Lumi means “snow” in Finnish; it also means Light.

I’m not a dog person. Which means quizzical-verging-on-contemptuous looks from the numerous dog owners in my neighborhood as I briskly walk past their adorable fur balls without comment or gushing. (“Sorry. I really don’t mean to offend you. I’m just not into your pet, okay?”) But, serendipitously, the same week an intriguing article on dog tail-wagging came out, which examines the long-term relationship between dogs and humans, a blue-eyed husky named Lumi reminded me that “dog” backwards is “God.”

This spiritual awakening happened like this: I was in New Hampshire visiting dog-owning family and offered the opportunity to try snowshoeing. Which I instantly loved! Although walking on snowshoes is a lot like wearing the heaviest, most mud-caked boots ever, snowshoes allow you to trudge on fresh, deep snow. (Duh.) So silence-lovin’ me immediately saw how eerily quiet and reverent such unsullied walks could be. And if, given global warming, it makes sense to buy me a pair, I’m in. (How do I even figure this out!)

Not that our Saturday trek was all that quiet. Two parents, one granddaughter, two dogs, plus me meant a less than worshipful stroll. Especially when Lumi would suddenly stop to frantically dig some piled-high snowbank. And have to be scolded, again and again, “Leave it!” Huh?

Under all that pristine, glistening snow were woodland creatures—and Lumi could hear them?! That stopped me in my tracks. (Which probably looked like Grammy catching her breath.) It wasn’t just the sudden gestalt when recognizing the symbiosis between ancient humans and dogs unearthing what’s for dinner tonight that earned my slack-jawed awe. I stared at Lumi as if seeing God made manifest: “You heard chipmunks or field mice or . . . under all that snow? What an amazing creature you are!”

And dog-owners get this, right? They get to have moments when their pets remind them: “Actually, creation is not anthropocentric. Humans just assume it is. If we’re incredibly lucky, we humans may be in a long-term relationship with lots of life forms. Dog willing.”

 

 

In Honor of Dr. King:

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been working on other writing projects. But today, serendipitously, as we honor the all-too-short life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I began revising this passage, about a young, Black, LA Uber driver. His SUV in the shop, he decides to do something he’s never done before but needs his grandmother’s—and Dr. King’s benevolent spirit’s—help. So thought I’d like to post it:

The Sequoia’s still not ready—but today he’s almost glad. Like what’s he’s been wondering about all weekend can happen now.

But first he needs a ride. Can’t keep using Uber.

Pulling out of the Enterprise on Washington in a white Kia Soul, the only thing left on the lot, Darrell’s gravely disappointed to be driving this shitbox. Literally. It’s a box. A small and and white and weird box, ugly as sin.

Not him.

But maybe that’s okay, he speculates at the light. Because none of this is him. But if in fact he does discover his father’s name, an address, remaining incognito is smart.

And, besides, this whole search thing isn’t real. It isn’t him searching. He’s playing a role: he’s the man who would actually drive this piece of crap.

(Like many, attractive young men in LA, Darrell’s had a handful of on-camera day jobs. He’s been an extra. He’s been a Storm Trooper.)

He’s happy to be behind the wheel, the sport of it, the block by block one-upmanship, the freeways’ ins and outs. To celebrate, he briefly reroutes and maybe for good luck or maybe to make amends or to change up the Universe, give it something different to chew over, he stops at the Whole Foods on Lincoln for a half-gallon of Newman’s Own.

And even though Ghost Town isn’t what it once was, even though the gentra-fuckers—his word not Gran’s—have driven out most of the families he’d grown up with, still, even though it doesn’t register, not even to this young man so thoroughly inhabiting his beautiful body, when he turns onto Sixth Avenue every muscle tenses: Will I be stopped, frisked, harassed? Will an LAPD squad car follow behind? Just to remind me: Hey, boy. I’m here. And I’ve chosen to give you a hard time. Because I can.

Relieved to get to Gran’s without incident; without thinking he pulls into her driveway, which lies between her shabby, faded-peach bungalow and the looming, steel and glass cube next door. His arrival sets off the never-seen neighbors’ bichon frises who howl and madly pace back and forth from behind the floor-to-ceiling third floor window facing Gran’s bougainvillea-graced house.

