#SOL16: When Words Fail

Rob

I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me. 

- Li-Young Lee, Mnemonic

I.

After greeting Rob yesterday morning, I realized that he no longer knew who I was. Just 12 hours earlier we were holding hands and singing I Want to Hold Your Hand. And though I know the progression of the disease, the mix of drugs, and of course, the dying process, all contribute to his confusion, words fail me as to how best to tell you what this feels like.

Each day I lose him in ways I don't expect, as does our son.


II.

When words fail there remains touch.  One of the startling things I have learned is that Rob recognizes me even though he cannot name me.  I'm stored in his brain in lots of ways.  He responds to the sound of my voice, the touch of my hands, and certain features that he has always liked (my eyes).  For now, I take solace in these ways of connecting.

Earlier this evening, the English Lord, a persona of Rob's that is fairly new showed up.  When I asked him if I was just some serving wench, he said in his crusty upperclass British accent, "More or less." My brother Jack and I were there and we both laughed and I leaned down to kiss me lord.

Even in this sorry state we find brief moments of delight. 

#SOL15: (Un)steady

Black Limbs (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

I.

Twenty-five years ago this past Monday, Rob and I were married in the front room of Dave's West Rutland, Vermont home. Dave's wife, whose name I have long forgot, served as the only witness. Twenty-five years have past and today finds me thinking about all I could not know that morning in Vermont. We stood there in that modest room with the wood stove burning, snow falling beyond the front windows and made promises to remain true "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." A series of phrases we repeated not knowing then the many things that these words would mean.

On that same trip to Vermont we found a deserted tree-lined road full of deep snow, untouched. We put the jeep that had been stolen two weeks before and recovered 24-hours later in Newark, NJ in 4-wheel drive and drove on only to stop a bit later and test the snow that was knee deep. We had to push hard on the doors to open them and we did and then walked about, laughing and I was sure we were the only two people on the planet.

We were so young. So unable to know the future could be anything but bright white snow and us in it.

II.

Memory is a Klein bottle, non-orientable, for what appears at first to be inside and outside breaks down when a trace is followed and lost.

We are more tangle than line; more hypotenuse than leg.

III.

Yesterday, I called 911 as my husband could no longer walk, even with assistance. He is unable to use his right leg to do what it has done for six decades. Stand up. Rob was supposed to go for chemo, but he could not get from the house to the car.  Nothing we tried, and my son and I tried everything we could, helped. Rob simply could no longer stand up--not a for a quarter of a minute.  When I called the oncologist's office to say we would not be there, the nurse practitioner told me to get Rob to the emergency room immediately as she feared spinal cord compression. 12 hours and an MRI later, spinal cord compression was confirmed and Rob was transferred from the emergency room to the intensive care unit where he remains as I write this.

Inside this story there is an abundance of sadness and fear and so much uncertainty that nothing looks orientable and really nothing ever is beyond the moment.  Inside this story there is hope and the large generosity of others.

Today, Rob's leg is stronger.  The doctors, and again I have lost track of the number, have begun treating him with large doses of steroids and radiation and the outcome is a bit brighter than yesterday.

IV.

Nothing holds steady. Not the turn of years,  not the lives we are making and forgetting.

#SOL15: Noli Timere

What is Written (M.A. Reilly, 2010, Sant’Anna in Camprena, Pienza)

Noli timere. (Do not be afraid).

I.

There is no emotional preparation for death.

There's nothing that will soften the pain or let loose the frenzied despair that seems now to form the marrow of my bones. Pain is elemental and what I most wish to distance my son from cannot be had. No amount of preparation, no amount of bartering, no desperate late night promises to God will ease our loss.

I know this even as I try not to.

II.

Years ago I sat in the back seat of a limousine with Rob who wrapped his hand around mine. We were stopped at a light and I spent those minutes looking into the windows of cars, fascinated by the ordinary lives of others.  It was a wild animal desperation that seized me, urged me to covet the imagined lives of those passing by. I wanted to loose my body in those moments and become someone else, anyone else, anyone but myself.

Too frantic to sit in my own skin, I shifted as the car started and the truth is that it was only Rob's hand wrapped around mine that tethered me to the earth as we made our way to the cemetery to bury my mother on a too beautiful, too spring day in early May. I simply did not know how to be in the world with her no longer here and my husband's touch was an anchor I could not know I needed.

