for Jon, Maria and Izzy
the tulip is singing
a song for the broken-hearted.
a song of grief
and a song of rejoicing.
a song of remembering
and of forgetting
of holding and letting go.
I ask myself these questions:
can you let yourself be sung?
(the melody is unknown)
can you let yourself be danced?
(there are no steps)
can you open and open again,
trembling in the wake
of this fierce music?
I remember these trains from my childhood. This one is by the side of the road – part of an ice cream shop outside of Bay City, Wisconsin.
Last night, as I lay in bed, I could hear the distant trains that pass below the bluff along the Mississippi. I love the sound – distant, eerie wails but comforting somehow. Hearing them in the night, they feel subterranean – buried in memory – dream trains, bearing hidden cargo, moving between the big cities at night, out of and back into the dark. Echoes of an earlier time, but here still, calling me now.
Visiting the Midwest is like that for me. I feel surrounded by the ghosts of old selves, haunted by the layered dust of memory. My sister and I touch those times tenderly, casually. Being here feels like traveling backward in time into a present that holds the shapes, smells and tastes of the past.
It used to be that coming home felt like trying to put on ill-fitting, outgrown clothes. Now it is different. Time and space seem jumbled, wrinkled and folded in on each other. Everything is familiar and I am the stranger, traveling on the dream train. Destination unknown.
On another note: Jon Katz has been sharing poems that go to the heart and this one is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. There is no confusion here: past and present woven, shining with appreciation.
I read this poem, “When you Can’t Stop Crying” by Jon Katz on Friday morning and burst into tears It has been a raw, dark week for me. There is a part of me that cannot feel into what is coming, or that fears what is coming and prefers not to look.
And then there is my beloved, beloved Capprichio, nose in the grass, hooves on the earth, eye to me, reminding me to taste what is here right now, to stand where I am and breathe all of this in. And today, when I was appreciating him, and appreciating the warmth, and appreciating the opening blossoms om my crab apple tree, the lilacs, the sun I could feel a budding possibility, beyond my control, beyond even my ability to imagine.
This weekend I am traveling to Minnesota to visit my sister. Janet is one of the most ebulliant and optimistic people I know. When the genetic cards were being dealt, she got those. Whenever I see her, I say I am going to get an infusion of “Janergy.”
Next post from St. Paul.
After lunch yesterday with Jon and Maria, Jon told me that he still didn’t know what I do every day, reading my blog. He also said that he didn’t feel like he knew much about me. He likes the blogs, likes the writing, but wants to feel more of me there. “Caught,” I thought.
The conversation came around to hiding, to fear. I talked about not wanting people to know too much of my life. “Why?’ he said. I thought that I might burst into tears. The feeling was like the moment before an avalanche. A huge cliff of hanging snow about to plunge down the mountain, obliterating everything before it. “I am afraid,” I answered.
“Why?” he asked again. I talked about the kind of fear and vigilance that I carry. Twenty-six years married to the same woman. The love of my life. And in the world, I walk around with this mantle of fear and caution. Not all the time, but often. It seeps into my writing. It colors how much I will say, how much of myself I will show.
I didn’t talk about age, or even about how I hide my age. I will talk about it later. I am not sure how much of the fear and hiding I can unravel in one post.
I think that is why I loved being with Rocky. Why I love my horses, Capprichio, Amadeo and Sanne, and why I spend time every week with Nelson. They do not care about any of that. They care that I am there, that I am present with them. And when I am with them, I don’t care about any of those things either. It all falls away. Dissolved in love and in the moment.