for Jon, Maria and Izzy
the tulip is singing
a song for the broken-hearted.
a song of grief
and a song of rejoicing.
a song of remembering
and of forgetting
of holding and letting go.
I ask myself these questions:
can you let yourself be sung?
(the melody is unknown)
can you let yourself be danced?
(there are no steps)
can you open and open again,
trembling in the wake
of this fierce music?
Yesterday my sister and I transplanted a Rosa Rugosa from a rose bed to the end of a grape arbor. She says that it is a traditional, auspicious place for a rose. Plus, she wanted it out of her rose bed. It was big and hardy, sending runners everywhere. It had to go.
We dug a deep hole in the new location in the rich Wisconsin earth and then labored over an hour to unseat the rose. It was a taproot problem, We couldn’t find it, and when we did it was as thick as my wrist. We sawed and clipped.
By now, I was talking to the rose. “Rosa,” I said. “You are going to love your new home. You’ll have more space. You will have an important job protecting the grapes.” My sister, sweating, cursed the rose. “No, no,” I said. “You have to be kind. Persuade her. Gentle her.”
Finally, she came free and we planted her deep with cow manure and more rich dirt. We watered her. The next day she looked good, leaves still firm and green, despite her amputated taproot.
That, I think, is the problem with planting oneself deep. You send down a taproot to the waters below and runners to connect out into your community. There is belief there: “I am here, I will be here.” Moving, transplanting means disruption, severing.
So now, I must find a way to speak to the rose that is me. To persuade, to comfort, to reassure myself that I will find a new place to root, to grow, to flower. A place that will hold me, hold us. And that in the coming cut is also the opportunity for new growth, new vistas, beauty and happiness.
Nineteen years ago we put my father’s ashes into his beloved Mississippi River. Yesterday my sister and I walked along the river, and came across these cottonwood trees, their roots revealed and honed by the river.
Can you allow the river of your life
to shape and polish you?
Will you stand in the slipstream,
the eddy, the boil and wash of your life
and reach for the sun?
The tree is not afraid
nor should you be
even when the current
is carrying you,
faster than imagination,
to another shore.
I remember these trains from my childhood. This one is by the side of the road – part of an ice cream shop outside of Bay City, Wisconsin.
Last night, as I lay in bed, I could hear the distant trains that pass below the bluff along the Mississippi. I love the sound – distant, eerie wails but comforting somehow. Hearing them in the night, they feel subterranean – buried in memory – dream trains, bearing hidden cargo, moving between the big cities at night, out of and back into the dark. Echoes of an earlier time, but here still, calling me now.
Visiting the Midwest is like that for me. I feel surrounded by the ghosts of old selves, haunted by the layered dust of memory. My sister and I touch those times tenderly, casually. Being here feels like traveling backward in time into a present that holds the shapes, smells and tastes of the past.
It used to be that coming home felt like trying to put on ill-fitting, outgrown clothes. Now it is different. Time and space seem jumbled, wrinkled and folded in on each other. Everything is familiar and I am the stranger, traveling on the dream train. Destination unknown.
On another note: Jon Katz has been sharing poems that go to the heart and this one is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. There is no confusion here: past and present woven, shining with appreciation.