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is this anything

~ a compendium, by Nancy Coughlin

is this anything

Tag Archives: poem

Schrodinger’s cat (a poem)

24 Friday Jan 2020

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poem

rain-dancing woman

Schrödinger’s cat is dead.
Thank God.
She might have been alive once,
Or twice, or all nine times.
(We had no way of knowing.)
She’s dead by now, though—must be.
Long dead.
Thank God.
Let’s rise from our squat,
For now we may wander unworried,
No longer hunched from listening–
One ear tight against the box–
For her soft, starved meow.

Excerpts (a poem, maybe?)

17 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by is this anything in autism, memoir, poem, writing, zen

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autism, memoir, poem, writing

false_hope_by_astridle

Excerpts from reviews of my unpublished book

… She goes through the mill, all right. No surprise there for fans of such stuff—in Britain they call them “Misery Memoirs,” and demolished mums go mad for them. What is this trend about, anyway—all these haunted women sharing stories with women similarly haunted? When you’re dry to the bone, why crawl out to visit a neighboring desert?

… There seems some universal need for—let’s call it “paying witness.” Which Coughlin does well. She tells the story of her autistic daughter’s life and death with style and wit. It’s really not her fault that we already know the story, thank you, and don’t need to hear it again.

… To quote Ms. Coughlin, “You can’t spell ‘poignancy’ without ‘Nancy’”—and that at least seems true. This book is relentlessly poignant. Every thought this writer has seems blackened at the edges, charred by pain. Even when she’s funny—and believe it or not, she can be quite funny, often at the very moment the ground is collapsing beneath her—a subtle wince behind the prose betrays an unquellable trauma.

… This is the sort of book that should be wrapped in satin, placed in a box, tied with a bow, and cached in an attic for some curious granddaughter to reopen one day, and to recognize.

Abbreviated (a poem)

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

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autism, grief, poem

Abbreviated

When making lists, I once wrote “He.” and “Ha.”–
instead of merely “H.”, as I do now.
This luxury of brevity
weighs heavily on me.

First to quaver, mid-list, is the pen.
Its wince shoots sirens to the hapless brain.
(I feel it first. It’s only after
that I revive my daughter.

Or she kills me, it’s either way the same.)
I see her then, in flashes—like the time
she danced out on the roof edge, or
escaped the moving car.

My husband, Henry (hence the “He.”), can’t hear
me in this place I’ve gone. I glimpse him there–
outside my gasp, inside his jar–
then grab for Hannah (hence the “Ha.”).

mother child

Henryland now (a poem)

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

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love, marriage, poem, writing

 

fun fair

Henryland now

Waiting for Henryland now.
Piano jazz on the family iPod.
Knowing he might walk in
sometime within this very sentence.

Or this one.

…No, not yet, but soon.

Henryland: a funfair
for middle-aged war vets.
I know shortcuts to the sweetest rides,
I know the thrillingest car
on the stroller coaster.
Total access, free chili dogs,
an all-night ticket. No lines,
no crowd. Just my husband, me,
and Oscar Peterson.

Henryland: my latter-day
reward for taking all those classes.
(This thesis took me
thirty years to write.)

Henryland: my recompense.

And in the yard a gallery
of rusted iron: the broken ones.
We don’t ride those anymore.
(People kept getting killed.)
We should haul them to the dump,
I know, but we’re lazy, and, besides,
they’re cenotaphs. They’re modern art.

Someday I’ll write a poem called ‘How
to Love Someone,’ but this might do, for now.

Pep Talks and Promises (a found poem)

19 Friday May 2017

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chocolate, comfort, cough drops, found poem, play, poem, work, zen

yin yang mandala

Pep Talks and Promises:
(an alphabetized conversation between Hall’s cough drop wrappers and Dove chocolate wrappers)

Be unstoppable.                                  Be fearless.
Buckle down and push forth.       Believe in love at first sight, just in case!
Conquer today.           Break the mold, be extraordinary!
Don’t try harder. Do harder!        Close your eyes and relax.
Don’t waste a precious minute.             Decorate your life.
Dust off and get up.                   Do all things with love.
Elicit a few “wows” today.           Even small celebrations deserve a dance.
Fire up those engines!                      Feel the sun on your face.
Flex your “can do” muscle.          Forget the rules and play by your heart.
Get back in the game.                 Get a good night’s sleep.
Get back in there, champ!                    Indulge your sense of amusement.
Go for it.              It’s definitely a bubble bath day.
Inspire envy.                                It’s OK to not do it all.
It’s yours for the taking.              Laugh, laugh, and laugh some more.
Let’s hear your battle cry.            Listen to your heart and dance.
March forward!               Live in the present, forgive your past.
Nothing you can’t handle.                Live your dreams.
Power through!                        Lose yourself in a moment.
Push on!                      Love like there is no tomorrow.
Put a little strut in it.                          Send your best friend flowers.
Put your game face on.                 Simply be, rather than do, for a moment.
Seize the day.              Sing along with the elevator music.
Take charge and mean it.            Someone is thinking of you right now.
Tough is your middle name.              Take time out for a catnap.
Turn “can do” into “can did!”           Think of every day as a Sunday.
You can do it and you know it.           Think without boundaries.
You’ve survived tougher.                                 You make everything lovely.

