Ray Charles in my blood, bag o' rags and nights in the attic of my girlfriend's house. Just friends - the old definition. Trying to sort out
sister love and hate, father drunk always accompanied by a pail of white paint and the prospect of passing out and mom, oh what a believer. No stopping her and her sexy self. None of it quite added up but this was my chosen teenage family and when she walked through my door, the vibration stopped, the music was syncopated, the couches long and filled with possibility. She knew she could hide there. Her house was my escape. My house was her refuge. 

What incredible views from down here,
from that place we all travelled before
but this time the destination is new.
A touch, a glance, an impression so powerful it floats,
like the gravity of a new planet undiscovered, 
brilliantly lit and surrounded by an atmosphere 
you no longer have to adjust to.
Family, that strange and other worldly space
nothing else can replace, to which nothing else compares.
All the years that passed, all the oblivion and misconceptions,
all the baggage you cannot check, has somehow disappeared.

I stood before you like a child who could not comprehend your pain,
your desperation, your plea for release.
Who wouldn't understand your inability to let go, to concede,
to accept the doctor's hardly indirect question that you are ready
for the netherworld, that negative space, that parallel universe
we'll never know but are destined for?

How could you? No one is prepared for that. But your eyes pleading
while your heart could not let go were convincing enough for that
indelible signature when for a split second we wondered if we were ready, knew we weren't, knew we never would be.

Goodbye dear mother. How can it be a year to the day tomorrow?
How can it be that long that we haven't spoken, haven't argued, got
pissed off about politics or the state of the world?

I am in your likeness you and then again me
and I feel one layer less, that vacancy, that minor to the major.
But I promise in the days ahead,
the weeks, months and years,
I will try to release you.

All my love.

24 hours to the day we had that talk, you and me. The one I always dreaded, the one you never wanted to have but always tried to. What constitutes the end, the life force, exactly what is it you're going to give up? Of course, I didn't have the answer and you didn't ask the question and somehow all of a sudden we were having this conversation that was so final, so irreversible, so irreconciliable. How can you have a conversation like that with your parent, with the one who gave birth to you? With no conclusion, only silence that is deafening and then the knowing. Of the end. To this day I can't totally accept it but I will try and keep on trying and that's all I can ask for. To you, mother of my invention, to you, my love always. 

Mother, where are you?

This time, I didn’t get lost in the department store.

This time, I’m not wondering when you will get home from work.

This time, I’m not eating fried chicken from Wishbone up the street

or missing my brothers and sisters who moved out.

This time, I’m not waiting for daddy because he is long gone.

This time, I am alone and it feels like an eternity.

i don't want your dna
or your hair color
or your ambulance chasing thoughts
i don't want your random phone calls
your insincere inquiries
your baseless doubts.

where were you
when she was lonely?
what did you say? with no reserve...
no imagination...no moment in time
that meant enough.

and now you wonder where she is
you can't reach her
not because you have something to say,
not because you care,
not because you really love her
but because you think you must.

Incredulous, we walk this path of darkness
remembering that call at 1:40 a.m., so delirious
from the news we granted ourselves another hour
of rest, a sleep so layered, opaque without dreams,
interrupted starkly by the shock of death.

The other nights left us speechless, floundering
around for solutions, someone to bathe you, clean the place,
prepare a meal, give you strength when you were so weak,
weave a good and convincing tale to take the path of least
resistance. 

We never had a chance to make the cholent or pancakes,
never got the wheelchair to break the isolation,
never found a way to bring you peace,
never saw the look on your face when you arrived at Maimonides.

That 2:30 ring tone, the cell phone upside down, when we kept saying, hello, hello, hello… When turned right side up, it was no, no, no, this can’t be… You were eating yogurt for godsakes, waiting to be moved to a room upstairs.

Now our eyes are transfixed on your wooden urn, our hearts distended,
our minds whirring mechanistically trying to put it all together, trying to make some sense of it.  Oh dear father, why did you have to leave just when we were getting started? Just when our love was so big we couldn’t contain it.

Not to worry, mother is here to take our minds off of you, to love in a new and different way, to show us an unfamiliar world through gesture, comment, movement, an empty pill box at 11 a.m. Sometimes she isn’t home when we get there, sometimes she is but forgets we are coming and sometimes she is pacing the hall waiting for us after we have left. We just take her hand and draw her close, put our arms around her, let her know that sometimes memory is there to forget. Sometimes it is best not to remember.     

 

 

                                  

i've been thinking about you. how can i not?
think, think, think, always in the middle of the night when sleep is so 
hard to come by. i've been seeing the past as recent history, the one
i would like to forget, the one that is so familiar.
some day i will remember to forget.

The hand, maybe a little bit  too close

The plastic bag inside the plastic bag just right.

I love you, Mom and do you know Dad just died?

No, I don’t think you’re stupid. I don’t think if I can help it. I don’t think if I’m allowed not to think at this moment just now.

Your hand feels warm, feels right. Don’t say you don’t hold hands with girls. Not now.

Don’t say it, please?