Settling In Gently

2020.02.23 Every Day Songs-- Poems from Grief's First Year Every day songs Oct 10 heart is a bird  Blue eyelids over blind eye-bulbs Tremulous and fallen Aged and unflown Naked out of the stony ribs of the nest August 12, 2019 For a moment i become aware I have a shadow sisterself At my right side overlapping me Coinjoined by a lung like a blue venn diagramm And I am fine I budget I grumble I diet I fret but I'm fine She, all along Weeps For a moment i am drenched in her hot tears Like a veil over her face I am dragging my body through my life, and she is on my arm, Invisible A cool blue weight Always crying The strange tears on my face Are hers. 10/31 Halloween today and It's raining yellow leaves under like cherry blossom petals in Japan. Leaves living and bright as gold leaf across a screen. A slight man walks down the road ahead of me, his hair a Blacktail at the back of the skull. He's hunched up against the cold and in

When I was 10, I got my period. A black smeary embarrassing surprise in my panties, discovered after the long walk back from the Takoma Park Folk Festival. I hid the soiled panties, threw them away.  What did this onset mean? What kind of person did this determine I would be? I had some alarming ideas about immaculate conception. Perhaps God, someone who seemed terrifyingly real and literally potent, would want me to be the special chosen vessel for the next of his sacred seed. In my room, amid the hoarded little boxes of shells and peach pits and candy wrappers and coins and stickers and fruity smelling erasers, a pile of ruined underwear grew, ignored, a testament to a kind of hostile takeover of my body, over my life. * When my daughter Rosie Jo was 9, her dad died. With her stunned big hazel eyes in her round white face, she told me seriously that she was scared she had to be the man of the family now. I said, no honey. We don't replace the people we've lost. They