Clearing (a poem)

30 Sunday Apr 2017

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poem, writing, zen

deer fawn running

Clearing

I’m watching her: this part of me who thinks
and writes (occasionally at once). She’s
onto something new, she thinks. And maybe
she is, I don’t know. What I like best
is the joy I feel her feeling as she races
through her trance. I don’t want to startle her
in this sudden clearing, don’t want
to make my presence known, for fear
she’ll lose her train of thought, for fear
she’ll notice me and blush bright red, like
that time her brother Jim walked in on her
pounding out the piano solo from Cat Stevens’s
“I Think I See the Light” onto her bedroom desk.
Don’t mind me, little one. Keep going. Make
mistakes, change fast and slow, follow
your thought the way I follow you. We’ll both,
we’ll all, be here to help you home again,
when time comes round for that.

 

 

Under One Small Star (a poem by Wislawa Szymborska)

02 Thursday Feb 2017

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poem, Wislawa Szymborska

aurora-borealis

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Wislawa Szymborska

Roar (a poem)

13 Sunday Nov 2016

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grief, poem, silence, tribalism, zen

 

laurel hardy

Roar

The furnace roar enthralls me, and the silence
that comes before–and follows–also soothes.
By turns, by force, they beg my acquiescence
to all that’s merely “being,” merely “truth.”

But the wailing mob—how ought I feel? The din
of eight billion curses and sighs. The shriek
of the shrinking world, the whisper-whine
of conquered species, conquered earth. They speak

in hurricanes that moan, in floods that spew,
in droughts that sneer at our inanity.
Yet we can’t translate, though they force us to.
(Our purest faith: Divine Cacophony.)

They’re growling to themselves alone, we think—
or speaking, yes, but saying something else—
completely else, all forms of else! (We’ll sink
while never knowing that we’ve drowned ourselves.)

It’s not our fault. We’re deaf, or worse. We’re dead
to any but our tribe’s vernacular
(which even God calls gibberish). I said,
“The furnace din enthralls me.” I don’t care

to know its source and cost, it seems. I close
my eyes to trace what paths my dreams may take,
as Silence, like a patient prince who knows
his sovereign destiny, remains awake.

Fifty (a poem)

07 Friday Oct 2016

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age, both, memory, metaphor, poem

 

getty_rf_photo_of_sliced_onions

Fifty

Sometimes it seems I’m every age at once:
not in memory merely, but in form,
like Russian nesting dolls with just the latest
mother breathing out. Or like a tree
with fifty rings, so that even my seedling
start remains, swaddled by its future
matrioshki; comprising, still, the marvels
of its quick, brave year in the sun.

I feel you now (poem)

07 Friday Oct 2016

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apophenia, grief, illusion, imkertje, loss, love, poem

twins

I feel you now
(aan mijn imkertje)

I prayed you’d let me feel your presence here
as fiercely as I feel your absence. You,
imaginary guru, heard this plea,
condoned my wish. I feel you now, more true

than life, for even as I take my rest
in you, I’m wrested thence. I’m all at once:
so utterly aggrieved, so thickly blessed–
so blinded by your panoramic glance.

A simple, impossible thing (a poem)

29 Monday Aug 2016

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absolution, comfort, friendship, grace, home, longing, loss, love, memory, poem, revision, surrender, writing, zen

A simple, impossible thing

1
A memory that breaks my fall: the winter night we climbed
the mountain tower, and Maggie, in her scarf that matched
her lipstick, in her nimblest sneakers, hoisted her blithe
body onto a parapet, so naturally I thought why-not, began
my own uppity fumble–yes, but you agreed with gravity. You
held my shoulders, laughed and said oh no you don’t.

2
You who cage such raucous grace beneath your ribs that even
its muted, chastened flutter flies me back to the once-upon
world of my babies. Rolling together in the bay-window room,
one saggy end of baggy bed to other, goofy giggly, basking
in the sun’s noblesse oblige approval of our basking
in the sun. You make me ache (but sweetly—how??) for my two
girls. As they did, once (those days cut short by random
knife), you invite me, for a visit, back to Eden.

