Love
To my daughter at fifteen
And to any girl who needs a blessing.
Beloved daughter, we have arrived at the time of life where I cannot give you everything you want and need. We have come to the time where you must learn to walk alone. That is hard for me, but it is right and good. It is the way things should be.
Listen to me now, for there are things I want to tell you as you stand, trembling, on the edge of womanhood.
I know that boys have become fascinating and mysterious to you. They live in a strange world of their own, the world of young men. It is a world of new muscles and deepening voices. It is a world of astonishing energy and
If Only
When a person dies, there is a sudden collapse of all that they knew. The complex and fragile framework of their worldview, which is a unique thing in all the universe, drops to the ground like the contents of a pricked water balloon. The depth of that loss is incomprehensible.
What is left after death are ghost-like shreds of your personality that live in the memories of those who knew you. Some warped version of you exists in the stories and the sorrow. And then those stories fade. The last to go are the memories of the one who loved you the most. Those memories are twisted and contorted into comforting shapes that he or she clings to for comfort. And then your beloved dies, and you are lost along with everything else that disappears in that terrible event.
After that is only what the children remember. It’s not much when compared to the fullness of a life. And when those children die, there is only a name or maybe a faint memory on someone’s family tree.
On a day and in a moment that no one knows, the last memory of you winks out of existence with the death of the last person who knew your name. And then it is as if you never lived. You join the ranks of the billions of humans who have walked this planet, living and loving and dying. Some were saints who lived and loved and died well. Others not so much. Some were scoundrels. All are forgotten.
It seems to me that the whole world would collapse if I were to die. How could things go on? How could the world continue without my worldview propping it up, explaining it, and giving it a purpose?
The Story of My Love
My love was born at my mother’s breast and in my father’s strong arms. It was a sucking, insatiable, infantile love. I was happily curled in the warm embrace of pure need.
My love was shaped in early days by my need to perform. I worked hard at home, in sports, and at school. I had a first-born child's natural sense that people would love me if I excelled.
My love turned inward and became hidden and personal with a series of best friends. Michael and Mickey and Lance and Steve and Mark and Kenny. We claimed the rights to our own lives and our own loves. We stood together against the world with our secret clubs and inside jokes.
My love thrashed against my arm like a tethered falcon when I discovered the beauty of ponytails and freckled smiles. A series of little girls first turned my head and then turned my guts into jelly. The falcon burst its tether and screeched, circling and diving, causing me to throw myself to the ground in a panic. Bonnie and Carmen and Kathy and Tracy and Diane and Laura and Julie and Elma. How I ached and longed and cried and failed and watched from afar. Waves of feeling rose up in my chest and cast me face-down upon my bed. There was no end to it and no relief because it felt so good and it hurt so bad.
In time I learned the proper words to coax the falcon back to my arm. I slipped the tether around its foot and paraded it about for a few years with an imagined sophistication. Oh yes, I had it all figured out for a time.
And then I went to college and met a woman with a swinging ponytail and brown eyes that were tender and crinkly when she smiled. She sat across from me at the Baylor cafeteria, and when she talked she revealed a certain, indescribable spark of personality that proved irresistible to me. My falcon took one look at her, snapped its tether, and disappeared over the horizon, never to return.
Moon Colors
the night was bending and turning and lonely
we were tossed in our sheets by our dreams
i heard a train in the distance
pleading like a ship seeking safe passage
something is wrong and lonely between us
but the lonely wrongness is going away
because you turned and bent and reached
and so did i
we were sleepy and there were only shades of grey
and our fan, ever faithful
keeping watch over us by night
we sought each other tearfully, finally
you were my pillow and I was your boy
i was your comfort and you were my only one
maybe the night was an opening thing
opening us because we were barely awake
and our guards were down
and nothing casts out fear like sleepy love
it is like a rampart of pressed earth
thrown up before the ages
and beaten by desperate hands
it is like a bulwark of moon colors and faith
rising up in the dead of night
to take on all comers
rlp
For J9, only mine
The Saddest Pretty Thing I Can Do
I remember a long time ago when I was where you wanted to be, and you were where I wanted to be. We ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of where you want to be. We tasted and knew that it was good. This was knowledge. It was the knowing of a thing, and we knew it. We knew where we wanted to be.
But now I wonder if time and children and work and money and worry have made us hard.
On the outside.
And I wonder if we still know where we want to be.
I wonder if this knowledge has gotten lost somewhere along the way, like a precious ring that a little girl lost while playing in her secret place under the bushes. She cried, and she looked, and it should have been right there in the dirt, but it wasn't. It was lost, and thirty-five years later she still thinks about that little ring and wonders where it might be.
The ring was right in front of her but just out of her reach. Maybe it slipped between her fingers as she dragged them frantically through the dirt. Maybe it took a bad hop and was just a few inches beyond belief, hiding under a leaf or behind a twig. As her energy for searching withered, her grief for losing grew until finally she gave up and took her sadness home.
Over the years the ring sunk slowly into the earth until now it lives among the roots and the stones, beyond all hope of being found.
The saddest things are the ones that can be forever lost but never forgotten, like precious rings and love and faith and innocence and play.
You are where I want to be. Am I where you want to be?
Become a girl again and meet this boy under the bushes. Let us find what has been lost. For yours are still the brown eyes for my blue. And mine are still the only fingers that know the secret way to hold your hand and your heart. And ours are the bodies that knew one another and brought three sisters into this world.
You are where I want to be. Am I where you want to be?
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