Every Sunday I post an original poem.
I don’t really have any poems specifically for or about mothers, which is rather odd, come to think of it. But I do have this one, which is about parenting and marriage and of course, a puppy.
The Puppy Poem
She’s just teething now, the first
Puppy of our marriage — a black
Hound, glossy and bewildered.
Continue reading »
Today is my surviving grandmother’s 94th birthday. She’s in hospice now, near the end of her life. I’ve written various things about my grandparents before, and even my great-grandmother, but today I wanted to share one that wasn’t written as a poem, but as a song, at a time when her husband, my grandfather, was failing. It’s on After the Flood, and it’s called “December.” You can follow along the lyrics with the song:
You could walk forever
and never run out of streets
tripleproofed and wired
with maps on every corner
The police carried ray guns
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It seems that mortality is around me everywhere these days. Relatives left and right are failing, and a few days ago, my sister-in-law’s mother passed away. I have many poems about death and dying, because I have had a lot of people die in my life — most specifically, a lot of peers. Over time, it happens to everyone, of course, but I had three or four deaths like this happen before graduating high school.
Over time, of course, our brains are cruel things: they blur details, they preserve memories of memories, and we lose people twice over: first the loss of the person themselves, and then the loss of the real memory. You could even count that third moment, that instant when the person’s death makes of them something other than what they were: a giant stumbling rock of grief or dismay or shock or horror or even fear, obscuring the person they really were behind our emotional reaction.
This is a poem about memory. Specifically, it is about remembering Ed Schroeder, who was a friend in college — not a close one, but a friend nonetheless. He was a theater geek, specializing in lighting, and he died electrocuted while working on his senior obligation play. Kristen and I were gone from college by then, and we got the typical phone call.
The ocean:
From the blue of apples
To the blue of the craters of the moon. Continue reading »