3
A sentence from the book they’ll write of us someday:
“From opposite sides of the crowded room, they sent each
other smiles of warm encouragement.” Note the cool
authority, dear one: third-person, omniscient. I too will bear
mere witness then. I’ll delegate our story to the crone
I’ve only glimpsed so far: the all-aware third-
woman solving crosswords near the mirror-hall exit. If only
I could catch her now, could pilfer her quintessence
prematurely… It’s a maze, you (don’t) know: this
fissure lit only by cavewoman’s torch. This life
of the unreliable narrator. (Long-standing English-major
wish: I’m Huckleberry Finn, and wise beyond my knowing.)

4
You might, moreover, note (or not) how I grow tired—or, no,
how I long to grow tired—of picking at the threads
of vagaries–my half-concocted memories and clues. Not just
the strands that lead toward you, my love (though you’ve
reason to think they all lead there), but others too,
spreading like jellyfish tendrils (let’s say) across
mandalic seas. How deep-down, how finally I want to have
already said all I’m still so dumbly bent on saying.
Then, afterward, to fall into that haven uncannily
coincident with the hollow between your chest
and collarbone, that nest we built from twigs and wine
one summer night, and have never yet flown far from. Forever
I rest there in times of near-asleep and near-awake. Forever
you’re my respite from that double-edged hope: to lose
all need to talk or write, or to trip across the miracle
of telling all, just once, and plainly, and then to let it
let me let it go, absolved at last of everything but love.

Image

Sea change (a poem)

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

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bioluminescence, change, freedom, grace, metaphor, miracle, poem, recovery

Bioluminescence-at-sea-23409

Sea change

Diverge from paths that wreck you needlessly.
Heel sharply leeward. Plow a new lane, lit
succinctly by synaptic sparks that flit
like fireflies in a miner’s headlamp. See–

like phytoplankton woken by the wake
of midnight ships–your bioluminescence.
However faint and mythical, its blessings
enlighten every typhoon trail you take.

How desperate, how brave you must become,
then–heart lashed to the groaning helm—how free:
Re-draw your chart by plankton-light, mid-sea.
And mark in bold those routes that lead you home.

version (a poem by my daughter, Rebecca Gonshak)

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

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autism, compassion, grace, grief, Hannah, helplessness, loss, love, memory, poem, rebecca gonshak, transience, words, zen

Two kids in the bath again,
me just a smaller version of you.
If you cried, I’d sing
like a miniature mother, Moonshadow
and Bye, Bye, Blackbird. No, I didn’t sing
Bye, Bye, Blackbird then. Oh well, all memory is a lie.
You used to run from wall to wall of the house,
but did I really run after you?
I’m older than you now
but I still feel like a version of you.
That’s an invention too, I can’t say what you meant
in your silence. But if I could go back to that bath
and our feet could touch, and you splashed
– I know you would splash –
I would sing and sing until I lost all words.

                                            Image

lesson learned (a poem)

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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autism, grace, Hannah, poem, surrender, writing

 

gravestones

lesson learned

“darling girl”—I had them scratch
it on your stone—I’m not sure why.
I rarely called you that in life.
I always called you “pumpkin pie”—
a silly name, bereft of grave
solemnity. I must have been
too timid to be true, back then.
I’ll never be that way again.

With winter nearing, I remember spring (a poem)

23 Monday May 2016

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acceptance, apophenia, death, freedom, grief, love, memory, mom, poem, transience

Flower With Snow 11

With winter nearing

With winter nearing, I remember spring:
A fickle March, before my mother died.
Her bed lay flush with window. Side by side,
We watched another snowfall—wondering

At all the forms a snowflake takes: like bone
Turned ash, like milkweed floss, like feather.
Tonight they fell in tufts that clung together,
But for a few who braved the fall alone.

Heavy, wet, yet floating. It was night,
The storm lit from beneath. (My mother’s room
Was lucky, disconcerting midnight gloom
By posing, drapes pulled wide, above the light

That advertised the doors below, where hearse
And ambulance were meant to go.) We watched
The snow in halogenic awe untouched,
Unbroken now, by dietician, nurse,

Aide, hospice worker, laundress, orderly,
Their squeaking soles no longer restless hounds
That whined and sniffed at daylit doors; their rounds
Unspooled at last. And so we lay there free.

We lay there, clumped and clinging, and we felt
That we might never die, but only melt.

