Family Protrait

For my son Ethan, the budding artist...


we are goggle eyed

hovering in the air
like waifs with spindle
arms. handless.
appendages speared
haphazardly into our
circular torsos. we smile
although with absent
noses we can’t
smell the lead filling
our bones. our single
line check mark mouths
remain mute in our
white paper existence.
my son is armed with
his pencil and says,
I made this for you.
he offers it like a rare
flower bouquet he might
have made on the
side of a road on
a Caribbean island.
and so precious it
is to me, like a gem
encrusted with the
warmth of the summer
ocean.

Dream

The miscellany of my dream,

The bits of features, eyes,

Lips, floating in an aberrant

Cloud, cling to me still

In the morning. It is dense,

A fog that swallows the

Reality of wakefulness.

I think about it again

And again, the dream--

a disjointed mess

Of a thing with the gravity

Of a dying star. I see faces

Familiar in a way that

Draw my heart sharply

To the surface, like pulling

Strings away from a fraying

Rug. Is it you, though,

 in this dream, the weight

of you, that hangs over

me, separating you like oil

From the sea of others?

You, who whittle the

fragments of sentiment

into sharp knives that

incise the shell of my sleep?

I  am forced to wear your

memory like a winter coat

in the middle of August.

Coming Home

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. Romans 8:18

There is a picture. It is of my grandfather, John Cassady. He is standing at the edge of a hill, hands in his pockets, looking over the valley below. Around him, the landscape is in autumn twilight, a burning of yellows and reds, the colors of low flame before the extinguishing cold of winter. My grandfather is in profile, his chin raised a little, and it seems to me he is seeing into something I cannot, as I am bound by the confines of the picture.

I think of my grandfather now, at the end of my grandmother, Irene's, life. I think of him in this picture in particular. I think of it, because I know, for all the years that they have been separated, he has been standing on the edge of the expanse of heaven, waiting. Waiting for her to come home. Hands in his pockets. Waiting. 

The sadness we all have felt during her suffering, the grief at having to sever the tethers of the earthly love we have so long bound her up in, seems unbearable. Our human hearts do not want to let go. And why would we want to? Grandma, at least for me, had always been. Even at my age, I had never imagined her not being there.

These things about her that had always been: her peels of laughter, her love of us as children, and the same love she showed to our children. Dinners at Christmas, and chicken and dumplings for any occasion. Watching Hee Haw during Saturday Night sleepovers. Roses. Her house full of black and white pictures of her mother, and her sisters, of her children, the girls all in matching Mary Janes and cardigan sweaters, of grandchildren and great grandchildren. Sitting in church with her at Gethsemane. Her loyalty and her selflessness, giving of anything she had. 

But, through all of this journey, through all of these painful steps to the end of her beautiful life, I see him. Grandpa. Waiting. And he was never the most patient man. He always was one step ahead of where she was. But, for her, he has had all the time in world. Patiently waiting. And, I cannot tell you how comforting it is to me, that he has finally left that post he has kept for so long, watching over her, to meet her as she finally comes home. Her real home, in heaven. 

So, in my mind, the picture changes a little. My grandfather is still on that hill, looking over the valley. But grandma is now there, too, grasping his hand, and looking out, seeing that something I cannot.

God comforts me. He comforts us all. Because the thing that Grandma and Grandpa can see that we don't is this: they are watching over all of us. And will always be patiently waiting.

The Passage

there are years all over the floor

collecting in invisible piles discarded

newspaper frail words slip unnoticed

into grooves of the floor it's hard

to distinguish good years from

bad they all shed themselves

and leave the course skin of 

irreversible time behind if

I sift through them the years

my years like flipping through

aged paperbacks at the flea 

market I can surely seize the 

ones I don't remember but

do remember they bear

a tag of significance but 

you can't hold in your

lap something that has already

evaporated time pours itself

out thick and sweet like honey

dissolving what it can as it goes

Yearbook

I fight to remember many things. Not that I am particularly old, not that my mind is falling away, chaffed against time, not those things exactly. It is really about being removed. I fight to remember things that have long passed me. I look out at the passing of time as if I ride in a car, and things blur together in shades of fantastic color. And that's good to recall. The blurry and comforting outline of things.

But this is not it. This kind of complacent remembering. The outlines. The shadows of memories falling across a wall. I fight to remember. Because, if I don't, I fall into the folds, the soft places that connect one day to another, and I forget the strong lines that pull me together.

As I put away towels (the endless drudgery of putting away towels), Amelia comes into the bathroom, looking at something on top of the shelves where I am putting away laundry. "I like that dog," she says, and I have no idea what she is talking about. Then I remember. I look at it, and say to her, putting two neatly folded towels on the shelf underneath it, "That used to be in my grandmother's house."

It is a ceramic hound dog, hollow from the nape of its neck down its spine; it must have been meant to be a planter. And I am suddenly accosted by this dog's former place of residence: on a wooden bookshelf, at my grandmother's, sandwiched in between two chairs. And on the bookshelf, the hound dog was frozen in time sniffing a stack of yearbooks.

