Prophet sneaking into our morning bed...
Describing grief is like allowing a bathroom stall to open as you pee-- to permit the stream to continue, pee anyway. No one knows how to respond or help.
Should they step up and close it?
Should they hide you?
Is there something inappropriate in the witness of others?
I think of Rilke, run his words through my teeth like a bit, a formal restraint on what I might say or feel in public.
"You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be."
The mention of Mom at odd intersections, junctures between chocolate and winter coats. Last year's coats she purchased. Red wool dress coats with black velvet collars, a vestige of elegant and the fear that the girls will grow, outgrow the memories of her nurture and care. This world we walk into, soldered. The sundriness of year-old grief.
Last year's coats, her purchase: red wool dress coats with black velvet collars, a vestige of elegant and the fear that the girls will grow, outgrow the memories of her nurture and care. This world we walk into, soldered. The sundriness of grief rings hidden inside the heartwood of a tree.
And Audre Lorde, on what a poem can be about:
… that to put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival — that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain… Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities.
The possibility that she is wandering through Greenland, snapping those photographs of a melting world, and this frozen girl need to find her....
