Author: Pamela Wallace

Robin

Owen, my youngest, turns 20 this weekend. He was born on the most perfect day in the history of Virginia days. The day spring got its name, the moment cherry blossoms blossomed, the morning all the world was waking to robins and redbuds and rhododendron. I woke at 3:00 am, and labored on the screen porch while the sun came up, surrounded by the softest, sweetest scents in the history of April. In the history of gardens. In the history of breaking dawns.

Until then, I never liked spring much. My dad died on the first day of spring, and that, too, was a perfect day. Wakened with the news in the early morning hours, the neighborhood felt inappropriately bouncy to me. Like the whole world was wearing brand new Keds while I was immobilized in a block of ice. Like everyone was falling in love in their little sleeveless tops and I was still wrapped in layers of wool.

The creation and the carve; after all this time, still I am full, still I am empty, still spring comes, and with it all the ways I’ve loved and lost. And time folds upon itself, and I see my Dad in Owen’s wry sense of humor. They never met but somehow here they are, both together, while the robin wakes the day.

Left

Yesterday my uncle died. No, he wasn’t particularly old. Yes, it was sudden. Yes, my heart is breaking. And I’m thinking of the way grief comes, and scoops a hole where he used to be, and the way death sneaks up on us, every fucking time, and they way we are left wanting one more conversation. The way we are left wanting. The way we are left.

I am left without words, suddenly. I am left without him.

His daughters, his wife, his grandchildren – his friends – all of us are left, scooped out and hollow, while holes of various sizes take his place. The holes are what we are made of, now — what we have, what we are left with. This hollow place, the one we are left with, the one left for us. The one we are still gaping at. The one we reach across and find empty. The one we didn’t see coming.

The hole we kneel by, staggered.

The hole we are left with is ours alone, for each he shaped for us. And into the holes our tears will spill – and soon the holes are oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds and pools. Soon he is the brine of it all, soon he is the water that fills us, soon he is everywhere – when rain falls, when tides come in, when moon shines on seas. Soon he is one with us again, but deeper than my feet can walk merrily across.

Soon, he is with us again. But for now, I am left with the land scooped from my days.

I am left with his shape to fill.

I am left.

Hairspray

I went to TJ Maxx to buy myself a new yoga top, hoping to avoid the ever popular pose of forward flopping boob. This seemed like a small way to do something kind for myself, and surely my yoga class would thank me, too.

I don’t go shopping much. Mainly because I am trying to live more like a poet so I avoid places where poets aren’t hanging out – which is any place money hangs out. And clearly I am very out of practice. I had just walked in with my empty cart and — ooooooh – purses! Half hour later I snapped out of it just long enough to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, with a fringed and brightly colored coral bag over my shoulder – I looked like a tree stump with a tropical bird. A mortician with a parrot. A poet with a purse.

But something about it all – the quiet building frenzy of all the pretty things – I moved from one to the next, deep in focus as if the decision to choose the silk floral blouse over the linen floral blouse would determine the course of all of my days. As if I came for a floral blouse. As if I’d wear a floral blouse.

But removed from context of my own life, I’m pushing forward, aisle by aisle, item by item, size by size, making agonizing decisions and piling them in the cart, barely noticing the people around me, barely recognizing myself as I hold up a lace crop top, a racer back t, a pencil skirt, a ceramic peacock.

An hour in, my cart is full of sherbet colored silk scarves and wispy little tank tops and a million thread count sheets and strappy sandals and stemware and lingerie and hairspray and nautical throw pillows and crisp white slacks and jackets. Who did I think I was? Was I packing for a tropical cruise? Redesigning my carriage house for the summer season?

And hairspray?? Really?

An overflowing cart full of accidental wishes later, I left it all. I just walked out. I was exhausted, and stressed, and sweating. I had just pushed around someone else’s life for an hour, and what did I have to show for it? It took just one hour to forget who I was. To forget all about my flopping boobs, my empty wallet, and the fact that my idea of a hair style is to pile it up in a clump on the top of my head, resenting the 30 seconds it takes to do that.

There’s nothing wrong with shopping, of course. I vaguely remember the “money is no object fun” of it all. But even then, some authentic voice was strangled by spaghetti straps and high heels – by the woman I hardly know, and that I can’t seem to stop looking for.

