Why I write

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Some people know how to tell stories.

Where to start, when to stop.

What needs to be said? What needs to be shed.

I’m not one of them.

When I start to write,

I don’t know where I’m going.

Posts don’t fall from trees.

They come from a little store in Seville,

A café in Quebec

A twinkling star in a distant galaxy.

Or wrapped in silk ribbon, scented with cloves.

They are the story I have to tell.

Sweet or gentle things mixed with hard or heavy things

Like what you’d get if you stirred three heaping teaspoons of chaos

or crazy with two teaspoons of rightness and light.

There are tears around each corner

When you’re running out of years.

Swirling, blending,

Sort of like a river flows.

Sometimes they arrive like waves,

Cresting one after the other,

Overriding paragraphs

And breaking into poems.

Each post breathes

Briefly

Bare,

Briefly there.

Then speeds up,

Slows down,

Jagged, graceful,

Urgent, as in older,

And otherworldly as in from an “other” world.

Life becomes an index of absence.

I won’t ever have a client again,

won’t ever have a paycheck again,

won’t ever live in our home again,

won’t ever read as me again, won’t ever write as me again,

won’t ever be me with you.

What helps?

Staying focused on what I’ve been given, not on what I lost or how.

Also not giving up too soon or getting down too fast or staying down too long.