What’s Left (for Nikki)

(written October 12, 2011)

It’s the anniversary today.  I debate taking your grandchild to your headstone.  She names you in the sky at night.  I don’t feel grief or loss–those were my companions long before you died.  But there is this ache.  It’s in my chest and it warns memory.  The ache is, this year, something hard to identify.

This morning the house was dark and quiet and I pictured life with you in it.  A life without alcohol.  I imagined you would have prevented me from all sorts of things-things like heartache, lost trust, guilt shame, illnesses.  You were like a big child to us, even then.  Your slowness was what sweetened you.  You made your first born, Nikki, shine.  That was the last time she let herself be loved by a parent.  Your gradual rejection left in her a big empty space, and as she got older, that space filled with self-reliance, education, but mostly with the sense of life as an orphan.  Her ache for you and loss of you shook straight through her heart–cutting it in two and then clumsily stitching it back together, leaving gaps for it all to seep through.  I imagine it steeling itself to the love of many things.

When you died we all suffered different losses.  Mine was the beginning of a broken fever.  You left me to a monster and I’m scarred in crippling ways.  For Jodie, your youngest and by far the sweetest, her loss was unnameable and filled with a deep sorrow–it served as a reminder of not knowing love and protection and sanctuary.  But for Nikki–for Nikki your death made me angry.  Why had you left her again?  Why must she lose you twice and open up old wounds that, from childhood, really never heal?  When she was younger her love for you was fierce and without limit.  She knew you had no right to abandon her, and she didn’t give up easily.  She was persistent and faithful and resilient until, as time passed, her heart broke.  She learned loss and defeat too early.  When you died, her loss was like an old companion she’d tried to forget, only this time she had more control.  But I saw her face–she looked like a little girl again, learning you were never coming back.  I suppose, on the anniversary of your death, I grieve for her.  My heart feels young and fragile and sore for her.  She is the ache in my chest.

Scatter

for my father

 

Your body isn’t on this earth

like the others

I still see them, hunched over

bar stools at eleven a.m.

Your body isn’t on this earth

and I wonder where you drifted?

to an embankment

of some kind

to a bed of moss

a nest?

our rose petals we’d sent after

your ashes rotten years ago

your body isn’t on this earth

you’re more like a breath

or a petal, just above the stir

scattering

if I could talk you into

piecing back together

for an afternoon

I would touch

your face,

sober and clear,

I wouldn’t be afraid

I wouldn’t ask you why

I’d memorize your eye color

and the way your lashes swept,

I’d trace the bones we’d burned

I’d say my name for you;

I wouldn’t turn you in for all you were

I’d tell you who you were and are to me,

letting you go

and watch you scatter

softly back across the river

like a breath telling you I’ll see you again.

Memoir Piece 2: “Ashes”

Ashes

The land is in pools, mirrors. As if there were a flood and only islands remain, islands with the trees from my earliest memories–the wild apple blossoms, their pink and white petals falling like snow. I imagine him under there, in the shade of the silky blossoms, leaning back on an arm, picking blades of grass, his long legs muzzled in by the sweet alysum growing. His blue eyes look up through their long, long black eyelashes–the lashes I’ve inherited–and into the blossoms, into the purple sky. His reflection is still on the water. Peace. He’s found peace. He still wears the cream colored shirt with the brown vees from the shoulders to the chest, heavy in his strange scent that I can still smell if I remember really hard.

The white farmhouse, falling apart and filthy, stood on a sunken, lush lawn with wild apple trees that snowed pink petals.  He built us a swing under one of them, taking turns going higher and higher into the pink fragrance.  There was a hammock tied between the two trees and we spent afternoons lulled in it by the bees, fat and humming.  We picked from the plum tree, he pulled us in a wagon behind the rider lawnmower, we climbed ancient tractors, we walked in the fields with the big, round hay bales.  There was a pig in small barn, I loved the thick mud and even the suffocating smell.  Family came and went as if they’d never grown up and left home.  Most of them were alcoholics, some of them were borderline pedophiles but they were eventually pushed out of the circle.  My grandpa Leo was an old white haired man with a huge gin blossom nose, sitting in his chair.  Drinking.  The kitchen was warm and old, with a large wooden fork and spoon above the oven.  My grandma Helen had chipped, blue China plates.  The floor rolled in hills and we road our trikes around.  I don’t remember him ever leaving our side on those weekends he had us.