Touch matters.

III.

Loss can not be preempted.

This is a hard truth I learned at 40 and an impossibly cruel one to learn at 17. My son  is two months shy of that mark and as I watch him I wonder if he is too young to bear the weight of such loss. I want to gather him to me and tell him to prepare, but I don't do this as those words are more for me than him.  I have left the here and now--the place where hope is still kindled and have traveled to a darker, distant time where no amount of preparation can soften what the heart cannot decipher.


IV.

I resist the mistaken urge to caution him about matters of death and loss and instead reach out and hold his hand.

We will hurt, I think.
And this pain will reveal the many ways we have been loved.

#SOL15: My True North is Now

I.

Outside, the trees we planted three years ago are dying. I've faithfully watered them and used soaker hoses throughout the summer.  But September has been consistently hot and I have lost my way and find myself here.

Now.

Curling brown-edged leaves fill two trees and the fir trees have brown needles. The hydrangea are drooping and even the wild mint is less green.The gardens and trees I usually dote on are no longer a priority.  They aren't even a passing notice most days.

Not now.

II.

My husband has advanced-stage lung cancer that has spread to his spine.  Six weeks ago, none of this was known. He will take an MRI this week to see if the cancer has spread to his brain.

There, I've written it.

              And the urge to erase it is so strong.

But even if I erase it, it will still remain true.
Now is not the time for deception.

III.

As if the cancer was not bad enough, we learned yesterday that a staph infection, most likely contracted during the surgery to put in a port to facilitate chemotherapy treatments is running through Rob's blood. Early Friday morning found two police officers, three volunteer ambulance corp members, and two EMTs in our living room.  This was the day Rob was to take his first chemo treatment. Instead, I heard Rob calling through very labored breathing, Call 911.  And I did. All this before a single cup of tea could be brewed.

At the hospital we were told he likely had pneumonia, although the ER doctor had said, "I wouldn't make much of that bit of fluid in his right lung." Although he had no temperature at home, by 10 a.m. it had spiked to nearly 103 degrees. Covered from toes to chin with multiple blankets, he shivered so that the narrow bed beneath him rocked, defying the locked wheels.

And so he was once again admitted to the hospital.

The next morning we were told by the pulmonary specialist that Rob did not have pneumonia. This was followed by another doctor specializing in infectious diseases of the blood who told us there might be bacteria in Rob's blood and we would have to wait until the cultures taken on Friday could be read.

48 hours.

On Sunday afternoon, we were told there was nothing showing up in Rob's blood, and we all began to feel a bit hopeful that the chemo could be rescheduled. The oncologist made adjustments and had everything reset for today, but by Monday--late morning, Rob was told there was bacteria in his blood and that he has a staph infection.

The cancer treatment, so very necessary, will likely be delayed another month as he sits in a hospital with multiple IV lines feeding chemicals into his body to fight an infection.

Meanwhile, the CT scan he had on Friday shows that the lung tumor has grown larger in the space of 4 weeks.

IV

5 weeks ago we were planning a trip to Maine--a trip to close out the summer. Rob, Dev and I on one of our famous road trips we so love. Then the phone call came--before 8 a.m. and so much has changed.

Know that this is the stuff of nightmares and so perhaps it is not so odd that most nights I wake on the hour pulling myself from the same terrible dream of being tracked by a serial killer at night who flashes knives and slashes at my arms and abdomen; thighs and neck--never too deeply.

And I feel the sting and burn--the slow trickle of blood.

And even when I tell myself--You are dreaming--I wake only to fall back into the same scene over and over again.

This is the type of dream that follows me through the early morning as I make my way into a new day.


V.

Earlier today Rob looked at me as I sat next to his hospital bed and said, "We had to overcome a lot to be together.  Do you remember?"  

We talked about those memories for a bit, pulling forth a few stories from decades ago and then he said, "This is just debris in the road we need to clear. We will do this."

VI.

And we will.


VII.

On Wednesday I'll be shaving Rob's head.  The nurses look a bit askance as they hear us talking.

The day before we got the call, Rob had 8 inches of hair cut off and mailed it as he always does to Locks of Love. Now there is a stubby pony tale of chestnut hair that he says is difficult to lie on.  So it will be coming off.