The odd things we love, when we love (a poem)

11 Wednesday May 2016

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apophenia, cats, choice, dogs, illusion, love, marriage, metaphor, poem, surrender, transience, wanda gag

 

dogs

The odd things we love, when we love

Henry cares only for films about humans. Except
when he’s high, when he garners delight and soft
consolation from the documentary adventures

of other mammals. Dogs, in particular, warm his
weary cockles. He loves dogs more than any lover
of dogs I’ve known before, and I don’t mind telling you,

I’ve known my share. If I had nothing else to love
him for (but really there are ninety-seven things,
which I intend to list ad nauseam in future poems–

stay tuned!), I’d love him merely for his earnest
love of dogs.        And yet, if one day he went mad,
and started loving cats (against which I hold nothing,

due to allergy), I’d click my heels and spin around, and
love his love of cats. Because, you know, that’s how
we got here. That’s how it’s worked, so far. Ailuromania*,

to give but one example, becomes just the thing at hand,
the current metaphor: a pin, a peg, a cross, a stake,
a nail–a strong, convenient hook to hang our love on.

millions-of-cats-man2

*ailuromania: a passion for cats

Tributary (a poem)

03 Tuesday May 2016

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poem

tributary river

Tributary

You want the past to end already.
But how do you expect to shake it?
The fog tonight looks dark, feels deadly.
Tomorrow, too: a tangled thicket
impervious to your machete.

How can you know what map to draw
unless you float above the earth?
How can you know, mid-Amazon,
what lies ahead? Yet you set forth,
your blindness pure, your end foregone.

You only know the path you’ve known:
Falls, rapids, doldrums, dysentery;
and years of looking back for one
who left you for a tributary
so slim, so quickly overgrown,
she had to make the trip alone.

 

Now (a poem)

01 Sunday May 2016

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acceptance, compassion, eternity, helplessness, loss, love, marriage, metaphor, now, poem, surrender, thinking out loud, transience, zen

puddle2

Now

I pause to think how lonesome-long I’ve felt
that snowflakes never die but merely melt.
And so with us: this small, liquescent love.
We started–aimless, frozen flecks of fluff…

You know the rest, if either does. I’ve guessed
at reasons for our muteness: coalesced–
a lukewarm puddle, now—we know we know
already what the other knows (and more).

We pre-discern the gist of sighs. Each stone
that shocks the other, ripples as our own.
You wake so early, now. I sleep so late,
abiding time till we evaporate.

Fret (a poem)

11 Monday Apr 2016

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balance, poem, writing

dog clock

Fret

I want to shake you like a criminal:
when we could be so happy happy,
oh, why why do these things you do?
Why count my every not-you syllable,
deem every time I nurse my babies
as time I could have spent with you?

You who are as motherless
as I, as longing to be rocked—
How can’t I know you? How do I
evade this empathy, suppress
lactation, hold my will intact,
once startled by your tragedy?

But, sometime, I should wash my face.
And, sometime, I should write this book.
When I go out, my dog knows I’ll
Be back. He doesn’t fret and pace
With one eye on the dawdling clock.
He lets me go. (It took a while.)

my latest notion (a poem)

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

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autism, family, grief, Hannah, poem, transience, writing, zen

My latest notion

A website for Hannah,
like they put up for Santa
on Christmas Eve. We’d
track her soul’s holiday as, freed
from form, she strolls the universe.
Watch her atoms intersperse
with those of meteors!
Glimpse her changeless source!
In our old days, of course,
the web was bare. Likewise,
tools for such an enterprise—
that spectral radar—had yet
(have yet) to be invented.

girl hiding2

simple (a haiku)

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

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poem, randomness, serendipity, zen

scrabble game cresta highest score

the game is simple:
harness serendipity,
yield to randomness.

Thinking about Temple Grandin (a poem)

22 Wednesday Jul 2015

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autism, poem, temple grandin

Thinking about Temple Grandin

To triumph over tragedy. How odd
to think of either word without a clang
of chaos in your head. As if some god
decides what sub-division you belong

to, up or down. As if there’s up or down
at all. Your tragedy remains. Or else
it never was. Or else to swim/to drown
are synonyms, as each word melts

the other. We can’t know what’s tragic. Nor
can we discern—not yet—what triumph is.
Yet both words thread their silver through your hair.
Their twin ghosts glisten through your cowgirl eyes.

grandin

Groupie (a poem)

26 Friday Jun 2015

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love, metaphor, poem

Groupie

I went on google images just now
and stared at your face in a thousand
poses. And every now and then among
the different yous, for reasons I still
don’t get, there’d be juxtaposed right
next to you something not-you. A girl
on a horse, say, or Clint Black, or
the periodic table. Needless to say,
this was distracting. Then suddenly I
thought, but no, it’s true! You are a
girl on a horse! You are Clint Black!
You are the periodic table! And I fell
headlong into the chasm of knowing all
your metaphors at once, was ravished
by the army of your chameleon selves.

