Waiting
National Poetry Writing Month, Day 10: A meditation on grief, after Geoffrey Brock.
From napowrimo.net: “In his poem, ‘Goodbye,’ Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the ‘container’ for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.
I didn’t need to feed my grief. It lived on air. I kept driving and shopping, snapping photos of snacks that a strange part of me— apart from all this—took pleasure in arranging. The bright apple slices. The straightened spoon. How could I have kept you safe? I still see you years ago, pushing most of your mac-and-cheese back into the pot. “Say something!” I beg the past mother. How could I have kept you safe? You shut us out until you couldn’t, arms criss-crossed in cuts. I develop patterns. When I see a certain slope near the gray freeway, I know we’re almost there. You stay silent beside me, in the car and in the elevator. We rise, we step off. I sign a page and you leave me, pajama pants dragging at your heels. I develop habits. I bring stacks of old poems to a café. I try to write but it never works. I leave, stopping at a thrift store where I circle the aisles: plaster feet. Hangers of blankets. A little toy kitchen, utensils clanking. A row of silent clocks.
You are a tour guide, leading us through the halls of thoughts and emotions, pointing out the simple but magnificent small pieces that make them all.
Ordering our lives brings comfort, especially in transitions. As Martha Steward use to say, "it's a good thing." Yet, the desperation and grief find their way through the perfect stacks and into the land of the living. Your heart never lies and love always wins.