I came across some notes from a poetry workshop given by Texas poet Lianne Mercer: Writing is a physical thing. Let is spill out and get somewhere. Don’t think. Keep your hand moving. Have few expectations. Admit you don’t want to write so you can get past it. Be willing to take what comes. Be curious about what might come. Pause and breathe….. Good advice about more than writing.

And here’s a poem I wrote in that workshop set in the wonderful Hill Country of Texas…..

I had a boy’s body once

slim and lithe running forward

then blood came

and breasts and a burka of shoulds as old as Eve

covering spirit

covering daring

making me a girl

waiting on a man

What if our smallest actions do matter? What if the frown we gave the clerk at Walgreen’s was the last straw of a bad day? What if we’d smiled instead? There’s a theory out there called the Butterfly Effect. It’s about a small change in an unstable system, like the weather, and how a small change can affect a big outcome. There’s a whole lot around it, the chaos theory and other things, but aren’t we, the human race, an unstable system? Hate and love lie equally in us. What if all our tiny violences, the frown, the cruel thought, the curse at someone whose driving upsets us, matter? What if our least thought is important? That would mean a responsibility almost too big to comprehend. We so small and yet our place in the scheme of things so much more than we realize…..

(This was motivated by watching the role of a wasp in a PBS Masterpiece Contemporary piece called Collision.)

She leaves me the season’s gifts

crimson tallow leaves

a thousand-petaled camellia

pert johnny-jump-up faces

I like to imagine her in a green silk slip

hazelnuts for eyes

hair corn husks dried and whispering

barefoot, winged, dazzling, elusive

Houston’s winter, subtle until late December

littering her bounty on my sidewalk like some prodigal daughter

What tears were cried Sunday. I cried missed God tears. I was with a Holy Man, and he told a Sufi story. Tell me, the man in the story asked of the Master, how to find God. The Master took the man to the ocean, walked in with him, held him under water until he was fighting, crazy to be up in the air. Are you insane? shouted the man when the Master let him go. Why did you do that?

When you desire God the way you desired your next breath of air, you’ll find him, replied the Master.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the pants. When I heard that I went outside and cried for the girl who once sought God but turned away because he/she/it seemed all bound up in hellfire and damnation and original sin and nailed to a cross–no thanks–only when her husband went crazy, God saved her, and now she knows she has to find her path with this God, that this has to come before job, children, men, only she’s afraid to go full blast…..too many born again Christians in her memory….oh bless me, thank you, Jesus….gag me with a spoon….only she does need, does seek, so I cried Sunday because I was with this Holy Man who never lost God even when he was in the pits of suicide, of complete despair, and I’m so far from Mecca…so far…………..

I always tell the people who take my writing classes to listen to the Writers Almanac on NPR. You can even have its daily dose of poetry and Garrison Keillor’s commentary delivered to your email doorstep, hit a link, and hear the podcast. I tell them to listen to it because poetry is the highest writing art, requiring the perfect word and reflecting in a few lines ideas that can bring one to one’s knees. Which just recently happened. I don’t listen everyday. I think I’m too busy. But a friend of mine always emails me about poems she thinks I ought not to miss. And so I read Baptism by one Ted Thomas Jr and felt breathless when I was done because in a single sentence he captured what has happened to me around my mother. He writes in the poem of his father’s helplessness. In the last stanza, he says he “I pat him dry, he lets me dress him in the white hospital clothes, oil his hair, put him to bed and forgive him.”

Bam. That’s what’s happened in all this. I’ve forgiven the resentments I nurtured so close to my heart. In the bathing and dressing and feeding, in her shuffling daily endless need, something has dropped, but not by my insistence. There is only breathless, painful witnessing of  frailty, and my attendance upon it as best I can, some days far better than others. This last slow dance we’re in is immediate and huge. All else is nothing.

How was your day? I asked my grandson one afternoon this week. Terrible, I don’t want to talk about it. Then, during snack, he continued, Everyone hates me.

They do? Why? And out tumbled his tale. Ever the entrepreneur, he came up with an idea to make money by selling his classmates pieces of gum during lunch, but one purchaser narked on him to the teacher, who told him that as punishment she was taking away recess from the whole class. Everyone hates me, now, he said, and then he proceeded to do that which is so human and too seldom grown out of, make it someone else’s fault. If So&So hadn’t told on me, he began, everything would be ok.

I interrupted. No, if it was against the rules, you took a chance and lost. Don’t make it about someone else. I didn’t mention that I thought the punishment stupid, excessive, and over the top. I’m not in the classroom every day, and besides his mother is a lawyer. She will have enough opinions for us all. We went on to other things, the rest of our snack, his homework. At some point, he raised his head. I know what I’ll do, he said. I’ll go to the teacher tomorrow and tell her she can punish me but please don’t punish my friends.

I liked that. A boy growing a moral compass.