Mendicant (a poem)

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

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poem

Mendicant

Your house is the plainest of churches. Yet
how like a nun I find home there. I tiptoe so
the wood absorbs my step, so that your ceiling,
heaven-high, won’t broadcast echoes

of my graceless gait. Rough wooden beams
arrogate all dreaming here. Logs huddle
tight against the empty hearth. Likewise,
the daylight, muffled and oblique, worms

furtively through windows fortified
by stalwart iron traceries. Your halls:
made slim by dusty breveries stacked flush
along their borders. Narrow, too: your bed.

And yet what cosseted relief I find inside
this counterworld submerged in sepia. An old
clock strikes its hollow hour, somewhere,
in a distant room I seek to leave unfound.

tudor-arch-window

Envy (a poem)

01 Monday Jun 2015

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poem, surrender, words, writing

Envy

A clock that ticks yes no, yes no, yes no,
my lucky heart finds both words meaningless,
so neither can it label, nor assess,
nor translate…nor do anything but go

from tock to tick to tock, unstoppable
as any feeble, human thing can be.
Meanwhile, I scribble, not yet capable
of yielding to ineffability.

Perfect-Geometric-Patterns-In-Nature3__880

preference (a poem)

03 Sunday May 2015

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choice, desire, poem

I’m comforted by people who have preferences–
by which I don’t mean ‘people who have choice.’
I, too, have choice, or so say all my sentences
(which tend to be expressed in passive voice).

cereal choices

Apophenia (a poem)

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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apophenia, poem, randomness

 

windy tree

The trees grow restless for the coming storm.
Or do they shake their arms in go-away?
They swoon before the wind’s relentless grace.
Or do they claw at God for waking them?

Plenary (a poem)

07 Saturday Mar 2015

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comfort, love, poem, surrender

couple-dancing botero

Plenary

We meet next week. First time. Your mountain nest.
A hard or happy time–we can’t know yet.
(Both, I bet.) No worry, though: I know you
either way. And you know me (the one
who’s grinned so long her face could crack).
So when, with you, the tears come, full and free—
what luxury! Let’s cry together, love, clinging
tighter as the fireplace cools, between
the flannel sheets I’ll bring you as my present.
Let’s take a day or days to soothe and witness,
cling and cry… As if we’ve never cried before? No,
hardly that. We’ve cried forever. But as if
we could believe the crazy truth of us: that
with each other we can cry, and feel known,
feel safe, feel loved–at the very same time.

Confession (a poem)

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

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apophenia, coincidence, miracle, pareidolia, poem, randomness, serendipity

tree dancer

Confession

The miracles that follow me all day
Draw half their breath from my imagination.
E.g., these barren branches, witch-bone gray,
Claw wildly at the wind… Each rock formation
Discloses Lincoln. Clouds find Santa Claus.
And so on: marvels of the merely here.
And once you know them, dark and light, obtuse
And vivid, each way stunning, they appear
All miracle, all–why not?–lucky. (Hint:
Some days you have to tilt your head and squint.)

“A Third Body” (a poem by Robert Bly)

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

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happiness, love, marriage, poem, robert bly, transience

cute-old-cuoples-6

A Third Body

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
                                                     –Robert Bly

Are you looking for me? (a poem by Kabir)

05 Thursday Feb 2015

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god, kabir, poem, zen

hide and seek

Are you looking for me?
I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
you will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
―Kabir

peace (a tweet) (haiku)

22 Monday Sep 2014

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grace, haiku, peace, poem, thinking out loud, tweet, zen

I must become peace:
the nimble crow that hovers
in the cyclone’s eye.

 

A bumblebee hovers beside a sunflower

 

How it was (a short essay i wrote for a journal called “Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics”)

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by is this anything in autism, essay

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autism, essay, grief, Hannah, imbalance, memory, poem, transience, zen

How It Was

If I’d thrown her through the window that night, no one would have known I’d done it. After all, how many windows had she broken already? How many walls had been cratered by the smash of her head? (We even had a standard, bleak joke about it—that we could measure Hannah’s growth by the height of the holes in the plaster.) I could have gone into her room right then, and under cover of dark I could have dragged her to her feet and flung her hard against the one broad pane we hadn’t yet replaced with plexiglas. There’d be no obstructions on the way down, and only hard sidewalk below.