In two seconds, strawberry-aproned, clutching a heavy, silver candlestick, his grandmother huffs out the kitchen door. One look at her furious, lined, regal face, her haunted eyes behind her smudged, gold-framed glasses, her usually perfect ‘do all crazy-whichways, and for a second he’s Pharaoh again.

But in head-drooped despair he catches sight of his elongated, gym-sculpted shadow on the driveway; his massive shoulders. And snickers.

You planning to throw that at me, Gran? Or just smash it on my head?

Whose car’s that?

The dogs quiet but stand, wet noses to the glass, as if waiting for his answer.

But Darrell will only ever answer every third or fourth of his grandmother’s questions— or whenever she says Darrell Marc Wiggins, that added middle name the unmistakable tip-off she’s super-pissed.

Tight-lipped, he follows her through the back door and into her kitchen. Her spotless and lonely and no-baking-smells-anymore kitchen.

As he hands her the paper sack he inventories, half-hoping he’ll discover something new yet knowing he won’t. Same, same. Same pale lime walls and glass-fronted cabinets, same chrome, black-handled electric percolator next to the strawberry cookie jar—Gran does love her strawberries—same scrawny cactuses in the same Mexican flower pots in the always-sunny window over the double, enamel sink, same strawberry trimmed valance over it, same strawberry-garnished ceramic napkin holder on the same grey-marbled formica and metal-legged table.

(He’d thought that table-top looked like clouds when he was a kid. One time he’d outlined some of those clouds with blue Magic Marker. And got swatted. Darrell remembers this. Gran does not.)

Covering that clouded relic are newspapers and a jar of Wright’s silver polish and the mate to that  briefly weaponized candelabra—which belongs to Living Waters. (Gran’s got to be doing something.)

What’s this about? she frowns when she opens the sack.

It could have been okay, he realizes. Showing up like this, unexpected but family and tolerated, the expiating lemonade; he could have eased into why he’d come. What he wants. But that driveway mistake startled her. Even though this neighborhood is no longer “Ghetto by the Sea,” she’s still got bars on the windows, double-locks on the front door. She still remembers the Bad Old Days. He’d scared her.

Because she’s his Gran and obliged to and because she’s used to him evading her questions, she offers the lemonade. When he’s turned it down and she’s put it away in the same damned, round-cornered fridge he’d snuck popsicles out of when he was six, Gran slams its mint-green door to let him know she’s still not pleased and, as if deflated, as if exhausted, as if every one of her seventy-four years weighs on her, she plops herself down on a chrome and silver kitchen chair like an old, old lady and resumes polishing.

(So she won’t be looking at him. Perfect.)

What’s this about?

He sits beside her.

I should have thought, Gran. It’s a rental ‘til my car’s out of the shop. Sorry I scared you.

Nodding, lips pursed, she sighs as if to ask, Why, why do I expect anything different from you?

He remembers why he’d come.

And the right words come. And the right tone comes, too, so she can hear those right words. And since she’s always known this day was coming, she takes a moment to be surprised and to be grateful for the contrition she hears. That’s unexpected.

I know this is hard for you, he tells her in so many words. I know you don’t want to go there. But it’s time.

Truth is, I don’t know.

But you had your suspicions.

You’re right about that.

And she heaves herself off her chair, she washes her hands at the kitchen sink and, her back to him, she opens the top drawer next to the sink and pulls out the vintage, strawberry-embroidered dishtowel he’d given her for Christmas last year. The one she’d told him was much too nice, that she’d never use. Staring out the window, Gran slowly dries her hands.

He watches her shoulder blades rise and fall, rise and fall.

So when she turns, when she looks at him, although he cannot read her imperious face, never could, he knows to keep quiet; to follow her into her drapes-shut bedroom and to so acutely anticipate what will happen next that when she gestures under her pillows-strewn double bed he’s already on his knees.

Because he’s always known this Bullocks hatbox has been under here. At ten, he’d peeked under Poppa and Gran’s bed looking for Christmas presents, but got queasy thinking about them in bed, so never opened it.

He also knows that this Uncovering must happen, not in this darkened, cramped, sweet Annie smelling bedroom. It must happen seated side by side in Gran’s living room, on Gran’s davenport, the hatbox arranged on her coffee table next to her white Bible, opened to Psalm 27, and blessed by the framed photo of Dr. King.

