Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

I swore when I got into this poem I would convert this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts of our desolation.

...the mistake I say is a gift don’t be afraid see what it teaches you...

I have the distinct pleasure of slowly untethering the one side from the other which is like unbuckling a stack of vertebrae with delicacy for I must only use the tips of my fingers with which I will one day close my mother’s eyes this is as delicate as we can be in this life practicing like this

and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell from the words my mind makes of the world, and everything makes me mildly or more hungry

Of course she’s dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard— why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness? I am trying, I think, to forgive myself for something I don’t know what. But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet says I am trying to do this or I am trying to do that.

why else would I try to make music of her unremarkable kindness?

yet was not really a candidate for much besides the chill of a minor shame that he would forget for 15 years one of what would prove to be many such shames stitched together like a quilt with all its just legible patterning which could be a thing heavy and warm to be buried in or instead might be held up to the light where we see the threads barely holding so human and frail so beautiful and sad and small from this remove.

I can see myself trying to add some gaudy flourish to this memory to make of it a fantasy which is why I linger hoping to mis-recall the child me make of me someone I wasn’t make of this experience the beginning of a new life

here, where we started, in the factory where loss makes all things beautiful grow.

the puritan in me always carries a shotgun he wants to punish the world I suppose because he feels he needs punishing for who knows how many unpunishable things

the magic dust our bodies become casts spells on the roots about which someone else could tell you the chemical processes, but it’s just magic to me,

Years where nary a blade of grass. Nary birdsong. But one day a small seed took hold. Then anchor. Soon, beetles and spiders came back, and then, and then, the birds were chatting in the new growth.

My mother is not the wings, nor the bird, but the moon across the laced hands of the nest.

Don peered at me again with those sad eyes, or through me, or into me, the way my dead do sometimes, looking straight into their homes, which hopefully have flowers in a vase on a big wooden table, and a comfortable chair or two, and huge windows through which light pours to wash clean and make a touch less awful what forever otherwise will hurt.