But what if the window didn’t break? Or if it didn’t break enough, if it left her halfway in the room, and only bleeding? The thing was, of course, that Hannah never seemed to bleed, or to damage herself at all, in her plunges through glass. She was amazing that way. She seemed unscathable in the direst of circumstances, and by now we’d gotten so used to her invulnerability that, if I’d thought about it, I’d probably have believed that she could walk through fire without getting burned, get hit by a car without breaking a bone, drink poison and feel only happy effects.

Not that I ever thought of burning her, breaking her bones, feeding her poison. Understand, if you possibly can, that I’d have been the one dashing into the fire to save her, yanking her out of the line of traffic, forcing the ipecac down. It was hardly ever that I seriously considered throwing her out a window.

And even now I was giving up the idea, because I realized that the window probably wouldn’t break completely, so she wouldn’t fall all the way through. I’d have to shove her out the rest of the way, and I knew that was far beyond anything I could ever do. Which meant that Hannah, impervious or not, would surely end up wounded, bleeding, hurt—and not dead—and I couldn’t have borne that. The last thing in the world I wanted was to make her feel even worse than she did already.

***

My firstborn daughter was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. At first the experts we took her to considered hers a “mild” case, and I clung—by talon, by tooth—to that word, “mild,” for several years past the point when everyone else, even the experts themselves, could see that the experts had been wrong. In her seventeen years of life, Hannah never learned to speak her own name, much less to communicate her thoughts, needs, and feelings in any way those of us who loved her could readily understand. And for a long time this seemed a terrible, terrible tragedy to me—this growing realization that she would probably never be able to learn much about the world at large, or follow the plot of a simple story, or play a real game, or make a friend, or fall in love, or live on her own. But it’s amazing what you can come to accept, if you have to, and eventually I reached the point where absolutely none of that mattered to me anymore, and the only thing I really wanted was for Hannah to be “happy,” in whatever form that might take for her, and for however long it could last.

Her “rages,” as I came to call them, began around the time she turned six, and accelerated as she reached puberty (which often comes early to autistic children: Hannah had her first menstrual period at the age of nine). For an hour at a time, sometimes even for half a day, she could, indeed, be very happy—rocking in her dilapidated La-Z-Boy, swinging as if to touch the sky, laughing and swaying as she stood surveying the world from atop the highest banister or playground slide or jungle gym she could find. But in a single, breathtaking instant, all that could change, and Hannah would suddenly let out a shriek and start pounding her head as hard as she could, over and over, against the hardest nearby surface. Sometimes these bouts of pain and fury would last for just a few minutes, but sometimes, and increasingly, they went on for hours.

For the first several years of her rages, she was still small enough to hold down. If you were quick enough you could get to her before she could hurt herself much, and you got to be pretty adept at slipping over her head the special, cushioned helmet the doctor had prescribed. You learned to hug her tightly from behind, to hold her arms close against her chest, and to lean your head backwards and away so that she wouldn’t be able to ram the back of her own head against it.

But somewhere around the time she was twelve or thirteen, she got too big for all that, and it took a team to stop her from hurting herself or other people. The teachers in her special ed classroom would often have to “call a code” over the school loudspeaker, which meant that the burly male gym teacher down the hall would drop everything and rush over to help. At home, of course, we didn’t have such an option, and if I was alone with Hannah when the raging began, and I’d tried everything on my list of strategies to calm her down—music, videotapes, food, play-doh, stress balls, fuzzy pipe cleaners, weighted blankets, holding her, singing to her, providing her with silence and space—I’d often have to give up. My other daughter, Becky, five years younger than her sister, would already have hidden herself in the basement. I myself would try to stay in the same room with Hannah for as long as I could, but over time this became harder and harder to do. Her rages had begun to take the form of attacks on the people around her, and she was dangerously strong. I’d been pinched, clawed and bitten many times, had had my fingers pushed backward to the threshold of breaking, had been nearly knocked out by the crash of her head against mine.

The state-sponsored social services agency for Butte, Montana, is called Family Outreach. Our case worker, Elizabeth, had been coming to the house two or three times a month ever since Hannah’s diagnosis, but though she’d been helpful all along the way—providing us with respite care, at-home trainers, books, therapeutic toys, funding for me to attend autism conferences, a Medicaid waiver to help cover Hannah’s medical bills—she was beyond her depth, as we all were, in trying to deal with Hannah’s violent outbursts. Meanwhile, my own mental health was disintegrating, as was my marriage, and in our family’s last-ditch effort to ease the burden we bought a second home, a cheap little place just a few blocks down the road from where we lived. We called it our “respite house,” and for a while my husband lived there full time. Then for a while, as I continued on the path to falling apart, he and I took turns staying there every night, and sometimes Becky and I would stay there together.
In the summer of 2002, Hannah turned fourteen. Around that same time, Family Outreach decided—I’m not sure just why—to reassign Elizabeth and to provide us with a new case worker. Her name was Maggie, and she seemed young and inexperienced—flustered by the paperwork, all the notes she was supposed to take, the charts to fill out, the various forms we both had to sign every time we met. But somehow she saw immediately what other people in Hannah’s life—doctors, teachers, therapists, case workers, and even (especially?) I myself—had never quite realized: namely, that ours was a family in complete crisis, and that unless a fundamental change took place very soon, we wouldn’t survive.

