I Have a Sad

This is Misty, our rabbit, from younger days. She is doing what she does best: chilling. We adopted her at one year of age in March 2019, and she has been a silly, feisty, sweet presence in our family. 

Until this month, she has been in stellar health. We took her for a routine annual exam a couple weeks ago, and a mass on her left arm was discovered. The biopsy confirmed it is cancer. As prey animals, rabbits are rather fragile. Sometimes they even die under anesthesia. A domestic rabbit lifespan is about 8-12 years, and she is just shy of eight.

So our family decided it would not be kind to put Misty through a major surgery and chemotherapy. The x-rays show the mass embedded in the arm in such a way that surgery would not get the entire tumor. For the time being, Misty is as energetic as ever. She eats with gusto, her GI system works well, and she is her cuddly self. Her movement isn't hindered much at this point. We've opted for palliative care and all the rabbit treats she wants, and we'll watch her closely to know when her life quality has decreased. 

I've loved this little bun. And I feel heavy, knowing what is coming.

There’s Always Looking After

There’s Always Looking After

A tree is a guardian angel.

Trees talk to us, they
whisper stories and secrets,
slip us clues to universal mysteries.
Do you see the forest, or the trees?
Sap murmurs up the trunk in spring. Listen.
The apple falls (not far from the tree), its
crisp honey tang for the taking. Notice
how the air changes when you approach
a woods; the fresh, spicy scent of leaves
and needles performing their gift of tonglen.
Handle limbs gently. Despite their
coarseness, trees are benign as babies.

Autumn. My favorite elegy. Red orange yellow
each color a note, a symphony of glorious
death. Gaia’s last hurrah before hibernation.

Glorious death. The nativity of Jesus in
Bethlehem was honored by his parents, wise
shepherds, angels — even animals. But not
one tree except for the remnant serving
as his crib. Look what happened to him.
Whereas Buddha, under a Bodhi tree,
received the gift of enlightenment.

Beware. Trees are destroyers. When touched
by lightning (not an angel), in a rhumba
with the wind, trees release limbs as
geckos lose their tails. They surrender
responsibility, abandon stability,
crush what lies beneath. A shard
of wood thrown by a tornado can kill you.

How many angels are there? They number
more than all the leaves on all the trees
since Big Time began. Earth — head
of a pin on which all trees dance.
Those trees, they krunk in a hot minute.
We just don’t see them. They move so fast.

A baby is born. A sapling takes root.
As roots grow, her neurons multiply.
They amputated the tree in our yard
the other day. Am I going to die now?

A tree is a livin’ thin’, wif it’s own
varmintality, expressed by it’s shape,
texture, locashun, seasonal variashuns,
shade/sun alterashun, th’ emoshuns it
invokes in th’ obsarver, th’ memo’ies
it stimulates in th’ obsarver. A tree
lives as long as a hoomin, o’ longer,
an’ faces th’ elements day-in an’
day-out. To sacrifice a tree is a kind
of euthanasia. A tree thet yo’ plant
today will outlive yo’, an’ affeck other
hoomins in th’ future junerashuns… but
will only be thar IF yo’ an’ yer projuny
own th’ lan’ on which th’ tree thrives.
Own SOME lan’, somewhar, an’ put trees
on it, an’ viset an’ watch them grow.

The ancient forests of knowledge
hidden in dusky, musty library stacks
have become my land. My mind, my tree
of knowledge, thrives. It is all I have.
On this moonless night everything
telescopes, clarifies. Brightness erupts
from inky black. The dark night of the soul
is really a form of enlightenment.

I fall on my knees, praying to No God.
The god of no. I sway in the wind, yearning
to be struck, to plummet, to become the abyss
that annihilates, that looks into me. Oh,
the ecstasy of descent! I cry for it.

Mindful One, she thinks too much. She dwells
inside her head, sips the ink of books too
often. For all her lofty talk about meaning
and nature, she lives indoors, estranged.
Reconciliation is possible. The priest
intones, you are dust and to dust you shall
return. So it shall be. A reunion.

Yes! A gorgeous reunion. A gorgeous death.
It shall be as it is, unless it is as it shall
be. Remember, nascentes morimur. The voice is
relentless, paralyzing. Death, inevitable from
the beginning of my existence. My destiny, our
destiny, is to become nothing.

Not so, whisper the trees. Willow weeps over my
rigid despair. A pine tree caresses my hair.
You do not become nothing. You become everything.

The body becomes a corpse. The corpse rots, feeds
maggots and beetles, enriches the soil. A squirrel
foraging embeds a nut, forgets it. The nut germinates.
A sapling grows, slowly. Outside of time. Watching over.
Witnessing the Mystery. There’s always looking after.