A close buzz, like my Da wore in the 60s. I've never cut his hair.

Our son calls his Da, the Hippie. He says this with such affection. And I want you to know this: that in all of this terror, there is affection and love and trust and a trueness I have never named before. There is goodness here.

VIII.

On the way home from the hospital last night, I tell Dev, "We are claiming that hospital room as a place of love." 

Each day it looks less and less sterile. More and more lived in.

Living is a a minute-to-minute affair.  
There is no tomorrow.
There is now--that is my true North.


IX.

And the one simple truth I hold close is that in this often wild ride with Rob, I have never loved my husband more.

#SOL15: My Husband Dreams of Different Neighborhoods

My husband dreams of different neighborhoods where we have lived some with railroad tracks and others with roads that wind past the front door of a house disappearing like trees in fog. And in one neighborhood our dog, Max, is lost and is wandering. A UPS truck driven by itself turns a corner. And now both  the dog and the truck are coming down the road and Max waits at a corner for the truck to pass and as it does, he's transformed into a man driving a Dodge Dart.

This is the way it is.

All the while, snow blankets the ground.

#SOL15: The Shock That Clears Out the Crap

M.A. Reilly, 2013

I usually have so much to say here--this blog I've kept for the last five years. Yet, now this evening words are hard to gather, harder still to share. My husband has been diagnosed with cancer. I did not see this coming and so the call that woke us this morning seems to mark time and oddly stop it.

There is only the now.

And so the hurry and wait at the hospital and the tests already underway highlight the uncertainty that hangs on us. We take the steps necessary and the next week will reveal more of what we must know, what choices will be made.

I watched earlier as Rob joked with the hospital staff and then reassured me, our son. He's a fighter.

This shock clears out the crap that clutters my life revealing what matters most. And perhaps that is the one gift in all this. What matters most is so clear.

He told me earlier that he wants to write the novel he began years back. Reading the drafts years earlier when we first met still remain with me. It's an epic story. I want to see that novel finished too--or another of his making. More than that, I want him to be well. I have plans for us.

I've cleared the calendar and am scared beyond words.

An Inherent Vice: A Very Short Story

Barefoot Days (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat...

 - Walt Whitman

I. A Short Story

I had forgotten.

Watching Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, I remembered. It was the filthy soles of Doc Sportello's feet that brought it back. My teenage years were spent barefoot. That was decades before bacterial soap would become a household norm, before grime and earth would frighten us, before worry became as commonplace as breath. Then late springs were more often about toughening the soles for a summer mired in gravel and tar.

Throwing off shoes and socks was akin to letting loose that wild animal that hid within our too-soft bodies. How could we know more than what we knew at that moment even if 8,000 miles away young boys we grew up with were dying?

A whole country was dying and all those summers we hitchhiked barefoot.
Went to concerts barefoot.
Walked in and around puddles barefoot.
Ignored the signs & shopped quickly at the A&P, darting between closing doors as the manager in his too-soft brown hush puppies rushed to catch us.
We nudged debris caught in the grooves of old rubber floor mats with our toes, arranging it as if it might reveal something we had lost.
We flicked lit cigarette butts away from our feet, watching how thin arcs of light illuminated darkness, briefly.
We walked across city streets, on dirt roads and through cold night sand--barefoot.

We were so beautifully careless.

And when late August turned cool, some found Birkenstocks tossed under beds or borrowed someone's Dr. Scholls or a pair of thick white socks--but more times than not we just pulled the frayed hems of worn bell bottoms beneath our heels. At dusk some lit punks, some passed joints, and lying back we felt the sweet coolness of grass beneath our feet.

Keeping Watch (M.A. Reilly, Plymouth, England, 2012)

 "Nothing is more misleading than a clear and distinct idea" (Louis de Broglie, p. 128).

II. What's Forgotten

I had forgotten.

Watching Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, I remembered how way might not reveal way.  You see, it wasn't just the filthy soles of Doc Sportello's feet that wound me up as I watched scene after scene unfold all the while trying in earnest to recall the narrative until that too became too taxing, too misdirecting and I stopped wondering, What's the story, here?  and remained simply present.