The first option Maggie came up with was straightforward: we could surrender our parental rights to Hannah, in which case the state would take her from us and set her up in some sort of foster care. My husband and I actually talked this over for a day or two—this business of simply handing Hannah over to the authorities—although I think both of us knew all along that we could never actually do it. So then Maggie came up with her second plan—the plan that saved our lives. We would move Hannah to the respite house, make the place safe and comfortable for her there, and take turns staying there with her each night. Meanwhile, Maggie arranged for an army of caretakers—some of them had been already working for us, but many were new—to work in shifts to take care of Hannah after school and on weekends.

Hannah made the transition amazingly well, and in fact within a week of moving to the other house, she seemed clearly to prefer it to living at home. At first the caretakers came to the house one at a time, but over the next couple of years, as Hannah grew more and more dangerous, it was decided that they needed to work in pairs. Sometimes, especially toward the end, there were three or even four caretakers at the house at once: one woman’s job was just to come in each night at 5:00, cook the evening meal, and give Hannah her nightly shower. Another woman—a specialist in an autistic therapy similar to Applied Behavior Analysis—drove from Helena to Butte every weekend to teach that training method to Hannah’s everyday caretakers. A video-recorder was installed in the kitchen of the second house, so that Hannah’s therapeutic progress could be monitored and the training methods adjusted.

Meanwhile, around the time she turned sixteen, Family Outreach started applying, on our behalf, for a residential group home placement for Hannah. Ironically, though, the very thing that made such placement so urgent—Hannah’s rages—was also the reason she was continually turned down. (After a while, every time a group-home position opened up, we faced an impossible dilemma: if we emphasized how hard Hannah was to handle, she was rejected as inappropriate, but if we played down her violent behavior, then the state saw no urgency in our situation, no reason why a sixteen-year-old girl shouldn’t wait a couple more years before placement.) Still, we kept hoping and applying, because we’d been told that the unprecedentedly high amount of state funding we were receiving to maintain what was essentially Hannah’s one-person group-home set-up might suddenly be withdrawn once she turned eighteen.

If Hannah had lived, she’d be twenty-three years old by now, and I don’t know—I can’t even guess—where and how and with whom she’d be living. But life goes whichever way it wants to, so instead Hannah died, a week beyond her seventeenth birthday, of an epileptic seizure in her sleep. Some people—good people, friends and family, many of whom have shown a notable capacity for making sense on other occasions—have declared her death a “blessing.” I marvel not only at the certainty of such people, but at the sweet relief they seem to find in being so certain. Meanwhile, some six years after Hannah’s death, I myself still don’t know what to think, and I don’t suppose I ever will.

Guy (a found poem)

10 Monday Mar 2014

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apophenia, balance, found poem, Henry, memory, poem, randomness, slice of life

(a found poem: Henry’s description, verbatim, of what he’d just noticed out our window)

Guy

There was a young man crossing Excelsior from
east to west, and he was—first, he was in a
t-shirt and shorts in this weather; then, he was
limping, so that, I don’t know if he had a cast
on his foot or sprained or something, and, then,
he was carrying a large bag of ice. Um, so he’s
obviously going to a party to get drunk. So you
had a whole little story just in watching this guy
cross the street. It’s a story I know well from just
having finished grading their personal narrative
essays in composition, so I really was in that
world, for hours and hours, yesterday.

Image

summary (poem)

27 Thursday Feb 2014

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freedom, helplessness, poem, randomness, surrender, thinking out loud, zen

The trick, as ever, is not minding. The trick: allow yourself no choice. Never/always losing/finding. Gone, the actor. Mute, the voice.

 

Reminder (a poem)

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by is this anything in autism, memoir, poem

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autism, Hannah, memoir, memory, poem, surrender

Reminder

On my forearm, close to my wrist,
there are two white scars so faded
and tiny that you might not notice them

even if I pointed them out to you.
They’re the remnants of a bite mark
I received on Christmas Day, 2001. One

is a short white line and the other is
roughly circular–the circumference
of a molar. And of course they’re not all

that remain of my daughter–I have stacks
of pictures and videos, school art projects,
doctors’ reports, activity charts, MRI scans,

Special Olympics medals. I’ve kept five
or six pieces of her clothing, including
the sneakers I wear when I take the dog

for a walk along the rutted ATV trails
just west of town. I even, ridiculously, have
her brown velour La-Z-Boy rocker, ripped

and stained, the underlying structure so
decrepit that when you lean back into it,
the broken laths curve around to

conform to the shape of your body,
as if in capture or embrace. But it’s
the little scars that soothe me most,

because they’re always right there
with me, like pale tattoos, and they’ll
be there till the day I die.