-Kathryn Harper

I wrote this poem 20 years ago, following this exercise from The Practice of Poetry:

This exercise comes from page 119 of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. The goal of the exercise is to write a poem that includes these twenty suggesetions:

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia.
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you've never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of "talk" you've actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don't understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: "The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . . ."
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona in the poem do something he/she would not do in "real life."
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that "echoes" an image from earlier in the poem. 

No Place Too Small

No Place Too Small

It is easy to know how to meld with so much grief.
With joy there is blindness, rose-colored ignorance,
No body to tend, to anchor one to the earth.
When the world remains intact, you move nimbly,
Caressing the surface of things, noticing little.

But grief burrows in.
It needs only the exposed, wounded soul
To dig in as a tick under skin.
Grief bangs around the cellar, shrieking,
behaves unpredictably, hijacking your eyes
When the store clerk asks how you are. Clutching your
throat when you call the dentist’s office for a cleaning.

You walk now among oblivious humans,
an emotional leper
With lesions rotting your heart.
All of existence has its own death,
It too could slip into a tumor-ridden coma
Adorned with catheter tubes,
And gasp last breaths to the sterile beat
Of a monitor, attended by loved ones.

Since there is no place too small
For grief to infiltrate,
You lie down, surrender, pull it
to every cell of your being.
You take orders, as a dog obeys commands
From an owner; you honor and bear it,
And in this way, endure.

–Kathryn Harper

This poem was another exercise in scaffolding. I worked with Naomi Shihab Ney's Kindness.

“Grief” by jan buchholtz, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Impermanence

 

Impermanence

A dead man’s photo peers over my bed
The silent witness who lives in my blood.
Absence is the soul’s starvation diet.
I have been hungry since before I was born.

Plan for madness to heal you.
Plan for sadness to fly.
Plan for hope estranging your happiness.
It surely will.

The finite hours and days,
The years,
Dissolve with relentless measure
And apathy.

This will grieve your heart but release it.
You must not pull back: too late too late to stop.
You carelessly left your spirit alone,
Now seconds plunder its secrets

And take all.
Life perpetuates a feeble trick
on the frail mind:
A creation of memes
Moved by predestination

To obscurity.
The clock lightly ticks and then cocks its gun.
Aims between your eyes.
Are you ready?

-Kathryn Harper

I used James Galvin's Post-Modernism as the scaffold. I attempted to emulate the pace, syllables, and sentence structure. It was a tough exercise and I enjoyed it. 

“Memorial image #2” by jodene e, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

On Renee Nicole Good

The Library, Mid-Winter

The Library, Mid-Winter

The library chair holds the shape of a body
better than the body holds the news.
Outside, the rain is a gray slant of percussion,
drumming a rhythm for a march starting 
somewhere south of our borders.

We ate eggs while discussing our work
of mending, healing hearts and minds.
We called out each other's blind spots
to examine, completely safe within
our connection of love and respect.

But it’s time to undress the Christmas tree,
to stow the baubles and lights, yet I dawdle.
The branches hold beloved memories
that visit once a year. There is no guarantee
I will unpack them again.

I think of the earth, waiting for the pine,
waiting for me -- to be turned back into
something that helps the flowers grow.

-Kathryn Harper

Haiku

The last maple leaf

having let go of the branch 

second-guessed its choice.

-Kathryn Harper

NPR Tiny Desk Contest 2023 - Andrea Gibson - MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM

 

 

Andrea Gibson's brilliant force has departed their body. They were a beacon of courage and compassion communicated through poetry. I mourn our loss. May their brilliance and love manifest forever. 

 

Andrea Gibson's website.

 

Andrea Gibson's Substack.

All Kinds of Things for Love

[A Debt]
in a dream, i saw my mother
before she was made mine. her
life still unburdened by the weight
of raising someone. no one has left her
to be in a grave & she is yet to know
where the nearest cemetery is. 
when she runs across the field, no tiny footprints 
gather next to her steps. her 
hunger simply hers alone. 
we do all kinds of things for love. look at me. 
look at me returning her life to her. 
even in a dream.
--noor unnahar

(No Wind, No Rain)

 (No Wind, No Rain)

No wind, no rain,

the tree

just fell, as a piece of fruit does.

But no, not fruit. Not ripe.

Not fell.

It broke. It shattered.

One cone's 

addition of resinous cell-sap,

one small-bodied bird

arriving to tap for a beetle.

It shattered.

What word, what act,

was it we thought did not matter?

-Jane Hirshfield

Snow

Snow

 

Little soul,

for you, too, 

death is coming.

 

Was there something

you thought

you needed to do?

 

Snow

does not walk into a room

 

and wonder

 

why.

-Jane Hirshfield