The Sun

Early morning, Atlantic Ocean, Florida

Have you ever seen 

anything 

in your life 

more wonderful 

than the way the sun, 

every evening, 

relaxed and easy, 

floats toward the horizon 

and into the clouds or the hills, 

or the rumpled sea, 

and is gone– 

and how it slides again 

out of the blackness, 

every morning, 

on the other side of the world, 

like a red flower 

streaming upward on its heavenly oils, 

say, on a morning in early summer, 

at its perfect imperial distance– 

and have you ever felt for anything 

such wild love– 

do you think there is anywhere, in any 

language, 

a word billowing enough 

for the pleasure 

that fills you, 

as the sun 

reaches out, 

as it warms you 

as you stand there, 

empty-handed– 

or have you too 

turned from this world– 

or have you too 

gone crazy 

for power, 

for things? 

 by Mary Oliver

 

Happiness

Prayer (M.A.Reilly)

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
                  It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

—Jane Kenyon

#PoetryBreak:The Sky Over My Mother’s House/El cielo encima de la casa de mi madre

M.A. Reilly, 2016 The  Sky  Over  My  Mother’s  House by Jaime Manrique translated by Edith Grossman

It is a July night scented with gardenias. The moon and stars shine hiding the essence of the night. As darkness fell —with its deepening onyx shadows and the golden brilliance of the stars— my mother put the garden, her house, the kitchen, in order. Now, as she sleeps, I walk in her garden immersed in the solitude of the moment. I have forgotten the names of many trees and flowers and there used to be more pines where orange trees flower now. Tonight I think of all the skies I have pondered and once loved. Tonight the shadows around the house are kind. The sky is a camera obscura projecting blurred images. In my mother’s house the twinkling stars pierce me with nostalgia, and each thread in the net that surrounds this world is a wound that will not heal. *** El cielo encima de la casa de mi madre Es una noche de julio perfumada de gardenias. La luna y las estrellas brillan sin revelar la esencia de la noche. A través del anochecer —con sus gradaciones cada vez más intensas de ónix, y el resplandor dorado de los astros, de las sombras— mi madre ha ido ordenando su casa, el jardín, la cocina. Ahora, mientras ella duerme, yo camino en su jardín, inmerso en la soledad de esta hora. Se me escapan los nombres de muchos árboles y flores, y había más pinos antes donde los naranjos florecen ahora. Esta noche pienso en todos los cielos que he contemplado y que alguna vez amé. Esta noche las sombras alrededor de la casa son benignas. El cielo es una cámara oscura que proyecta imágenes borrosas. En la casa de mi madre los destellos de los astros me perforan con nostalgia, y cada hilo de la red que circunvala este universo es una herida que no sana

#PoetryBreak: Grand Mal Seizure

(Desert Panels, M.A. Reilly, 2016)

Grand Mal Seizure

                    - by Molly McCully Brown

There's however it is you call,
& there's whatever it is
you're calling to.
July, I sew
my own dress
from calico & lace.
August, they take it
off me in the Colony,
trade it in
for standard-issue
Virginia cotton.
Not much room
for my body in the
heavy slip; maybe
that's the idea.

                               For awhile the abandoning
                               was rare & then it was not
                               & would never be again.

                               Imagine you are
                               an animal in your
                               own throat.

The dormitory has a pitched
dark roof & a high porch.
We are not allowed outside.
Instead, we go to the window & make
a game of racing dogwood blossoms
knocked down by the wind.
Choose your flower as
it falls & see whose
is the first to hit the clay.
I beat the crippled girl every day
for a week. The trick is to pick
the smaller petals.

                               Most nights, they knot
                               the bed sheet in my mouth
                               so I will not bite my tongue.

                               Lay out on the pine floor:
                               rattle your own bones back
                               to the center of the world.

In the beds, the smell
of kerosene & lye.
The girls wake themselves
one after another:
spasm, whimper, whine.
Outside: cicadas.
In the distance: the bighouse lights.
Another truck comes loud up the road
bearing another girl.
There is whatever it is
you're calling to. There is
however it is you call.





