is it
grasping or clinging
to try and remember
his voice?
shattered / fragments [4]
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Tag Archives: love
shattered / fragments [3]
His clothes are waiting.
There’s a pile on the floor,
tucked into the corner
and ready to be washed;
another on his chair,
haphazard but clean.
A few others sit in a basket,
neatly folded.
He would have picked through them
the next morning,
getting ready for the day.
I pull out a pair of black pants from the dirty pile,
notice a bungee cord strung through
as a makeshift belt.
I fold them slowly,
tuck them under my arm,
and, for now, leave everything else behind.
shattered / fragments [2]
A police sergeant
stopped by the house this afternoon
with my son’s wallet
and an accident report
we don’t ever have to read.
He’d been first at the scene that night,
then sat in our living room
while my wife called me
in Los Angeles.
Today, I offer him a cup of coffee
and hope he’ll stay with us for a moment.
shattered / fragments [1]
I now understand
the meaning of
shattered.
I can’t even tell if it is okay
to smile at my wife–
but I’ll go for a walk,
and while I am out,
get her the box of chai
she was searching for.
—
I don’t know where to begin. I’ve lost my son.
I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps deciding to simply sit here, inside this not-knowing, inside this feeling of being shattered–perhaps this is something Zen gave to me, having turned out to be nothing I was actually looking for.
I don’t know where to begin. Except to return here, reach for my pencil and scratch out a few of the fragments I find.
Dear Mom
There’s a hurricane coming.
Before the rain begins,
I’ve cut some rudbeckia for you—
I found a few faint coneflowers, too.
but most everything else has passed.
I arranged them just now
in an old glass bottle
like the ones you collected.
The wind is picking up and
the birds are calling.
Every once in a great while, something emerges. I suppose it happens quite often. Every once in a great while, I notice.
ten
it was a purple one that first caught his eye
as we walked through the field—
perhaps some sort of clover,
but i don’t know the name in french.
papa, he showed me,
adding the smallest white daisies
and a few others i don’t recognize—
a tall thin grass, and
even dandelions, too.
they might not last the car ride home,
but they’ve once been collected,
spilling gently over the edge
of the vase he made of his hand.
—
My first post here in more than eighteen months. I think the moments have still been with me. Perhaps I’ve been better at not becoming attached—or perhaps I’ve been neglecting to pay attention.
Rudbeckia
the rudbeckia aren’t usually still in bloom,
so close to my birthday,
and even these are brittle –
but in the patch near the small gravel pile,
perhaps sheltered by the overgrown viburnum,
a few stragglers remain.
if I’d noticed them last year I might have arranged
one more vase
and placed it by her bedside,
so she could have turned her head
and thought to herself,
how I love those black-eyed susans.
Cardboard Box
I’m finally looking into the cardboard box
I brought home from my mother’s house
late last month;
The clementines she insisted I take and perched on top
have long since been eaten;
it’s been otherwise untouched
sitting in the corner of the yellow room.
Two pairs of my infant pajamas —
The yellow corduroy with the embroidered lion;
the faded white and green night dress.
She had remarked on the drawstring
she had sewn into the bottom,
how it was still there,
and the fold-over sleeves to keep me from scratching myself
as I slept in my crib.
My white shoes, too —
laces gone,
but still with their impossibly stiff soles;
my grandmother’s blue-and-white Canton ware,
wrapped in the 1975 Daily News
from Bowling Green, Kentucky.
That night,
just before I left,
we sat on the basement couch flipping through
faded Kodak prints, square with rounded corners,
(most taken before we moved into the house on the hill).
We paused at one where I wore that night dress,
standing with my sister
in the deep darkness of an evening east window.
There were others, too, from that forty-years-ago,
and she told me again about each one.
We had such fun, she said,
such fun.
Forty-Something this Summer
It’s supposed to be raining this morning,
but I awake without the sound
of small drops trickling from maple leaves or
spattering the old tin roof
outside our bedroom window –
either would have muffled the clinking of
spoons against the edges of
glass cereal bowls that
filters up from downstairs.
Yet well past the hour when
I often find myself alone,
you are still beside me,
only breathing;
I watch your breasts rise and fall
under the softness of your light blue camisole,
its narrow strap rising over your left shoulder
into a blur of light from the south window.
Your birthday is two days from now –
early forty-something this summer –
I should get up and settle the children’s argument,
plan for a gift.
Six
he knows now how to read.
he won’t pass through kindergarten again.
he won’t bring home another packet of sight words,
tape them to the wall
over his largely-unmade bed,
lie in the darkness,
read them by flashlight.
that moment,
that emerging,
that world,
that lifetime,
that he-and-I
is gone —
and I want it back.
—
Buddhism might one day free me from suffering, but not from being human. If anything, I feel my joy, my sadness, anguish, loneliness and contentment more acutely. Buddhism promises the possibility of welcoming each one. It has taught me, even, to welcome my attachments, to not run away from even my clinging.
My relief from suffering, when it arises, comes not from stoicism. Instead, it arrives when I allow the joy and dukkha that are the essence of fatherhood to be together. It comes when I turn and face them both and say, Yes, all of this. This is now. This is fatherhood. The wanting and the letting go. This is love. This is it. All of this. This is it.
bussokuseki 