As if they were nothing, she rummages through her capable daughter’s elementary school artwork, Shayla’s awards and citations, her spelling bee trophies, her hand-written essays with oversized, exultant As on top; with her long, knowing fingers Gran delves through all these treasures to clasp a Venice High School, 1991 Yearbook at the very bottom of the box.

Darrell, who got his GED in juvie, wants to read every name, study every picture; every extravagantly-penned, i-hearted inscription, but Gran impatiently thumbs through the thick, glossy pages like she’d always had a hunch but today, buttressed by him and Dr. King and Psalm 27 and that gift of lemonade, is acting on it.

And there, unmistakably, in the Faculty section, there he is, about the same age as Darrell is now. Even with most of his Roland Gift-look-alike face obliterated by his “Best Wishes, Shayla,” Darrell recognizes himself.

And for a moment, he thinks, This is it. Here’s the end of the line. This is all I need. His face. His name. I’m done.

But he’d made a plan. So no, no sudden U Turns, now.

Mark Braithwaite, he reads aloud, silently marveling at that Mark; at his spelling-bee winner mom’s little joke. That name mean anything to you?

But it’s her turn to ignore a question. I need to lie down.

 

 

 

 

Serendipity

[An excerpt from Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, to be published by Barclay Press, 2022.]

In January of 2020, the same day Beijing reported its first coronavirus death, out-of-the-blue I decided to rescue family photos in moldy photo albums or crammed into shoeboxes under my bed. After buying a nifty storage box, I began to sort and organize. That same week, Ancestry.com informed me that my ancestors had been English, Scottish, Norwegian, and German. (I’d hoped to learn something startling!) A local historian contacted me, again out of the blue, to learn more about my great-grandmother, Amy, who had been a Faulkner before marrying Benjamin Franklin Wild.  (He’d preferred “Frank.”)

That synchronistic week continued: StoryCorps notified me that a family-history story set in Somerville, which I’d recorded a few years earlier, was now accessible at the Library of Congress. I reconnected with my beloved second cousin, Peter Wild. And that Saturday, I’d been invited to visit a recently-opened and beautifully organized food pantry in the roomy basement of the Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ on Highland Avenue—just a few blocks from my house. From 1894 until 1975, Mission Church had been “First Unitarian Somerville,” and located next door to Amy and Frank’s mansion, now razed, where three generations of Wilds, including my father and my Aunt Amy, once worshipped.

That Sunday, still able to worship in person in the Friends Meeting at Cambridge’s meetinghouse, I reflected on that week.What does all this family stuff in one week mean? I wondered. Seated with a hundred or so fellow worshippers, we’d sat in deep quiet for over a half hour before someone stood to break the silence. And in that long and delicious time to deepen and reflect, something came to me: You call these random, all-the-same-week incidents family. Yet most of these happenstances have been about Wilds. Most of the photos in your nifty storage box are Wilds. You know next to nothing of your mother’s history.

This accurate observation had been followed by A Nudge: And isn’t about time for you to find out? Or, as I would come to view this Spirit-sourced prompt: Here is the first exercise of your apprenticeship. Go!

The next day when I googled for clues, I discovered that I hadn’t known how to spell my maternal grandmother’s maiden name—it’s Cogill—and that I’d been spelling my maternal grandfather’s first and last names wrong, too! My ignorance humbled me; to immediately realize how little I knew seemed a gift, an opening,* an invitation to apply what Buddhists call “Beginner’s Mind ” to this apprenticeship; to be curious, openhearted, eager. A Bonus: Stumbling upon the actual spelling of my grandfather’s name had been “serendipitous,” to use a word my mother often employed (sometimes wrong), and a reminder that, indeed, way opens.*

My maternal grandparents divorced when my mother had been a toddler; her father was never a part of her life. In 1966, when she and my father vacationed in Palm Beach, Florida, her father reentered her life: “You know, Al,” she’d mused one night at dinner. “I think my father lives here.” Low lights, flowers, a delicious, expensive, seafood dinner and a bourbon or two probably contributed to Mom’s pensive mood. Encouraged by Dad— “There’s two sides to every story, Pat,” he reminded her—she called her father. Who, I want to believe, immediately jumped in a cab to meet his daughter.

