TiaLucia

Mad Men

• Don: Well, congratulations.
• Joan: For what?
• Don: For getting divorced. Nobody realizes how bad it has to get for that to happen. Now you get to move on.

Detached

Here is the day
I let it go, blew it up
watch it all disintegrate:
separate and celebrate 
the rip is the beginning,
the building, split—
here is a wing.
Watch how, alone
but attached,
that is how to climb,
the capacity to fly. 

Biological Clock

• Me: You're like, "Oh yes, I'm fine, other than the fact my uterus has grown arms and is now reaching out toward the baby in this picture."
• Kate: LOL, pretty much!
• Me: But could you say that in French?!
• Kate: I could try, but probably it would sound even more unnatural that it does in English... "The arms of the area below my stomach want to be pregnant with this baby."

Cherokee Princess

We planted a dogwood in the ground:
roots tangled together, dirt held tight
in a ball, some tribe gathered closely around.

This will be a blooming burial mound.
Your mother will come under the cover of night
to place part of your cremains in the ground.

I imagine you singing but can’t hear a sound,
I can read your words but not witness you write,
I close my eyes and see you but you’re not around.

Now there is no single place you will be found:
you are the moon, reflecting the sun’s light;
water flowing under sediment, a river underground.

I think of you everywhere, holy places abound
where I can see your spirit without my sense of sight:
your heart is in my heart, I carry you around.

So I’m surprised to find the feeling most profound—
gratitude, for the creation of one place we might
come with tender hands to touch a home in the ground
we’ve dedicated as yours, to commune around.

“While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world’s greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.”

—Pema Chödrön, excerpted from her book “The Wisdom of No Escape”

Small Yawns Constructing Chaos

It is the wave that rarely raises now—
the desire to move, to connect, to do anything
at all. Tasks melt into each other until I’ve forgotten how

to lift a spoon: a holy fast without a sacred vow.
Outside, everything is being reborn, it is spring
and all the living is trapped in bloom just now;

except you are ashes; no more tightening of your brow,
no more watching as you drive and passionately sing.
New days keep coming, but I am not sure how.

You are gone forever but my brain won’t allow
that reality to permeate beyond paper, and so I cling
tightly to each moment of the past, trying to drag it into now.

I refuse to say dead—as if that could remove the chains and endow
some prospect you’ll return from the realm where Thanatos is king—
when escape has always been an illusion, not even Sisyphus knew how.

So I remain stagnant in memory: unwilling to sail from this lough,
refusing to leave behind the treasures our past will continue to bring,
until each tender thought becomes a septic action against the now:
the present is so loathsome—I might be willing to survive (but I don’t care how)

“Today I will conjure love from the empty air. I will call it out from thin places where people walk without breathing, from dark places where they stumble without seeing. I will find love in those I do not like and let love appear in the faces I avoid. I will make room for love in my life even if I feel overcrowded with worry. I will offer love without restraint even if I have not received love in return. I will dance with love in innocent pleasure. I will sing love as though my voice were a new discovery. Today I will be the love God made me be when God called me from the empty air.”

—Bishop Steven Charleston

Alouette Grise

At first you wanted that dress to be gray,
but when we talked of weddings recently and I asked—
no, I would wear something different now—you say.

I’m told again and again it will get better, and it may—
I’d prefer this constant walk through a graveyard you don’t have not last;
you’re not buried, but your tombstone, the sky and the Tiber, are gray.

What happened was so surreal, any possible logic locked in your DNA.
Within the tight muscles of your tender heart, the wrong cells amassed:
there are ashes to spread, there is nothing to say.

I want to think the carbon fibers deep in your being knew it would happen this way;
distilled in this light, dissected while you are, your last words become easy to recast.
You will never wear a wedding gown, but the subject of your final poem will be gray.

Everyone attempting preservation: doctors cooling your body while we pray,
kept functioning and warm after you die—the space between here and next so vast,
you left before ‘gone’ was a word anyone would say.

There are delicate parts of you that remain—ripe kidneys cut away,
thick words captured in a paper web and photos gathered into frames will last.
But where you were to be, that future has been consumed by an endless gray,
no matter what I want to discuss, thoughts of you are all I can say.