Memoirous

 Someone You Know is Dying   You haven’t been in touch for years, a connection grown thinner and thinner—yet she once knitted a hat and, because it was too small for her head, gave it to you. You got a blanket after the divorce, hers not yours, that was still to come. She was a fiddle player. Now, when you hear a jig or lively dance tune, you pause, remembering. The band stopped touring a few years back. On one hand you feel angry, then sad, then thoughtful. Nothing feels right. She spins, her spinning wheel sits silent, the remains of the last dyed yarns died. You ask friends: Why didn’t she fight? She wasn’t that old. It wasn’t cancer or some incurable disease. It was your ex-husband who said it best—She was too logical. Meaning—only an insane person contests death. Still, you’re pissed. There’s a picture of her you discovered on your hard drive when changing over to a new computer (another form of death, another story of grieving). Memorial Day 2005 by the lake. Exact...

 Many of us are familiar with A. E. Houseman's infamous poem "To an Athlete Dying Young." It was eulogized in the movie  Out of Africa , when the character Karen Blixen movingly reads it over the open grave of her lover Denys Finch Hatton. I read it as a youth and--without knowing the term exactly--found it romantic in a way that doesn't fit the common concept of that word, but more like the emotive aspect: tragic, ironic, and about destiny. Houseman was infatuated with the idea of life cut short, of youth in all its glory, fossilized, forever caught in the folds of time. To an Athlete Dying Young By  A. E. Housman The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. Today, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay, And early...

  From my friend, Lotta: THANK YOU!

October   Books litter the bed, leaves the lawn. It lightly rains. Fall has come: unpatterned, in the shedding leaves.   The maples ripen. Apples come home crisp in bags. This pear tastes good. It rains lightly on the random leaf patterns.   The nimbus is spread above our island. Rain lightly patters on un- shed leaves. The books of fall litter the bed. I’m still high from reading Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Mental illness permeated his adult years—but also he was bound by the seasons. So many of his poems contain seasonal observations. This one hints at relationships: our island; at love: the bed; at unrequited loneliness: dreary autumn rain. For Schuyler there were rings of friendship—but also failed romances. There was getting older; memories of bygone days; unfulfilled dreams. October holds all of this. Goodbye October.

  All the leaves came down   All it takes is one storm                         A fierce wind                                     And one night   A shaking of the boughs                         A rattling of the bones                                     To surrender   Add to that, cold                ...