(opening poem from  The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, Persea Books)

#PoetryBreak: The Main Thing to Know

Grief (Cohen and Reilly, 2016)

The main thing to know
about grief is how lonely it feels,
like an empty boat moored
beneath moonlight.
Here, breath
remains the color
of silence.

When you
finally speak
grief rises
from the ground
like thunder,
like a too-angry god
so loud
you can't hear
your own wings beating.

Even now,
your heart
feels too tender,
too undone
like the bowline
that slips
from
my hand
to form
this poem.

It is in the making
that you learn
to live
again.

#Poetry Break: Grief Has a Sound

A Man from Cape May on New Years Day. Many years ago.

The wind
that New Year's Day
reckless and wild
found us 190 miles from home
huddled at the Cape May lookout
where we watched others
who had gathered too
to watch the sea.

Then nothing bad
was known
firsthand.
We dreamed of futures
and held them up
like bright bits of flame
that warmed our too-cold hands
on that first January night.

Years later I would know
that grief has a sound
more howl than holler,
like the sea wind set loose
reckless and wild
a lamentation
now known
by heart.

#SOL17: On Not Aging

Rob teaching

Rob will never grow old.
He will not turn a year older like you will this year, or I will next fall.
He'll never retire, or find new hobbies and interests.
He will never see his son graduate high school, drive, enter college.
He will never have the chance to disrupt the idea of what 70 is or 80.

I freeze his life at 60.
When he turned 60, we had no idea what that year would bring.
There were no signs that said, live brilliantly now, for you will be dead soon.
We were blind.

17 years ago my mom died.
Each year, I add to her age.
She would have been 98 had she lived.
My father would have turned 100 next September.

Rob was always 4 years older than me--almost exactly.
We were born on adjacent days in mid-November.
He was 3 years, 364 days older.
There will likely come a time when we are the same age.
There will come a time when I am older.
He will always be 60.

Why can I age my parents, but not my husband?
Is it the simple tragedy of dying early?
I don't know.
What I do know is that Rob will never grow old. 

#SOL16: After Rob

Below is a poem that captures an early morning after Rob died. I  wrote it and paired it with two pages from my art journal. It has been a long time since I actually wrote poetry and it was a bit scary to face the page. A special thanks to Carol Varsalona for the occasion to write poetry and the encouragement to do so.

from my art journal, 6.8.16  (acrylic paint, ink, gesso)

#SOL16: Two Futures. One Past.

I.

So I'm following a link Simon Ensor (@sensor63) tweeted and when I read the poem he has posted, I slow down. It's a poem about many things, the least of which is an accounting of the death of the speaker's father.

I don't want to follow the speaker up the stairs to where I know surely, death has happened. I don't want to notice what only can be known by experience. My time with Rob. My time watching my husband die is still so raw, so immediate and the details of a death at home and all that comes with it are ones I understand too well. But Simon's words are a traffic accident I cannot look away from and these words compel me to look, to notice, to do what is the most human of things--to bear witness to another's expression of grief. It is this, this bearing witness that makes us human.

Simon writes:

"It was autumn in spring perhaps.

It wasn't winter surely.

It surely wasn't summer.

I backed out of the room.

I walked along the corridor.

I passed the embroidery.

Saying nothing.

My sister and my mother were sitting on the sofa.

Were they sitting on the sofa?

We said nothing.

All was drizzle.

A corpse is a corpse is a corpse.

I never saw the corpse.

My father lives differently..."

And it is the present tense in that last line I have quoted that stops me. "My father lives differently." A corpse is a corpse is a corpse and a father is not. A father lives, like a husband lives, like a mother lives, like the ones we love so deeply live beyond the body through our art and talk and sighs and grief.


II.

The deepest despair blooms and that is a truth about time we can hold.  For time as we name it, know it is slippery, unreliable, and irrational.  It bends to our will and rejects our most deepest wants, our most private fears. We will all die and what that means is mostly informed by what we know of time as we name it now and how the body dies. For a corpse signals the end. What remains beyond the body is less known, less understood, less rational, less comforting in the aftermath of loss. We want the corporeal.