And later, the very the phrase, inherent vice, kept nudging at something I thought might be important to know, something I might want to tell you.  And so I looked it up and learned:

An inherent vice is "the tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components" (from here). 

The made thing does not lasts. Even, memories, though sweet, are their own inherent vice. Something crucial right now is slipping, turning on itself like a scared animal cornered.

Somedays we move along and the way is forgotten. We move between order and disorder, barefoot or not.

Picturing the Night Sky for One Moon Cycle

New Moon (M.A. Reilly, 5.18.15 - Gelatos, chalk pastels, white gesso, black and white photograph)

I have long been fascinated with the night sky--especially the moon.  For the last few years I have made hundreds of photographic images and traditional media works.  In a project I am currently beginning with teachers and students I made a slideshow--a visual slice of life-- using some of those images (see below).

Blueblack Night (M.A Reilly, 5.18.15)

For the next month (28 days), I'll be making images of the night sky--based on what I observe and
wished I might have observed.  I hold little allegiance to reality. I plan to use a range of media and to introduce children and teachers to that media as they study the skies.  I hope that they might explore some of the following traditional drawing and paint media, as well as digital media as they create a series of drawings, paintings, photographs, and mixed media collages that represent what they saw and imagined as they studied the sky during the next 28 days.  They'll create these works alongside some writing.

Drawing and Paint Media

1. Watercolor cakes
2. Reeves gouache paint set
3. Faber-Castel Gelatos
4. Chalk pastels
5. Gel medium
6. White gesso
7. White glue
8. Crayola Color Switcher Markers
9. Metallic markers
10. crayons
11. Sakura white gel pens
12. Sakura color gel pens
13. Inktense Color Drawing Pencils
14. 2H, HB, B and @b drawing pencils
15. Charcoal White pencils
16. Micron-01 black ink pens
17. Erasers
18. artist tape

Digital and Photographic Media

1. Polaroid camera/film
2. Digital photography

Substrates/Paper/Fabric

1. Black drawing paper
2. Watercolor cardstock
3. Artist Tiles - Black
4. Artist Tiles  white
5. 70 pound white drawing paper
6. cardboard
7. found papers
8. origami paper
9. rice paper
10. fabric scraps
11. newspaper
12. magazines
13. photocopies

Content Rests In Your Hands

Trying to Get Home (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I.  The Clambake

Every Labor Day weekend during a three-day neighborhood clam bake,  Patty, Jeannie and I would perform a singing and dancing show for those in attendance.  The neighborhood parents and all of the kids came to the clam bake, as did most of my Da's and Mom's sisters and our Aunt Alice from Jamaica Heights. The party was held at the Schroeder's, our next store neighbor.  Just a small spit of lawn rested between us and them. Every bed in our house was claimed by Thursday night and my brothers and I slept in sleeping bags on the side porch those long weekends or at other people's homes. Patty, Jeannie and I performed shows for about 5 years, usually on Saturday night after it got nearly dark and the fireflies were out. It was here in the close of what constituted summer that I learned how content was a made thing.

II. Diana

The year we were The Supremes, Mary who was Jeannie and Pat's older sister showed us how to roll our overly long hair around beer cans so our hair would be straight and have volume. Another year, Mary showed us how to iron each other's hair. We dutifully flipped our hair on to an ironing board and one of us covered the hair with a bath towel, while the other moved the heated iron back and forth on the towel. We usually slept at one of our homes during the weekend party and that year on the night before we were The Supremes we did so with our hair wrapped around beer cans. There was no sacrifice too dear.

Two weeks before the clambake, we would get busy and determine what songs to sing, what hats and other costumes to wear, and generally we scoped out how the performance would go. Everything was made by hand, gathered by what was around. One year we made microphones out of juice cans that we covered with foil. Another year we wore matching mini dresses made from pilfered white pillow cases and twine. We were bricoleurs well before we knew the term.

Stop! In the name of love...


The week before, we mostly argued about who got to be Diana and who had to play back up. There was little democracy to these discussions. Jeannie, being the oldest, mostly got her way. Pat and I were destined to play backup. We practiced in the unfinished basement of my home so that we could keep the performance theme a big secret.  We did paint signs advertising the show, usually on large pieces of cardboard--the left over remnants of neighborhood appliance deliveries.  We nailed these to trees throughout the neighborhood. It felt as if we had endless time to make the show as our obligations were simple chores we usually finished by early morning. Other then nightly calls for dinner, most of the day was ours.