Interesting moment. I’m in the backyard working on a haiku. The day before I’ve seen a butterfly with cobalt blue on its bottom wings. The blue is only noticeable at certain angles, and the first time I saw it, the beauty of the color made me catch my breath. So I’m sitting outside working with that, the butterfly, the blue, my surprise, and I’m happy, the way I always am when I play with haiku. And my friend calls. She’s calm. The cancer in her husband’s lungs has also touched his lymph nodes. We talk about that, about her faith in the doctor, about the treatment, about how sick he will be in the next months, about how she will keep their business together as he goes through this. The doctor is cautiously optimistic, she says, and she is, too. And so will I be for her, but I wonder if she’s walking toward that final hour in what has been her life with him. She’s one of the few people I know, including myself, who is still married to the same man. I think of a piece of a prayer that comforts me, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. And I think of that flash of cobalt blue and the idea I was playing with, the butterfly as a small magi bringing gifts.

My  writing group ends. I’m estranged from someone who has been a loving presence in my life since I was a child. I’m invited to join a group, and the woman who invited me finds out she has cancer. My sponsor leaves town. Someone who taught me how to be a friend, who has remained a friend, who has the sunniest heart I’ve ever encountered, just found out her husband has cancer. Another friend’s husband isn’t healing from a surgery. I’ve finished a book and am in the empty space before another begins, but there seem to be empty spaces everywhere. My mother’s expression is more vacant. I know to expect it, but it’s bigger than I thought it would be. I feel as if I’m standing in a widening circle. The only thing I can do is be still and hold the faith I’ve cultivated these last years close. I will go upstairs and dance it, faith and fear, grief and love, life, life, life, filled with changes I must accept. I have done this before, once stepping out of a car crash of hope. I thought I would die. Didn’t.  This is not a car crash. It’s the knots in my rope of friends, of dear ones, unknotting, moving on, or disappearing. I can stand in each fresh little emptiness. I can let them wash over me, teach me, touch me, mold me. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, and yet I must learn it anew each time I’m shaken. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

Once, long ago, someone called me to tell me he’d written what he called a “picaresque” novel. I didn’t know what that meant so I had to look it up in the dictionary. It means episodic adventures described in realistic detail of an engaging, usually roguish character. Don Quixote is an example. Inman in Cold Mountain is another. The reason I bring this up is I just read the proof (a book before it’s published) of another kind of adventure, a young woman who is pregnant and isn’t married and doesn’t know what to do.

Her adventures are as engaging as Don Quixote or Inman’s, but they involve the attempts to find some security for herself and her child and the attempt to wrap her mind around the fact that there will be a child. Where is the term, like picaresque, for this kind of adventure? It’s been happening to women since forever, and it’s real and honest and desperate. I think of Ada and Ruby in Cold Mountain. They didn’t roam toward home like Inman. They were home, and they used every ounce of their intelligence and spunk just to survive, to make home real, a place of safety and sustenance.

Anyway, I feel irritated that there is this term that describes a guy’s adventures, adventures a woman couldn’t go easily on because she’d be beaten or raped (in the old days, anyway, though maybe that applies now), and here’s this whole other adventure, involving a new life, and there’s no literary term, and yet it’s a common, constant drama whose details we see played out in media stories about real people.

A very bad day with Mother this last week, a reminder that Alzheimer’s is stronger than wishful thinking. No matter what we did, I couldn’t lift her to liveliness. Her smiles were few, her gaze was often vacant, her attitude one of how much a struggle anything was, getting in and out of the car, undressing for her bath. I came home grieving and then today, looking for what to put in this blog, came across notes from nearly a year ago. How sharply I was reminded of a happier time, that change is the only constant, and that I must treasure the present in this disease. This is what I wrote nearly a year ago:

She was so sweet yesterday that I had to stop and hug her more than once. I told her I was going to Reno, where she had lived so happily before Alzheimer’s demanded changes. I told her I was going to see my sister and her daughter. She thought about what I said, then announced, I ought to go, too. Oh, you ought, I thought.She was once a champion traveler, driving all over the states of Texas and Arkansas to see her children and grandchildren, but now travel, the hurry of it, the length of it, the decisions and disruptions, upset and disorient her.

As part of our day, we went to Penney’s to shop, and when we passed the jewelry counter, she noticed a pair of earrings. Those are beautiful, she said. I caught a glimpse of the black belt shopper and jewelry expert she used to be and it hurt my heart. So we bought them. Later, when we were eating, she remembered that I was leaving on a trip. Where are you going? she asked. To Reno, I answered. I should go, she said. Oh, yes, I thought again. You should. Another time, I told her, and that night I helped her put her new earrings in her ears, even though it was after her bath.

Footnote: The earrings are lost now, put away by her somewhere. And treasuring the moment is a skill useful for far more than Alzheimer’s. So I know, but can seldom seem to live.