Did my grandfather stand for a few moments at the entrance to the dining room scanning the tables for Mom? Did his face light up when spotted her—the stunning, middle-aged, well-dressed woman craning her elegant neck to scrutinize every man entering the room? When he’d approached my parents’ table, had all three shook hands? Hugged? What were the first things my mother and her father said to each other? Had their initial conversation been stiff? Awkward? Warm? I don’t know. As already noted, my mother wasn’t much of a storyteller. I do know that sometime during this reunion, Mom announced that I would be getting married that July.

“I’m coming,” her father declared. (In that declarative moment, did my mother remember all the times in her childhood when she’d longed for a proverbial Dad?) The dapper, elderly stranger who’d showed up—in spats—to my first wedding had been Munro not Monroe. And his last name was Horre. Not, as my mother, her sister Kay and her mother spelled it, Horrie.

I’d known—but forgotten—that Horre to Horrie spelling-change story, too; its broad outline, at least. When I’d been maybe ten or eleven Mom explained, “My mother went to court. She added the I. You’d think that with a name like Horre, she might have added a few more letters!” Too young and too cosseted to understand her quip, I didn’t get it. Twice-divorced, I can now also appreciate how my grandmother, who wanted to be called Lil and not “Grandma,” had inserted an i into her ex-husband’s last name. I love how Lil inserted her personhood, her selfhood. I.

I remember that inserted-i story. But do I also remember a veiled look, how my lovely mother might have looked away, twirled a lock of her wavy brown hair or stared at her wedding ring when she’d finished telling it? Had she “cleaned her molars” with her tongue, as my sister and brothers called this Mom-tell which signaled, “I’m done! And angry. No more. Stop!”

The serendipitous story (And it really is):  Seven months and two days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Munro Horre and Muriel Kershaw applied for a marriage license and earned a tiny notice in The Palm Beach Post. I only discovered my grandfather’s name misspelling because someone researching Kemp family history had apparently clipped a two-paragraph, alphabetized snippet—which had also included Munro and Muriel’s announcement. And because of “a little thing I like to call ‘The Internet,’ ” as my daughter, Hope, says, there that snippet was, waiting for me to find.

Although newspapers misspell names all the time, seeing my grandfather’s name in print felt solid. Felt real. Important. I liked looking at this little scrap of information. So I took a screen shot of this small memento of the grandfather I met once but never knew and sent it to my four daughters and my sister.

Horre. Munro Horre. Who, during my mid-sixties-hippie-style-wedding-in-a-park reception, having just met his other daughter, my Aunt Kay, sidled up to my mother and whispered, “I like you more than her!” Munro Horre.

(Spell-check keeps asking if I actually mean Horror. And maybe I do.)

Thanks to the Internet I located a Cogill family lineage tracing back to the mid-eighteen hundreds, too. I printed it out. I hole-punched it and reverently placed those family names and dates, as dry and as dusty as the begats of the Bible, in a three-ring binder. Thanks to the Internet, I learned that Lillian Cogill Horrie died in 1961 at the horrifyingly young age of fifty-nine. (No wonder she hadn’t wanted to be called “Grandma”!)

Possessing a Cogill family lineage or doing simple arithmetic to learn that Lil had been forty-two when I’d been born didn’t speak to my condition, however. * This “exercise” had not been about right-brain, three-ring binders or pouring over census records. I was not supposed to research my mother’s family’s history.

What had I been gently nudged to do? To spend some time wandering through that metaphorical hallway of shadows and forgotten ancestors; that’s what this exercise had been about. To inhabit that mournful word, forgotten, but supply my own adjectives as well. Like lost. Unacknowledged. Denied. Stricken from the records. Missing. Never named. Gone. To walk past artists’ renderings of my English, Scottish, Norwegian, and German ancestors in that hallway of shadows and forgotten ancestors, to study the more recent portraits and photographs of the New Englanders listed in my three-ring binder and, at last, to discover that where Munro Horre’s portrait ought to be is an empty frame. To stand in front of that empty frame, its brass nameplate correctly spelled, to feel the sadness of his not-there-ness. To connect with my mother’s sadness. And to begin to connect with my mother differently.