We have made time up and said it is the Truth and organized the story of an entire universe based on this single story. Time is an arrow moving forward. Once there was nothing then there was a bang and time began.

Time is an arrow. Boltzmann told us time flows forward. This morning like most mornings, the cream I pour into my coffee mixes with ease.  It does not unmix.  Here time moves forward.  But here is not the totality of possibilities; it is only the vantage point from which we hypothesize. Julian Barbour, Tim Koslowski, and Flavio Mercarti propose that the Big Bang produces a single past with "two distinct futures emerging from it." They write, "Any internal observer must be in one half of the solution and will only be aware of the records of one branch and deduce a unique past and future direction from inspection of the available records."

Where we stand frames what we know and in doing so, what we cannot know. Imagine that death is the movement from one future to another. Time then is never just an arrow. It is a slim truth we have concocted to organize what is irrational. We live here in these three dimensions and we call that whole and yet grief lives within and beyond that if we let it.

III.

Each death slays us as it opens us to other ways of knowing, being, loving. I know this now.  I know how Rob's death opens me to what is non-orientable, what is unnamed. We know more than we can say is a better truth than time moves forward, leaving those we have loved behind.

Some nights, I sleep in flannel pants he once wore. When it is cool and misting, I wear a flannel shirt of his when I walk outside.  It is the absence and odd clarity of memory that travels with grief that moves me most; makes me most humbled when I read posts like Simon's.  Wallace Stevens knew, like I do now that there's such courage in the saying out loud what we see in the dark.

Poetry Break: After the Winter

Uptown (M.A. Reilly, 2013, Harlem)

After the Winter

BY CLAUDE MCKAY

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves

     And against the morning’s white

The shivering birds beneath the eaves

     Have sheltered for the night,

We’ll turn our faces southward, love,

     Toward the summer isle

Where bamboos spire the shafted grove

     And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill

     Where towers the cotton tree,

And leaps the laughing crystal rill,

     And works the droning bee.

And we will build a cottage there

     Beside an open glade,

With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,

     And ferns that never fade.

Claude McKay, “After the Winter” from Claude McKay: Complete Poems. Published by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2004 by Claude McKay.

Poetry Break: The Cold Night

Pastoral (M.A. Reilly, 2012) THE COLD NIGHT by William Carlos Williams

It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars -- like the bare thighs of the Police Sergeant's wife -- among her five children . . . No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass. One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold . . . ! White thighs of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April . . . In April I shall see again -- In April! the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergeant's wife perfect still after many babies. Oya!

Poetry Break: April in Maine

Spring Ice on Pond (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2009)

A friend, Nelson Campbell, posted the poem below as a reply to a poem I posted yesterday. It is so grand, so perceptive that I wanted to share it more widely.  Years ago, the first time Rob and I went to Maine it was early April. We left Manhattan and it was 50 degrees and ten hours later we finally stopped in Freeport, Maine because the snow kept falling. At first we thought it was nothing more than a snow shower, but as we travelled north, we realized we were in a bonfide snow storm. We ended up staying at an inn that had just been open. We would return to that inn annually for the next 27 years.

Thanks Nelson and of course, thank you May Sarton.

April in Maine 

         by May Sarton 


The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.



April in Maine" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. 

Poetry Break: In April

Spring (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

In April

James Hearst

This I saw on an April day:
Warm rain spilt from a sun-lined cloud,
A sky-flung wave of gold at evening,
And a cock pheasant treading a dusty path
Shy and proud.


And this I found in an April field:
A new white calf in the sun at noon,
A flash of blue in a cool moss bank,
And tips of tulips promising flowers
To a blue-winged loon.


And this I tried to understand
As I scrubbed the rust from my brightening plow:
The movement of seed in furrowed earth,
And a blackbird whistling sweet and clear
From a green-sprayed bough.

#SOL16: After Pennsylvania

Dreaming of Horses Running (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Below is a poem Rob wrote for me years ago.  He found it again this past December and gave it to me on our 25th wedding anniversary.  A friend recently said to me, you and Rob had such a love story. And she's right we did.

