02003 SOLSTICE LETTER I

January

this house has winter in it
even the parakeet   
with his yellow head
cannot sing it out

February



February 4, 02003    Mariah (honorary god/dess- daughter/ niece) moves from Seattle to Missoula to go to massage therapy school. She lives with mutual friends, Diane & Elizabeth, and brightens my days.




from a field
of tulips
this one blossom

It’s Thursday. I know the phone won’t ring. We’re in winter drought, dry air sucking moisture from rashy skin and cracked lips. The pond is frozen over, fountain bubbling under a cap of ice. Ducks crowd together on the river-bank, a colony of grey stones, muttering, complaining. I am shrouded in ice, too heavy to float. Cold. Grey. Leaden.

I rearrange the supermarket flowers, extract limp daisies, set survivors into a ceramic pitcher – purple mums in a checkerboard of painted fruit: pears, apples, lemons.

What is the difference between secrecy and privacy? –
I must have privacy to write,
to be the necessary fool. . .

the sky is falling now
in shivers of light 

light accumulating
like dust in the empty garden

March

a skin of snow – thin, dry, stingy – but when sun strikes it, rainbows glitter

first spring day
the helicopter lifts
from the hospital roof

April

My neighbor, Ann, is dying. She gasps for breath. My friend Evelyn calls from New York: she is no longer able to walk, or travel – her greatest pleasure. “Suffering needs meaning,” she tells me, “and there seems little meaning now.” And April is in the garden: hellebores bowing down their lavender faces, blue stars, bluebells, tiny pale iris – buds on vines and trees – bright skies in the mornings.

May




eating powdered donuts
while hail piles up
in the flowerbeds


spots of sun
in the cloud-dim garden
yellow warblers

On my 55th birthday, the city took down all the trees along the river, in fear that they would fall, and falling, take the dike with them. For days afterward, few birds – only sparrows, no finches, no chickadees. One robin, collecting moss for a new nest.

On Friday, a classmate of Mariah’s died in a car wreck. She was 19. Last week Uncle Russell died of leukemia, of age.



late may – 
young squirrel
eating rosebuds



June


mosquito nursery 
emptying the kiddie pool
slaughtering thousands

sleepless night
white tulips
in the moonlight

your letter
on the computer screen –
I long for the scent of paper

 

June 15, 02003   (My stepsister) Mary’s ashes are spread at Gooseberry Falls, Minnesota.

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