Ooh, Baby love...


In looking back, I'm pretty sure few actually watched our shows as the party was well under way and our parents and aunts and older cousins were most often too deep in their cups to notice much. But nothing derailed the show and there was applause peppered at appropriate times and surely we felt like stars performing below the Schroeder's deck with all the lights lit, singing into orange juice cans, and dancing sort of in sync in our pillow case dresses.

Back in My Arms Again...


III. Authoring

Nothing has held me in as good a stead as what I learned about making and authoring when I was a kid. Those summer shows showed me that content was not something given, or looked up to regurgitate. No, content was mostly what got made among others.

This is how I think about curriculum and content today.  I understand curriculum as complicated conversation (Pinar, 1971) and content is what gets made prior to, during, and after those conversations.

I've written a lot about this in other posts. Here are a few:

A Simple Curriculum Framework To Hold Us in Good Stead (11.19.14)
Disassemble, Reassemble: Some Notes About Curriculum and Improvisation (6.19.14)
Six Thoughts about Curriculum (3.19.11)
Curriculum as Complicated Conversation (3.31.11)

"The One With the Foul Ball, Waving for TV"

Ordinary Angels (M.A. Reilly,  Dún Laoghaire, 2008)

I.

Roughly 4 ½ years before great uncle Paddy, then a 16 year old boy, quit Ireland and shipped off to Manhattan, 16,000 British troops landed at the ports of Dún Laoghaire and Dublin--brought there to suppress the 1916 Easter Rising--an Irish attempt at independence.  From 1821 to 1920,  Dún Laoghaire port was named Kingstown port. The original name, Dunleary named after the 5th century king,  Lóegaire mac Néill, was dropped in the1820s when King George IV paid a visit.

Counting is what colonizers do best.

Nearly 40 years after Paddy left Ireland, I came to the States to live. I was born 50 kilometers north of Dún Laoghaire. Then I was called, Olivia Muldoon.  A few decades later I'd visit  Dún Laoghaire in late September with Rob and Devon. It was there I would make the image that tops this post. 

It was late day at the Forty-Foot promontory where the locals swim. We'd been told it had been an unusual September--warm and sunny, unlike the cool and wet summer that preceded it. As such, many were swimming that early fall day and the temperature rose to nearly 21 degrees Celsius. Warm by Irish standards, indeed. I was fascinated by the trio and how the shadows behind them looked almost like wings.  The image would later be published in B & W magazine.

Dev spent that day playing at the promontory splashing in the water and looking for treasure among the rocks when the tide was mostly out. Rob wrote notes in the small notebook he carried--always pen to paper, recorded sounds, and chatted people up. I watched and made images. We all visited the Martello Tower--the very place where Ulysses opens and later we found a small restaurant off of Harbour Road and talked long into the night and ate well.

II.

I understand Ireland largely as a place of narrative. Story leads to story. Ambiguity is embraced. This was how I was raised. And so on another holiday we criss-crossed the island without much of an agenda and when we needed to be at a particular place, we most often found ourselves lost.  More times than not regardless of who we asked, we were told, You're on good road. Just up beyont.  And oddly, all were correct, for eventually we found where we wanted to go and in truth the roads were all good.

Unlike the Irish whose stories and language wind like their roads depositing the subject often at the end of the sentence, we here in the States favour counting and the most direct route. We teach this to our young with increasing precision. With nearly 30 years of high stakes testing and now the Common Core giving shape to schooling, we have lessened the space for stories at school and now require our children to fit their narrative selves into dull, five-paragraph frames. We then call these changes, rigor.

Don't dawdle, we tell them.
Don't waste time, we chide.
Be precise, we warn.

These admonitions give us purpose. Set us right. But mostly, they work to conceal ambiguity by replacing it with an imposed value.  Numbers mark us. When you count, you count.

Douglas Goetsch in his poem, Counting, helped us to see the irony of the act. He wrote:

...That’s all any child wants: to count.
That’s all I wanted to be, the millionth
customer, the billionth burger sold, the one
with the foul ball, waving for TV.

The spaces between what we name by numbers are most often temporary placeholders we use to mark and unmark our possible selves.

