Poetry Saves Me

Stay with me...wait for it...there's a donkey in the second poem below.

There's a neon sign in one of my favorite thrift stores--run by a Christian mission, I think, that proclaims "Jesus Saves." It's the thing in that store that I most want. But I'm pretty sure it's not for sale. Not to be sacrilegious  or anything--especially toward anyone who fervently believes, but despite the fact that I want that sign, it's poetry that so often saves me. 

Towards the end of my marriage, my husband would sometimes lie in bed reading the Bible or praying the rosary while I read Yeats. I wonder now if he was praying for the courage to tell me he had a new love, or for me to die, or for our love to rekindle, or maybe for God not to send him to hell for wanting a divorce. I don't know, but I was reading Yeats to read Yeats, and I guess, in a way, to save my soul. I frequently paged through the book to this:

863. When You are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,	5
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled	10
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Here's the poem that saves me today.
A poem by Jane Hirshfield from a recent New Yorker:

MY LIFE WAS THE SIZE OF MY LIFE

My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It rode elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depths of lives, too, is different.
There were times my life and I made jokes together.
There were times we made bread.
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off our clothes on our tongues from

That ending, right? I wondered if the New Yorker might have suffered a typo. But now after several reads, I think that that last line captures the typing through tears and typos joy of being alive, of deciding to live here in the moment with woes and dissatisfactions, knowing that my life is the size of my life, and passionately loving it. 

Which is not to say I'm not struggling.

Earthquake, Santa Anas, and the Full Moon

I awoke with a jolt at 6:25 this morning. Oh, no, here it comes, I thought. It felt as if my house had jumped up in the air and landed hard. Sometimes earthquakes begin with a rumble and shake, but this one was a single sharp blow, and I thought for sure there would be horrible rattling to follow. There wasn't.

I feel earthquakes in my stomach and in my heart, and it takes hours for them to settle. If I lived a life of complete abandon, breakfast might have been steak and eggs and a sturdy red wine, or maybe a 6-pack of beer on the beach. Or something creamy in the blender. Or a couple of Irish coffees in a dark bar. Can you tell I've put a lot of thought into this?

In reality, I drove the man who loves me to the train station and remained completely sober so I could later drive my mother to a doctor's appointment. None of that went particularly well. Santa Ana winds, a full moon, and then an earthquake over the last few days is plenty enough to cause a loss of equilibrium.

My mom woke with a headache, and nausea followed as it usually does these days. After the train station, I left her with her companion and went to yoga for 35 minutes until the plumber called to say he was on his way to fix the leak under my kitchen sink. 35 minutes of yoga is better than none, and I felt remarkably well despite cutting it short. After the plumber, I went to the beach and performed my usual ritual of picking up trash--which this morning included a very soggy five-dollar-bill. An omen, perhaps?

Maybe there's more good luck or money on the way--or maybe my mom's hospital bed! Or maybe The Someone will finally find time for mediation so we can agree on how much he owes me, and I won't go completely nuts and re-hire my attorney again. Or maybe the man who loves me will start feeling better.

But so far what's really happened is this: My mother had another not-so-lovely trip to the doctor with a dishpan on her lap--to find out when we got there that she's lost 10 lbs. in the past month. And she may be developing cellulitis again. The winds are kicking up, and while my mom naps,  I might just pull the covers over my head.

Pillville--Where the days are getting longer.

More daylight at dinner time enhances the conversation between my mother and me. "I think I see a light on in the 3rd floor condo across the way," becomes 'Look at that dog!" or "Don't you think that girl should be wearing a jacket?" Soon there will be hummingbirds and more boats going out, more joggers, more babies in strollers. It's probably just enough to keep both of us from going insane.

Simple observations in the moment are much easier than discussing what's gone on in a day. My mom asks a lot of questions about current goings on that she doesn't remember getting answers to. And I  either don't correct her at all, or I simply answer the question as if she's asking it for the first time--M is taking the plane, not the train to New York. Our houseguests left yesterday, not today--I do get to feeling a bit looney myself. Wait? Did they leave today? Or sad. As the tide lapped into the marina last night, my tears began rising too.

I walked after dinner for the first time in a a couple of months. It seems a workable compromise if I walk around and around the block. When I get to the marina side where the sidewalk passes by the patios of all the houses, I can look in and see my mother tidying the kitchen or standing at the end of the kitchen island reading the newspaper on the iPad. If she disappears, I stop walking and go inside. Last evening, the fresh air and the water was enough to settle me and bring me back to realizing things are really working out pretty well here in Pillville.

Still, Friday evenings are the hardest. I think we all have these rhythms. Tide in. Tide out.  If I am going to wake worrying, it's always between 3:00 and 3:30. I am almost never grumpy or pessimistic in the morning. At 4:p.m. I would like all the cake in the world. To myself. Go away. Or bring me coffee--then go away. I am incredibly thankful, however, that Friday nights are not as hard as they used to be.  I'm pretty sure I would not have survived without my dogs.

But, as always, Friday nights turn into Saturday mornings. And they pretty much always look like this here in Margaritaville.

My mother has had four or five good days in a row--outside of some tiredness, she hasn't had any severe pain or nausea. For the last couple of nights, she's stayed awake and engaged all through dinner without the narcoleptic moments that can come on so quickly it's as if someone has exchanged the salt for slumber dust.

And it's almost springtime. I have the urge to clean things. I took up the very dirty carpet squares in front of the couch. I bought some new pillows and a pouf at the Cost Plus sale. Orange! Orange! More daylight! Orange! I am drunk with light and color. Drunk on the beauty of Margaritaville, sans the Margarita. Which is kind of a miracle.

Pillville: Population 2 (and an elderly cat)

Today went by in a whirl--the last few hours with my son and his family. It was too windy here to be outside so we went into an arcade and shoved $5 bills into token machines, held out our hands and let the children pluck them at will.

Arcades might be among my least favorite entertainments in the world usually, but I tossed that attitude to the wind.

I feel a little like these places are training kids for Vegas, but what the hell....today I might have even bought them candy if they'd asked...

...just kidding. But the time was sweet. And Zoltar says our futures look sweet, too.

But really, we have no idea. Though I do hold somewhat to the idea that we can choose sweetness.

At lunch, my 10-year-old granddaughter wanted to know where she was during the time my son and I were on a trip to Europe in the 90s. You weren't anywhere, I told her. She asked the question again. I told her she wasn't on the planet Earth yet. That she hadn't yet been born. She furrowed her brow and laughed. I love how kids always have trouble imagining their parents before the beginnings of their own lives. Our pasts are to them as mysterious as the future.

And sometimes my own past is mysterious to me, too.

But here I am right here, right now in Pillville with my mom talking to herself as she crochets in her room. Piper the ancient cat has not ventured out yet from her respite under the laundry room sink. I just had a long talk on the phone with my friend Paula about the mysteries of dating. I have to decide if I'm serving leftover spaghetti for dinner again. What does the future hold? And why did the past roll out the way it did? How much control do we have over any of it?