Now, as a child, I was fascinated by these yearbooks. My aunts and uncles were enshrined in them. But best of all, so was my father. His yearbook was maroon and embossed with a crest. There were one yearbook that was bound in glittery red; one in silver, I think. I would look through the neat rows of pictures, and there were trends of last names that a lot of the students shared. Because that is common where I grew up; long lines of families reaching back deep into the swells and valleys of the mountains.

The memory of me sitting in a chair by that bookshelf, looking through each yearbook, while the ceramic hollow bellied dog watched me, hits me suddenly and quite vividly. I can hear the adults, just around the corner of the bookshelf, in the dining room (which had a slant to the floor), talking over opaque cups of coffee in mismatched mugs (my grandmother would leave a half cup of coffee sitting in just about every room of the house; having forgot she had one, she would pour herself another). At the dining room table my grandpa made, they talked: my dad, and my mother, my aunts Penny and Pam, and my grandmother, sitting at the head of the table, balancing a cup between her two hands. And she spoke slowly and softly as I flipped through the pages of a yearbook, scanning black and white photos, hoping to see my dad, marveling that he could be a child like me.

Amelia doesn't give the ceramic dog in my bathroom a second thought. I wonder, when she is my age, and is fighting to hold onto her child memories, what she will want to remember most. She never knew my grandmother, but she has been there in that room with the bookshelf. The bookshelf remains there, but nothing much is on it. The dining room, with the slant to the floor, is all but folding in on itself now. My grandparents are gone. The colors of conversation and embraces with them blur at the edges like watercolor. But in the middle, the memories are clear and physical and good.

And I am lucky to be putting up towels and remembering them. No fight at all.

After Dinner

I've been watching you for hours. It's been years since we were born. We were perfect when we started. I've been wondering where we've gone.
                                                                              --Counting Crows



The rain is cold and plants
itself on the windshield, spreading
blisters of water across the
glass. In the dark the interstate
sprawls ahead lit by streaking lamps
at intervals along the pavement.
I say I am happy. And he smiles,
a silhouette of sadness in the
way his lips imperceptibly part. There
in that space is an expanse of time
before this rain, of silence and strain
against dreams falling like stricken
stars, of hands almost touching, and
fingers wrapped around loneliness.
I say, I like talking to you. He nods.
The rain throws pellets
harder at the earth. I turn my
attention to the radio.

Pillows

I am a fool for pillows. Pillows who have no other purpose but to look. Well. Pretty. Pretty pillows to bring out a color in a room. Pretty pillows I found at a flea market, made of blue chenille, extraordinary in their three dimensional knobs of stitches. Pillows my grandmother made, limp as days old lettuce leaves, but breath taking all the same because I am aware that her tiny fingers bound the pattern on the pillows together, sitting in her rocker, working by the light of the thin paned window.

Outside that window was s snowball bush, which shed its petals like a storm of white rain, and my grandmother sewed with back bowed over a quilting hoop that is now sits  alone in my attic.

I have the quilting hoop because I would piece quilt squares with her. I'm not sure why I pieced them, perhaps a way to pass time in her house (where time barely moved, as slow as still moving beads of water on an imperceptible slope), or because sitting next to her was solid, a steel line between a girl and her grandmother, and it felt good to be attached to her her, a rock in the middle of the shallows of my life.

I must tell you, she had black hair, bound in a bun at the nape of neck, but it wasn't bound tight; her hair swooped in a wave in the front before collapsing together among its constraining bobby pins in the back.

There are pillows everywhere in my house. And my children like to make forts out of them. They stack them, then knock them down. They scatter them in rooms where they don't belong. Pillows wind up in my kitchen, islands floating just below the refrigerator. I pick up the pillows and deliver them back to the sofa from whence they came. I expect the pillows to stay put. But they don't. Ever.

The cycle of repositioning pillows goes on and on.

I painted my daughters' room pink. Pale pink and demure. My oldest daughter asks me daily if we can repaint it, PURPLE, she exclaims, like I am ignorant to not have suggested a room color change before. But it is wearisome to me, to change everything to PURPLE. Everyday, I dig pillows out from underneath my daughters'  beds. Nothing in there is PURPLE. But I always pull out the pillow my grandmother made me when I was a girl. She always gave us hand made gifts at Christmas. And I loved them.

This pillow had on it, I think, a pattern called Flower Garden. My mind might be making that up, but the pattern looks like octagonal flowers, bound in the back with thin pink cotton material. It looks like a flower garden to me. I could fold that pillow in half, it is so flimsy and worn, but I always put in on my daughter's bed like I am placing china in a cabinet. I see my grandmother's hands working the thread through the fabric. Her stitches were small and efficient.

The cycle of pillows. The cycle of things being thrown down and built up and displaced and made whole. The cycle of disarray and order, of chaos and sense. Everyday, several times a day, I rearrange pillows. Pillows that bring out the color in a room,

Our the memory of my grandma and her hands.

My children don't understand the meaning of pillows. To them, they are barriers, or jumping posts, or roofs to a castle.

Because of this, I am constantly returning pillows to a place of belonging and symmetry. Because a Flower Garden does not belong under the bed with the discarded Barbies, and because momentary order can buy you an ounce of peace.