This too: to connect my own and my mother’s sense of loss with humanity’s collective loss; our shared grief. All our lost, missing, gone ancestors! All their lost wisdom. All the revelatory stories we will never hear. When an old person dies a library burns down, an African proverb reminds us. What enormous loss we all carry!

My sense of loss was to become enlarged, more painful, more focused, soon after that weirdly synchronistic week. Thanks to Ancestry.com, I learned that an eighth cousin—nine generations back she and I share a common ancestor—is a young Woman of Color. More than likely our common ancestor had been male and White. More than likely our shared DNA means rape, coercion, a violent sexual assault.

Horrified, devastated, I sought guidance from family and friends—and my apprenticeship handbook.

 And found this: The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming, Weller notes. 1 And he counsels us to literally hold this enormity in our hands, to cup our hands as if holding water in order to offer ourselves a bottom, a limit; to perform this ritual in order to contain all these powerful feelings.

Unaccustomed to ritual yet appreciative of how Weller’s suggestion both acknowledged and honored what I was feeling while offering those feelings a safety net, I held that galactic grief. I embodied it. I honored it by lovingly cupping it in my hands. I grieved my own forgotten ancestors—and humanity’s. I held in the Light my eighth cousin’s forgotten ancestors, brought to this country in chains, whose real names and those of their descendants have been lost, forgotten, erased. I grieved those unnamed men and women and children who’d once walked on this tiny patch of Somerville real estate I call “mine.” I grieved for my fatherless mother.

I held that. For a few terrifying moments, I allowed myself to experience momentous grief. But then my right brain kicked in: You can never adequately cup water in your hands. You can never hold it all. And I spread my fingers wide.

Butter-knifing

Here I am, once again, “circling Fort Knox with a butter knife trying to figure out how to get in.”* I know I want to write about loss, about sorrow, and about how, for most of my life, I’ve let anger mask sadness. I want to write about the grief of climate change. I want to write about my mother’s family, its secrets, its tragedies; about transgenerational trauma. I want to write about my moment-to-moment grief and horror to be white and affluent at a time when the ravages of income disparity and systemic racism and growing fascism are more and more real, obvious.

Yikes.

Meanwhile, as I circle, sadness, grief, loss happen. Terrifying headlines reporting another environmental disaster happen. Someone pisses me off happens—and I, self-conscious “apprentice” that I am, try to access the sadness underlying my anger. (And it’s not as hard as I thought.) Meanwhile, I feel all the heartbreaking Feels that I get to do this work at the same time the People Of Color all around me struggle. Meanwhile, I buy myself a copy of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief  by Francis Weller so I can physically interact with his every word, every paragraph, write in the margins.

Here’s a bit I’ve already starred and underlined and <3-ed (heart-ed):

An apprenticeship with sorrow requires a hands-on encounter in which we are invited to work with the materials of grief, its leaden weight, and the particular demands of melancholy. We can feel it already, just in these few sentences, that this apprenticeship leads us below ground, into the hallway of shadows and forgotten ancestors. Here we find the scattered shards of unattended grief, the pieces of unwept loss, and the shavings of old wounds swept into the corner.

Meanwhile, like someone in recovery, I’m making amends.

 

  • Ann Patchett said this—at a writers’ conference I’d attended—about trying to figure out how to begin a novel.

Fallow

[Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, California, after a fire.]

When I was working on WellingUp.net, I told its web developers: “You know? This is probably my last book.”

“Nah,” Byron Hinebaugh replied. “You’re just getting started.”

Turns out Byron was right. Turns out I just finished a new one I’m very excited about, Missing Reels, currently looking for a happy home. Turns out I’ve already begun research on another one. Turns out, Spirit is generous. As in generative. Replenishing. And, like grace, unexpected.

But, although excited about another project, I am not yet ready to, you know, write. Which means more time to catch up with family, spend time with a new friend going through a medical challenge, mull, ponder, noodle. More time to inhabit that place of uncertainty and confusion out of which comes Something. Something that needs time and thought and energy to come to life. More time to think more deeply about how, so often for me, anger is the genesis for a new project—but to actively wonder what might come forth should I delve more deeply into what sadness might produce?

I’m just getting started.

 

Do I Matter?

[This 2007 photograph of an El Salvadoran mural taken by Alison McKeller.]