Just a Snippet to Share

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****picture of my real dad, John, my sister  Nikki on the left and me, the freaked out one, on the right.  He didn’t care for me that much and he left me to always help my sister (he didn’t believe I was his at first or something) so my mom and Aunt C say, but my other Aunt J says how much he loved us, even if it was for a short while, he loved us.  And that fills quite a gap in my chest.  His love from what…two years…is enough to help me get over the “unlove” from the next father figure.  Doesn’t make up for all that I lost and gained, nor the fact that there is some irreparable damage done to me, but hey, I’m not asking for too much.  He loved me then.  He loved me. Aunt J told me last week on the anniversary of his death that I have my dad’s beautiful, dark eyes and long lashes.  No one’s ever told me I had anything of his.  I cried because I was so happy.  I have his eyes. Despite the comb-over and goggle glasses, he actually was a handsome guy.  This one time, after not talking for years (decades) I found him in a bar, and I  sat and had a beer with him, I had a beer with my daddy, and he took out the pictures of my sisters and I in his old wallet, and he knew somehow where we were living and what our jobs were.  He was like an excited child that I was sitting with him.  There was no past or future there, we were just blood relatives having a beer, wishing for so much from each other and not knowing what that was.

Mama, It Was Too Late

My Mother Turns Fifty (published in Third Wednesdsay Poetry Journal)

It is a sunny afternoon, the light

coming in yellow through her curtains

that cut through the smoke.

Cat Stevens feels like water inside my soul

and then she switches it to Bread

and hands me a dust rag.

I dance across the green and brown

carpet squares; I wipe the hazy walls, the stiff

yellow furniture with the green and gold flowers;

Me, Amy Jo, in 1984

speakers as tall as I am:

it is 1984 and I am my mama’s bumble bee; I shine everything

everything is for her.

She is young and beautiful and lauging;

this is the age I wanted to be her–chain-smoking Dorals

and sipping black coffee, no men for us, no fathers, no drunks

She tells me to get dirty but stay in the yard as she

folds freshly washed laundry from the Good Will.

I see her always moving, and I was a part of that motion,

that current,

that music like water.

I used to find my gravity in her eyes

Not this woman

with

this stare,

this woman

who wrings

In Your Absence by Judith Harris : The Poetry Foundation [poem]

In Your Absence by Judith Harris : The Poetry Foundation [poem].

In Your Absence

In Your Absence

By Judith Harris Judith Harris

Not yet summer,

but unseasonable heat

pries open the cherry tree.

It stands there stupefied,

in its sham, pink frills,

dense with early blooming.

Then, as afternoon cools

into more furtive winds,

I look up to see

a blizzard of petals

rushing the sky.

It is only April.

I can’t stop my own life

from hurrying by.

The moon, already pacing.

Poem copyright ©2007 by Judith Harris, whose most recent collection of poems is The Bad Secret, Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Judith Harris.

It’s In the Little Pieces

 

I catch you in reflections–the small ones

that hint at a sense, be it smell or taste or touch

the smell of your sweat, bent over the tractor

the taste of Old Style on my small lips, just a sip

the feel of your long daddy arms twice around me

whenever I called to you

a hint of pink on a blossom falling

to the grass, your cheeks, alive

a light refracting on water, just a ripple,

your blue eyes calling to me from somewhere

I’ve vaguely dreamed about, a haven of sorts

where I was once somebody’s

my reflection as I pass by a mirror

in a blur, I see how this body came

from yours, I am your limbs,

when it’s quiet sometimes

I see all the pieces of you

you are not your grave, not those

ashes we spread on the river

you were mine once briefly

and I was yours and that

makes my heart heavy and

then light, all the

what if’s

what if you had stayed

what would you have taught me

I remember how you tried, you

cried in front of my new dad

and walked away to live in your car

and drink your drink

you tried to put us into pieces

you could hold onto

faded photos of babies

in your wallet

you fought for us in a slurred

tongue,

but for us

that was the best we’d ever get

gentle, shy, scared father

I loved you

I loved you

you’re in all these little pieces

of my life,

never absent now

as you rustle and hush through

petals at my feet.

Bones …for John. I’m sorry dad.

he stands in the gap between the

frozen birch trees

he looks back, hair in his eye

I catch a glimmer maybe

his glasses are gone

his jeans are still faded

I think of my frozen fee on

the icy ground

in this frost where I

don’t belong

he would’ve spoken

but I guess you can’t say

anything in Limbo

I am pale and small here

I slip away, back, and he moves

forward

to the dark crevice

between the wide white bones

of the woods

it was all so quick

I forgot to smile back

so say I love you

to say goodbye

it was too late

thoughts echo in this space

gives them room to be heard