Dark Energy & God's Steady Breath

Look Twice. (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

They were all required to drink a measure of the water, and those who were not saved by their good sense, drank more than the measure, and each one as he drank forgot all things. (Plato, The Republic: 10.618a) 

I. Dark Energy

The universe is expanding--an accelerating, dark energy filled cosmos we mostly don't understand. A universe, physicists now speculate that will go on expanding infinitely--a cosmic acceleration that billions and billions of years from now will cause galaxies, like ours, to be ripped apart.

For most of my life I imagined a different universe and a different ending. Think of a big balloon. Now think of that balloon expanding by God's steady breath. And one day we would drink deeply from the black waters of Lethe before God grew too tired from the constant blowing, from our constant whining and stopped. Then the universe would fold back into itself like a collapsed river we did not know, could not even name.

But that's an old story.  One no longer true--if truth, like time, is a river we cannot speak.


II. Uncle Paddy

Stories, I'm told, are a constant.  And it was a story my mother told some years ago about her Uncle Paddy who killed a Black and Tan in Kilmichael, County Cork towards the end of November, 1920. It was late day, perhaps it was dusk.  An ambush she thought or it might have been a fight with fists and bottles and cudgels. And perhaps it wasn't even Cork or November. Perhaps it was late summer. There was such killing that year and the next and the next and the next. Who could really say?

Were there guns?  Did he snap the Brit's neck?  Were his hands bloody? Did he feel remorse?

Recalling details is largely shaped by what we most want to forget and what we partially recall. But some details remain true.

Paddy was too green to wear the IRA tunic the year he killed the Brit, those temporary constables who did nothing to keep peace.  He was too young to be a killer and too green to remain. And thanks to the sure thinking of others, Paddy was quickly bundled out of Ireland via Dublin's Kingstown port while Cork burned.

He was almost 17 when he crossed the Atlantic and arrived in New York City. Arrived to find his sister, Catherine, married to a cop, no less, with five small children and another who would be born later, only to die before her third birthday. All of this and the weight of living in a cramped railroad tenement, but he was a hero in that neighborhood, a fighter for Irish independence. He would live with his sister's family on and off for the next twenty years. He was a man who learned to drink more than his measure. A man who would never return home. A man my grandfather would be called on to identify when the local cops found Paddy's body beaten to death.

Ah Mary, he grew to be such a hard man, never marrying, dying too young. Such were the words my mom said, her breath leaving her mouth in a rush as the late afternoon light colored everything and we sat before two cups of tea still steaming at the kitchen table.  I listened to her talk and talk about Paddy and the Brit until it was dusk and the tea long cooled.

And now nearly 100 years after Paddy first arrived in the States, I find myself wondering about the Brit. Was he someone's father. Was he some woman's lover? There's so much we cannot know. But a son? Yes, the Brit was a son, for certain.

All we have are stories.

III.  Maps

Kitchen wall. 

We are the very stories we find hardest to tell, I say to my son as I look at the wall behind him in the kitchen, knowing well it is marked with pencil, pen, marker--whatever was handy. These marks keep certain my son's growth--the infant who came from Korea at 5 months of age. There's so much I cannot name or keep safe, but these messy marks are maps of love and even at that, they are beautifully incomplete.

For every system we think complete is a lie, even the ones we love--perhaps those more than others.

The spaces between stories are not silences, but rather energies we sometimes heed, sometimes name, often forget. They exceed our definitions, our hunches, our partial knowledge as they are maps we make by living.

The marks stop abruptly at the top of the plate my brother brought back from Greece. They stopped a year ago--perhaps a bit longer. I'd like to think they stopped when I could no longer reach the top of his head to place the pencil against his scalp and draw the line that I would later date.  In truth, though, they stopped when he no longer had the patience, nor the need for such measurement.

All our measurements are at best temporary truths--stories we can't quite hold and need not hold.

He's almost 17, I think watching him leave the kitchen to make his way up the stairs to the room that holds his computers where he'll connect with others around the globe.  I pour some hot water over a tea bag--thinking how my mother would frown at my tea making--and I wonder about the juxtaposition of two young boys who each crossed their own ocean to land here.  One from the East, the other the West. I sip the tea recognizing in part the folly I am making for it is always the map we make in contact with the real that matters most.

