Seventeen

          for my daughter

Seventeen years you have been with me.
I’ve tried to protect you from harm
And prepare you with knowledge and skills
And a moral compass to guide you.

And here you are, such an excellent person,
Smart but not arrogant about your brainpower,
Sympathetic about the difficulties of those around you,
Happy to have fun with your friends and enjoy being alive.

The hypocrite adults all say: “Do what I say, not what I do.”
So I have tried to teach by example.
But the example of my life is a checkered record at best,
So take what you like and leave the rest.

I hope that you have what you need most by now.
I don’t take the credit for who you are
Though others compliment me upon meeting you.
I hope that misfortune mostly passes you by.

This year the world will change for you on your birthday.
This is the day you will get your driver’s license.
No more will you be under my wing going here and there.
You’ll be an adult in the eyes of the DMV.

I remember the delight of mobility first gained in my youth.
Now I’ll be free of the driver duties for you, do you think?
Not! Really it will be a loss of something I enjoyed,
But you’ll begin to get the feeling of not depending on others.

In that way adult means being independent and self-sufficient.
Of course I hope you always need me and seek me out as an advisor,
But most of all I wish for you to surpass me totally
In what you know and what you accomplish.

The Promise

          for Julie


This I can promise you, you who are bereft in your loss:
She is gone from the external world but remains with you.
She will be there for you when you need her most.
You will feel her guiding you when you are quiet in yourself.

You will honor her and remember her and carry on her traditions.
You will cook a special dish and she will be there.
You will arrange flowers and cherish a peony and she will be there.
You will wrap a present in her special way and she will be there.

I know these things because my mother is with me still,
Though she died nigh on fifty years ago.
And I have children who never knew her
And births she missed and I sorely missed having her with me.

But I keep her memory alive and I give her to my children
In ways they know and ways they do not know
Because she is in me and is acting through me.
It is not just stories of another time, it happens right now.

When I set out a vase with gladiolas, her favorite flowers,
She is present in a way that defies logic.
I feel her love and I express my love to my children
And in that way she touches me and them with her love.

Memoriam

          for Barbara

Today we gather to honor the woman who was my aunt.
I am here to add to the chorus singing her praises.
Wife and mother, nurturing people and plants, decorator par excellence,
Shopkeeper and more, she did everything well.

It is strange for me to speak of her as a separate person.
To me she has always been there together with her husband
And I marvel at their sixty years happily married.
Not once did I hear a hint of discord or annoyance between them.

I know that there were difficult times for her and for him
Growing up and then making their way as young adults and later in life.
It was not a bed of roses, not at all, but I heard never a complaint.
Their love for each other and for their children made a safe haven in their home.

As an adult I would seek them out, awestruck by their love,
Grateful for their acceptance of my faults and their support and encouragement,
As I am sure my cousins their children likewise received.
She will live on in our memory as an exceptionally good person.

Barbara, I can hear your voice. You are speaking kindly, affectionately.
You say “Charlie,” beginning a sentence. Can you all hear it? "Charlie."
This room is filled with love for you because of the love you gave us
Like some multiplier effect for the currency of the heart.

We are your legacy in the way you touched our lives
And showed us by your example, bearing up and carrying on.
As we go on with our lives and are good to each other,
So we honor your life among us. Thank you for the sweetness you brought us.

The Quickening

The declination of the sun tips towards us again
As February moves towards March
And the ducks are soon active on the mill pond
Before the ice has completely melted away.

The drakes beset the ducks when spring is still an idea
Imagined in the angle of the sunlight.
The predatory snapping turtle still sleeps in the mud below,
For fifty years or more rising later in the spring to devour the ducklings.

As I imagine the idea of someone new, of an intimate relationship,
As if we have lived shared experiences in a parallel past,
As if she knows my heart and I hers. It is possible.
After all, spring is on the way.

She has her pond, too, not the same pond, but not so different,
Left there by the receding glacier as part of that Long Island,
Part of that huge pile of billions of round stones that is the island now.
On her pond the swans nest and lose their cygnets to another large turtle.

Her swan is not the lustful Zeus swan who raped Leda.
Her swan is female, tenderly hatching the eggs,
As if Leda was transformed into a swan by the experience,
And her offspring each spring tragically get devoured, one by one.

And what would bring us together now, more or less sixty years old?
There is the bittersweet sorrow of our losses, each our own.
There is the eye for fleeting beauty in the world around us.
There is the dream of a companion’s embrace.

For her the stars and stones somehow conflate. I do not understand.
I think the stones break bones and words can hurt, too.
I think there is deep pain there but it is not my metaphor.
At times she is too abstract for me.

A humanist feminist: that’s good for me in theory.
It’s not an intellectual act, though, and not an act of will.
What the heart feels is like a dream, not a rational argument,
And trust and courage are matters of the heart, mine and hers.