat with you, the third at the table.
I brushed the tears from your cheeks.
Your speech remains imperfect.
Perfection, though, would constrain my grace.
Your wrestling cleared a space around your soul.
May I fill it with mercy?"
Centennial, CO
Sunlight
The light mixed itself into the pale yellows,
sage greens, and soft whites of my aunt's kitchen.
Her gaze, as dim as a slow scuttling storm at dusk,
settled on my eyes when I spoke.
When she gave advice she took my elbow in her freckled hand,
but for stories she held her rumpled rag
against the counter’s corner, or circled it flat against the granite.
She told of three ladies
who lived out their last decades on her street.
Two hated the one who wore a bikini
in her front yard, back in the fifties.
Even as her figure weakened
and her skin drooped into limpid folds,
their jealousy snouted deep
like a disgruntled mole in dark soil.
My aunt lifted her palms and eyebrows.
“It was just the strangest thing.”
That night, dinner moved slow
from counter to table to prayer—
nothing taut between souls or schedules rushed that house—
and my uncle told of a redwood as high, brawny, and solitary
as beauty may be.
The owner of the earth between its roots
(if a man can own the age and change
of an evergreen or sandy soil)
determined majesty to be lumber.
At the crash of the felling, a splintering sprang
from limb to ligament,
and he never changed his wood to wealth.
“The oddest thing,” my uncle said.
The old pair looked at stories with a frankness in their eyes,
and sometimes a heavy-swelling worry.
But then a country song would swing
my aunt and I around the kitchen
in the ageless sway which is the meeting of two eras,
of two strong hands,
of an old womanhood and a new.
And then my uncle’s smile would deepen with his delight
of plunking a biscotti into my coffee
and rolling small blueberries into my palm.
The clouds scurried dark and swift across their countenances
because a strong light threw those vapor shadows.
Walnut Creek, CA
Bildungsroman
Twice, yesterday, I saw my dad in pain.
A father ages into weakness
as a child hardens into strength
so that compassion might soften
the meeting of two minds
made as rough as a broken stone.
Tyson's Corner, VA
Hope
(Or, Roughly, Happiness)
There will be more light glinting off the leaves.
There will be more leaves greeting the wind in broad eagerness,
once these yellow and crumple.
There will be more breezes taming their hours and miles
into the gentlest touch on a cheek.
Earth and sun will spin new time
like the old women at their wheels in Scotch tales
or the young Fates weaving Greek legends.
Young men will chip money from stone
or grow it from the ground
or trade it for the labor of their minds.
Old men will think new stories
which the mothers will form into character
and the children into dreams.
And those dreams will strengthen into abundance
like sap into wide-spreading branches
where wind and leaves and light
dance to the years
and to the children’s love.
Littleton, CO
Sabbath
I'd like to defend crooks—
not criminals, but the shape.
Yesterday, the dividing of an oak trunk cradled me,
strong and gentle.
I folded my body into the tree
and stayed on the phone with my mama
long enough that her conversation turned away from me
to laugh with the neighbors who bent the rules
and planted pumpkins outside their fence.
Later a hammock crooked around my shoulders
and I watched
how the clouds bent,
brittle as fishbones,
around the embrace of the wind.
The whole day took a bending trail
toward a loquat tree
and a changed flight
and conversations all of different lengths and times.
The time wandered comfortingly.
I'm growing in allowing my days the easiness to turn
without wheeling
or whipping the moments into minutes.
I've found hurry dims peripheral sight
so I solely love what's straight ahead.
but it's only the crooks in my path
which cradle a need not my own
or the sigh of a friend
entering, shyly, into peace.
Palo Alto, CA
The Lesson
On every walk
my mama
(soft, eager, and generous
as a morning glory after a rain)
says, "Look, Bethany."
Now I exclaim her,
"Look!"
back to her,
echoed over the years
and across state lines
and into poetry.