Here's the poem he wrote. I want to share the work, our love, his poem to me and preserve all of that somehow--here in this digital wonderland.

I love you, Rob. No words of mine can capture that quite right. Your words however... 

After Pennsylvania

(for MaryAnn

Shrouded in the deep serenity

of meditative hills

where the music

of winter winds

covers the silence

& I wait

for the future

is a rose

born

of just this moment

(it unfolds

even as I speak

each petal

wraps

a memory

& falls across faraway days

where 2 horses

nuzzle:

the brown male nibbles gently

at her white ear

the other side of the fence

her careful eyes lidded white

& I remember the look of you

when you showed me

how you sat

on the counter in your kitchen

& stared down the road

prayerful

I would be soon

in your arms

but that fence

kept us apart

or the Sunday

as I practiced Zen

& waited for you

& drifted in my study

only to lose all concentration:

every sound

could be you

there

for me to

nuzzle

& without fence

share

each other, feed

each other, play

What sounds!

Was that me

laughing like that

& you

did I hear you squeal

as you took

food from my mouth

you fed my heart:

I who have always been

on my way

to something else

have followed this path

of fallen rose petals

to a hill

where I see

2 horses

graze together

in an open field

as I stop to catch

my breath

.

#SOL16: Found - Rob's Words

A notebook entry from Rob. 1.20.16

I.

This morning the house is very quiet. Rob's mother left yesterday to return to her home in Florida. My son and our guest, Robyn are each asleep upstairs.  Rob has been sleeping soundly and wakes briefly. We talk a bit. Rob is so weak that his voice is hard to hear, his words difficult to discern. But when I ask, "So, you'll help me to cross over when it's my time?" He is quick to respond, "Yes. Get my brown bag."

I return with Rob's briefcase and put it on the bed near him so he can see it.  He is too weak to handle it.

"Get my writing out."

I show him his iPad, thinking he may have written something on it. His computer. And he shakes his head, no, each time.  At the bottom of the bag I find a small black Moleskin notebook. There isn't much written in it, but there is a prose poem/observation on the first page.  It is dated, 01.20.2016 -- 2 days before the snow. I realize now that he wrote this after I had left that morning when we ate breakfast together. I show him the book and he smiles, settles a bit more and falls back to sleep.

III.

What Rob can't know is that in four days from the dated entry he will be transported back to Morristown Hospital from Kessler Institute in Saddle Brook, NJ. I will call the nurse's station that Sunday afternoon to tell them that something is wrong with Rob.  He is not responsive when we are on the phone and I have tried to talk with him all morning.  Since Rob was hospitalized back in the end of August, I have not missed a day seeing him when he was away from home. Saturday, the day of the blizzard, was the first time I couldn't get to him and so I am anxious at his inability to hold a conversation.  Meanwhile, Devon and I can't get the snow blower to work so we are digging out after the blizzard using shovels, with Dev doing the heavy lifting.  I repeatedly call the nurses as my concern rises as the day moves along.

Rob is just not Rob.

Finally at 7 p.m. a doctor from Kessler will call to tell me he thinks Rob has a urinary tract infection and that he needs to be treated at a hospital. After a bit of back and forth, the doctor agrees to have him transported to Morristown where Rob's doctors practice.

Devon and I leave home for Morristown and because it is the night after a blizzard, the highway is fairly empty, but the emergency room when we get there is packed.  By 3 a.m. we learn that it isn't a urinary tract infection that has raised Rob's temperature above 102 degrees and has him delirious--but rather another staph infection. This time it is the Picc line that is infected.

The first staph infection was caused by a surgeon at a different hospital placing an infected port into Rob's chest back in September. The second staph infection happened because Rob had not been cured of the first and yet cleared by the infectious disease doctor at that hospital to have his first chemo treatment. Within 6 days of the treatment, he developed a massive abscess in his chest--one I was told by the thoracic surgeon was dangerously close to the right ventricle of his heart. He lost his fifth rib during that surgery. The infection had mostly eaten through it.

IV.