This week I heard a story, a story I’d heard before, told by a friend held in solitary confinement. His tiny cell’s overhead light broken, for months he literally lived in darkness; only a beam of light the size of a quarter shone in. His food, shoved in through a slot in a steel door so thick it blocked all outside sounds, was barely enough.  Fearful for his mental health, over time he learned how to tie threads—harvested from his underwear—to cockroaches’ torsos and hitch them to an empty milk container,  those creatures’ progress, their struggles as entertaining as a 3-D movie. “Does anyone know what I am going through?” he wondered, alone, hungry, in the dark, and completely cut off from all human contact.

Listening to this horrific story again, I heard his plaintive, poignant question anew—and,  serendipitously, connected his question to a lament I’ve heard lately. “People need to know,” an immigration-rights activist I know says. Over and over. Until I heard my returning-citizen friend’s story again this week, I’d always heard my Salvadoran friend’s statement as a plea for more information-sharing on today’s immigration issues. (Do you know, for example, what’s going on for TPS holders right now? You’re welcome.)

But what I believe both are asking is: If no one knows what I am going through, what will change? Does my struggle matter? I feel alone; am I alone? Must I always live with my overwhelming sense that most people have no idea what my life has been about? Does my life have meaning? Do I matter?

 

 

Show not Tell:

Enemies Should Know That Syria Will Never Fall—Assad/Syria Will Never Fall—Assad” by Nazgol Ansarinia, 2012.

A newsprint collage currently on exhibit at the Katonah (NY) Museum of Art’s current exhibit: “Long, Winding Journeys: Contemporary Art and the Islamic Tradition. (I took these pictures on Friday.)

A closer look at Ansarinia’s collage, created from two different newspaper articles cut into tiny, geometric shapes. (The geometric pattern she has used was inspired by the Shah Cheragh mosque’s mosaics, Shiraz, Iran.)

About those articles: Both newspapers had written about the same event from differing perspectives; the Iranian artist has interspersed her mosaic pieces so as to make the newsprint unintelligible.

Easily found in Ansarinia’s profound reflection on truth, however, is a head shot of Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad—presently being accused of gassing his own people. Again. (He denies this.)

Thank you, Nazgol Ansarinia.

 

. . . Things I Cannot Change

Playroom Creation by a Three Year Old.

I visit a man in “Seg.” (as in Segregation) Aka “The Hole” or “Solitary Confinement.” (Once, on the phone, while making the required appointment to visit this man, I’d carelessly used the word “Isolation” and was quickly and firmly corrected.)  Whatever its label, putting a human being in a tiny room all alone for long periods of time is cruel and unusual punishment. Period. And, yes, in the early nineteenth century, Quakers—and Anglicans—invented this form of punishment so, yes, of course, I feel personally responsible whenever I visit him. And am eternally grateful for the many activists working hard to abolish this inhumane punishment.

His story is his to tell, not mine, so I will offer only this: Let’s just say that because of the times we’re living in, when he’s served his sentence, another sentence will be imposed upon him. And, it seems, there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. (I’ve tried.)

But here’s what I want to report—and to marvel at. In the six months I’ve been visiting him, something truly wondrous has happened! On Friday, the angry, young man I met in September who’d rightfully demanded, “Why me?” shrugged his shoulders; he’s accepted that he cannot change his fate, as deeply unfair as it is. Indeed,he’s viewing his unplanned and unwanted future as, oh, my, an opportunity!  Grinning, he struggled to remember the words but eventually nailed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Living well is the best revenge. And gestured as if to acknowledge to the cinderblock walls of the booth where we met, the glass and metal wall that separated us, the guards lurking outside the booth, the prison cells, the barbed wire fences; all that presently surrounded him.

And, yes, there’s a tiny, tiny part of me that wants to believe that those early Quakers and Anglicans were right! And that this man’s transformation was made possible by forcing him to be “penitent.”

But, mostly, I want to marvel at the human spirit. Again. Oh my.

“it’s always ourselves we find in the sea”

IMG_2202

[Cairns, Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia]

maggie and milly and molly and may
E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962*

 

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

 

* Thank you, Kip Harris, for including this poem in your “Artist Statement” at your current exhibition at the Jo Beale Gallery. (I love your work!)