September
Cherry Pit Words
Sometimes a single word becomes a cherry pit I keep in my mouth long after I have swallowed the burst of fleshy sweetness surrounding it. My tongue explores the contours of the seed’s surface, noticing occasional inconsistencies in texture and form. Its three-dimensional shape is both familiar and unexpected. My brain forms a precise picture without my camera eyes.
Bare is a cherry-pit word. Like certain songs, it lingers in my mind and pulls me to forgotten places…
October
Five Directions to My House
Go through the village of San Geronimo where the adobes nestle along the creek
Wind your way up the rutted dirt road, inhaling the ponderosas and the cotton ball clouds
Beneath the red-orange earth, the sage and Indian Paintbrush hold hands with rock fragments and clay
Listen for bleating baby goats crossing the meadow to their mother; Hermit’s Peak, the majestic silent protector stands guard
You are there, almost, the cabin waits
Five years old, maybe six, too young to hold this much grief.
A few years ago when I was working in a middle school, I completed this poetry assignment alongside the students. The assignment was to use Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Five Directions to My House” as a poetic structure and give directions to our own houses.
I came across my poem the other day while procrastinating creating new writing by wallowing in the old. So much of my writing points its compass toward grief. I cling to it, telling myself if I write about pain, I will release myself from suffering. But perhaps I do not wish to be released. When I am inside grief, I am inside the most powerful emotion of all.
Grief is love. Love for what once was, but is no more. Love for a future that didn’t unfold in the way I hoped it would. Love for everyday routines, voices, faces, and names that do not belong to today’s reality but live on within me. They are embedded in landscapes and houses and streets and yards and alleyways and rooms, each with their own textures, their own quality of light. I close my eyes and remember the light changing in each of thee places as the hours and seasons passed; I pick up on subtle sounds and smells that didn’t seem significant then but have become the golden thread stitching memories neatly to my heart.
Grief has led me to a place where I can love the departed in a less cluttered way. And I feel them loving me back, holding me close with hugs that begin as a warm, tender-yet-firm touch deep within me and radiate out toward my skin, instead of the other way around. I am now free to love them without masking any part of myself or hiding complicated feelings.
All of the resentments, the annoyances, the pressure to perform, the fear of losing them or losing their adoration are stripped away. I see them in their full complexity and accept them because their inside-out hugs assure me they have extended me the same unconditional love. And yet I miss them intensely. The world feels wrong without their human bodies and I still feel the loss, at a loss, lost.
When I allow myself to enter my grief room, I have an intense urge to write. I am also thirsty for knowledge. I want to know the history of my people and their people and their people’s people. I long to know the indoor and outdoor spaces they inhabited and those they met along the way. How they saw themselves, how others saw them.
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