How It Was (a poem)

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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autism, grief, Hannah, helplessness, poem

How It Was

If I’d flung her through the window that night,
no one would have known I’d done it. For how many
windows had she smashed by now? How many walls
had she cratered? We lived in an asteroid storm.

(A feeble joke we told our friends: that we
could gauge our daughter’s growth by the height
of the holes.) I’d pinned her down—embrace turned
tourniquet–on our bare, midnight mattress. But

I could have let her go, and when she charged,
I could have shoved her hard against the one
broad pane not yet replaced with plexiglas.
Her only chaperon: the air. Only sidewalk,

her release. But if the window didn’t break?
Or didn’t break enough, and left her equipoised,
and only bleeding? We thought her unassailable,
thought shards of glass, like all of us, were barred

from ingress. (Was her very skin oblivious?)
However founded in calamity, she seemed
unscathable. I seemed to think she might
cavort through fire unburned, clash with a car

without breaking a bone, drink poison and feel
merely sated. Not that I had ever thought
of burning her, breaking her bones, feeding her
poison. Understand, if you possibly can,

that I ached to be the one who leapt
into the fire, snatched her from the line
of traffic, forced the ipecac down. It flew
at me just once (no–twice)—this fierce retort:

throw her out the window. This urge—more howl
than wish–I let it go. For I knew windows well
by now. They’re not like in the movies. She would fall
halfway through and dangle. Is there a heart

that wouldn’t vaporize at once, rather than
abet that second push? …And so she’d end up hurt,
not dead. (Beyond my scope, this lone barbarity:
to make her feel worse than she already did.)

You Need to Know This (a found poem)

18 Monday Nov 2013

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found poem, men and women, poem, sex

romance_1920_-_sydney__keane

You Need to Know This (a found poem)

Enlarge your pole with wonder pills
Cumming has never been stronger
Your package is set to grow
Your love tool is set to thrill
Nothing beats a huge stick
You need to know this

Disappointed at your lack of performance?
Stop being a nervous wreck
Don’t embarrass yourself in bed again
Get the manhood you’ve always desired
Big self-esteem makes her crazy
Be the master of the bed

Get huge and scare off the competition
Scare people with your tool today
Rectify your manhood issues easily
Impress all in the locker room
Power pack your tool in your pants
Size DOES matter

Smell sweeter below the belt
Evoke your girl’s delight
Make her the queen of the world
Stop leaving your partner dissatisfied
Give her the best of you
Have the pecker of her dreams

She will surely pounce on you
She will not be able to resist
She will want MORE of you
Hitting her g-spot everytime
Make her come again and again
Never let her down again

Attract the RIGHT girls with wonder pills
Your erection will become huge
So hard you can break an egg
Every cunt is tight after having that size
Hear ladies scream in bed
Leave a lasting impression

Rock her hard on your first date
Turn her into a pleasure machine
Give her more of your love rod
Give her what she deserves
She’ll swallow if you take this
Because she wants it

This is totally unbelievable
Certified by doctors
Fantastic results for length and girth
Why waste any more time
This is not a myth
You need to know this

Another letting go (a poem)

16 Saturday Nov 2013

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acceptance, marriage, poem

Another letting go

“The one that got away.” The fish that broke free
of the hook. It’s a powerful cliché. It’s the perfect
crushed-into-scrap-metal metaphor for what we all
feel, deep down, how much we worship and long
for whatever we’ve lost. It’s seldom the one who
stayed whom we love most, but the one who, like
the prodigal son, escaped us. My husband got away.
He got away, perhaps, for good. He’s sitting five
feet to my left, reading a book about the Middle
East, but he’s lost to me, and I to him. Not that
I’ll ever tell him this. No, we’ll go on, and we’ll
be happy. Still, it’s a sad thing to give up on
someone, to leave him to drown. But it’s what
you have to do in the end. Henry and I had no
other choice. On his side: I’ve become crazy,
or at the very least, incomprehensible. On mine:
I had to let my husband go because I could see,
far too clearly, that he had already gone. (Yes,
yes, but how arrogant I am to assume he’ll
drown. Everyone knows that fish swim fine.)

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