You must remember that. Tracings are mostly lies especially those we believe are infinitely traceable. For numbers and the like are placeholders for stories we can't quite tell ourselves. For stories we mostly remember, but not fully. For stories we've heard told and retell as if they were omens to heed, sadnesses to forget, joys to claim.

Tracings are never maps.

I snap a picture of the wall and think this jpg is an act of preservation. I want to remember this night. I want to feel the fullness of it so that I might later wrap it around me like a traveler's cloak when the gathering stillness, the gravity of choices made and not made, the steady breath of God, and the expanding universe leave me mute with nothing but a coin in my pocket and a dark river to cross.

What it Was I Was Listening For

                                               ...The space we stood around had been emptied
                                               Into us to keep, it penetrated
                                               Clearances that suddenly stood open.
                                               High cries were felled and pure change happened.

                                                                                - Seamus Heaney, from Clearances, VII


I.

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

On a too early day in May, I watched my mother die. There is simply no easy way to buffer that truth. I stood beside her bed, touching and not touching, hearing even now, fifteen years removed, her chest rattle as I bargained with an indifferent God. Just a bit more time though I knew she suffered. And regardless of all of those years I spent on my knees--the hard kneeler a kind of penance for sins committed and not--God was mute. Tight-lipped. Taciturn.

I never quite knew what it was I was listening for.

II.

Time passes like a list begun more than once, left tucked inside the pocket of a winter coat worn last season. This is how grief moves and fails to move. Memories arise from the least provocation like a wave that swamps me. And I am drowning here on a Tuesday morning on day too much like the day we set her in the ground--a too beautiful, too early spring day at that.  I sit next to the grown daughter and her mom--both out for some talk, out for a pair of pedicures--nothing too goddamn special.  And it's the ordinariness of it that most undoes me.

I am desperate for Heaney's pure change.

III.

There's little to know when burying the dead. Knowing is a false balm that does not soothe. Knowing is a way to stand still, like that cup of tea made and remade that is still waiting on the counter, long cooled and forgotten.  With each lived moment, I edge closer to leaving and nothing terrifies me more than the thought of my son bargaining with some god on a too early, too spring morning. What words will he proffer?  Have I even taught him how to listen?  Language is a vice--one part fixed, one part moving--a bolt through the heart.

I tell you love is nothing if not epic.

Samhain's Fire (#SOL15, Day 31)

Samhain's Fire (M.A. Reilly, 2010, Morristown, NJ)

I.

It's been a long winter. Cold. Icy. Holding on and here, almost April--and winter's not giving way to spring with any ease. I hear that it may snow today.

II.

Unexpected gifts come when we most need them.

Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend, Catherine Cronin, in from Galway.  We have met one other time, oddly enough in England and it was so good to see her sitting in a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She brought me a book of poems-- Hands by Moya Cannon-- an Irish poet she knows.  When I arrived home this evening, I read.

Towards the end of the book is this jewel:

Apples and Fire 

As we entered
the dark winter room
there, shining on the table
were apples, gathered
in haste last September --
each one a small lamp.  

Later, as the stove's fire
carved into the cold
I began to understand
why fire was worshipped.

To share heat in winter
sweetness in winter,
is to know blessing.

III.

What art, like friendship, does so well is help shift perspective--to reveal what is most hidden.  On this last day of the Slice of Life challenge, I wish for you--fire to worship.

Dormant (#SOL15, Day 30)

When Trees Have Lost Remembrance of Leaves (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

I.

During the last thirty days I have been participating in Slice of Life writing challenge hosted by The Two Writing Teachers.  Tomorrow is the last day. The writers I've had a chance to read during this month who are participating in the challenge have made this a memorable experience.  There's no shortage of writing talent--and this talent is comprised largely of teachers.

Participating reminds me that I am happiest making stuff. I live in a home where everyone makes things. All day yesterday, my son rebuilt a computer in order to make it more energy efficient.  My husband has journals that date back to the early 1980s. He's forever scribbling thoughts--crafting some of these into poems.

II. 

Yesterday morning I took a walk about the yard in search of crocuses. Usually by now they have pushed through the ground and soon will be blooming. 

It's been a cold winter. No sign of them yet.