As Rob sleeps, I read his writing, piecing together that this poem in some way may be his answer to the question -- how do we cross to the other side. Perhaps and yet perhaps not.  It hardly matters. What does matter is to be of one mind with him through his words.

 Here's what he wrote.


The old lady's forward movement
opens a crease, a small line of
organized light--a slip of
space just enough for a 4 year
old hand to slide a hand in and hold--
What is this? There's nothing 
to hold but this hand is filling
with ______what? Cold, trickles
over hands and with a mind
of its own begins to bend
around hands now wringing
as if under a faucet flowing

V.

Since 1985 Rob has kept a notebook.  Such treasures awaits us.  I think beyond today and take some small pleasure in the reading I will do after he has left.  His words will live on.

Poetry Break: Harlem Night Song

Moon Over Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Harlem Night Song

     -Langston Hughes


Come, Let us roam the night together
Singing.

I love you.

Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.

Down the street
A band is playing

I love you.

Come,
Let us roam the night together
Singing.

A Poetry Break: Old Territory. New Maps.

A Room of One's Own (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

When I read this, I was stopped. Sometimes poems do that to me.  Halt me in one breath and then invite me to wander, ponder, consider how the poem and the meaning I am making intersect with my life. This one does just that as poems about the tenacity of love often do. I am reminded of the journey I am taking with my husband and how space and time are so often measured by gesture, by suggestion, by longing and absence and the made thing. 

Old Territory. New Maps.

BY DEBORAH A. MIRANDA

You plan an uncomplicated path

through Colorado’s red dust,

around the caustic edge of Utah’s salt flats

a single night at a hotel

in the Idaho panhandle. Our plans change.

It’s spring, we are two Indian women along

together and the days open:

sunrise on a fine long road,

antelope against dry hills,

heron emerging from dim fields.

You tell me this is a journey

you’ve always wanted to take.

You ask me to tell you what I want.

I want my longing to miraculously

bring you through the barrier of your skin

into my blood so that I can possess you

entirely and yet be entirely possessed.

You say no, your face tight with pain, tears

burning your eyes, hands clenching the steering wheel.

I believe you. We drive hundreds of miles

across deserts sculpted by wind and story,

and I learn distance from my hand to your thigh,

your mouth to my mouth, the curve of a collar

along a warm, smooth neck.

You grin as if no one has ever seen you thus:

naked, savage, happy.

That is the beginning of yes.

Ghosts are everywhere.

We hear them singing on that mountain in Ute country,

the cries of your flute pleasuring old spirits.

Like those people whose land we cross,

we don’t live by lines drawn on paper.

Instead, we mark the waterfall of shy kisses,

a dry windy town where we exchange secrets in whispers,

the high cliff hollow that shelters us

on the edge of the Uinta forest.

Wildflowers bend beneath our bodies,

cup the trembling weight of touch.

We wander for awhile in a place vast enough

to contain all possibilities.

After twelve hundred miles together

we enter green forest thick along a fearless river.

This dense topography we can’t see through,

can’t find the horizon to judge distances

or the arc of the sun to know east from west.

There at last you clasp my hand, guide it

to a place beyond maps,

no universe I have ever known.

It is a raw landscape; we are the sojourners

overcome by the perilous shock of arrival.

We stop the car, walk by the river,

clumsy, frightened by desire. I wish

for more than body or soul can bear.

Sweet, these are the maps we made together,

territories we foolishly vowed to own.

Here, the place we wandered off the map,

moved deep into a land without scars

where every direction took us home

but no place could give us shelter.

I don’t know how to survive awakening

in a woman’s body with a child’s

broken heart. I fall on my knees, our love

a bare stone on the windowsill between us.

How can I learn this trick, will your body

back to the other side of my skin? Help me

translate loss the way this land does—

flood, earthquake, landslide—

terrible, and alive.

Miranda, Deborah A. (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen/Chumash). “Old Territory. New Maps.” from The Zen of La Llorona. Copyright © 2005 by Deborah A. Miranda.

love what it loves

Towards Home (M.A. Reilly, Warwick NY.2010)

Wild Geese

 by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.