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Grief
The Odds Of Injury
In rugby I find a clan of women who braid their hair tight to their scalps, who have tattoos and girlfriends and are fiercely loyal. They are my comrades on the field. They risk injury for me, and I do the same for them. Since women’s rugby is an underfunded club sport, we fight for field space, wake up early, play on the rocky public fields of Oakland.
February 2014
Already Falling
You think you can feel the peace in this room. A line from Matthew comes to you: “Forgive us as we forgive . . .” Something is happening here with the light and the birds and the wind outdoors: a transformation from despair to readiness. You call for your mother.
October 2013
A Brief For The Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. / But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. / Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not / be made so fine.
— from “A Brief for the Defense”
July 2013The Most Beautiful Raynovich
“There was nothing that could be done,” said the policeman to my friend Nancy last Sunday at her door. By this he meant, Your twenty-year-old daughter died in a traffic accident on her way to work at the mall this morning.
June 2013
Swimming
Feeling less alone — in the pool, in my grief — should be a comfort, but it robs you of something. We are possessive even of our pain. We become it, and even the suggestion that it could be shared is frightening. We want to be alone with it, to caress it and learn to love it like a child, saying, This is mine and mine only.
February 2013
Family Tree
I watch my son high in the magnolia / where branches thin. His sister / at the foot of the tree shrieks for him / to come down and play with her.
January 2013Leah’s Daughter
The workshop was just about to get started when somebody noticed / that Leah looked glum & distracted & asked what was wrong, / & Leah told us her daughter had called from Iraq that morning, / hysterical, screaming & weeping.
January 2013The Language Of Sky
I’ve moved on. I hope you can too. / And just like that, I am lost. / It is possible we will not meet / again in this life.
January 2013Sanctuary
She boarded the train that propelled her into the past and the future both at once, giving her time to shift perspectives, to find her edges again, the places where her body and the world met.
January 2013
Twelve Reasons To Cry
Asking, “When was the last time you cried?” is even more personal than asking someone’s salary or weight.
January 2013
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