At least this time, I remembered to leave her behind. And this time, I remembered to laugh.

Wake

Sometimes sleep won’t leave the bedding of your brain, and every word rises only to find it self recalled, back to the comfort and curl of darkness. There are new words you long to think but each effort is quickly lulled and tucked under cover of an exhausted narrative. The one that says you’ve tried that before. There’s nothing you can do to change the way it’s always been. The way it always will be. The way things work. The one that says just five more minutes, disregarding all alarm.

The momentary stretch and reach, the fleeting light through your lids, the lifted weight of night – we know what that’s like; that soaring second when it’s entirely true that another life is waiting for you, and you’re heightened and heartened and here!

Where does that go, that fragile stretch of morning light? Can our newborn fist not open? Is our marrow made of ambien? In the raising of the sash, in the flutter of the lash, are we lit with possibility, or blinded by fear, or impossibly weary by what we think we already know?

Wake, now. And if the dream begins to yawn, keep your eyes open just another breath or two. Before you sleep again, say the words you long for.

Fools

April first is the start of National Poetry Month
And fools everywhere avoid
It because who wants
To decipher the
Words of
Fools,
Who write
To decipher the
Codes of the heart
And paste together the
Ripped and thinnest membranes of the day?

Hardly anyone who sees the dead wing in the windowpane
Spliced between the storm and screen
Will leave the house while
Her mind stays home
Sticky with
Fools,
Who die
Trapped between worlds
Pranked from their spindled legs
That carried them all the way here
Only to leave the very height of themselves behind.

Creation

I woke with a gentle but urgent thought – I woke with something I needed to do, some kindness that needed offering, or some idea I needed to explore. I woke with a loose and blousy image; some new creation was tugging at a thread. Something I needed to know was trying to be known.

And then, while the gauze was still across my brain and my gaze was still soft, I sat down at my desk and checked the news.

Apparently, my airbag is a serial killer, salmon have been taking Lipitor, and a woman accidentally mailed her cat. Closer to home, my daughter was diagnosed with an anxious vagina and the peanut butter was gone from the mousetrap, (which, after day 4, should really be called a feeding station).

All of this astonishment before I even get to the real stuff, of Pakistan and poverty and cancer and cures and beheadings and bombs. The attention and gasp is all worn out by the time you even check your first email. That fleeting thought you had this morning is crowded out. Before you know the words you long to speak, or the dream you need wake from – you are swarmed by the news of dying bees.

And it’s essential, of course; those dying bees. But so is something else.
What’s close up, what’s within us, is so frequently swept away in a torrent of information and data from the outside world, that the universe that is you is drowned. Drowned in headlines and crushed by all the little bits from across the globe. The weight of it all, the power of the moving tide of media and markets takes us along, and soon we are so far away from that single thought – the one deep inside of us that needed to be known – that we know nothing, and nothing new is created.

Maybe that’s why we are all so weary. Even with headlines that make our hearts stop, we are weary because our own place in creation isn’t reflected in that raging world. Somehow, all the words we’ve heard before. Maybe when we long for original thought, it is our own that we are missing.

We are the creation that will and can change the world. But we must find time for the silence, and space for the tender truth of us to emerge.

Resurrection

My body left me in the corner of a dark basement before I was 6, and from that day forward, it was just a burden I had to carry, or a stranger that carried me.

I lugged it once to math class, where a tall man touched it, but I wasn’t there so I didn’t mind. I let it walk ahead of me in the Easter parade, because it was wrapped in pastels and called pretty. I gave it away, and let it be taken, because it was never mine to begin with.

All my life, I’ve watched it take me places I didn’t want to go.

When I was just 15, I watched as it got pregnant. I watched as it crossed a picket line, past a plastic doll impaled on a stick and a woman yelling “killer”. I watched as it searched for me in inappropriate places. In the arms of a married man, in a gay parade, and stitched into the folded lives of other people’s secrets.

As time passed, it learned to straighten its shoulders and lift its chin, but I stayed curled around its shame. I tried to kill it with cigarettes, and comfort it with cake. I called it disgusting, ugly, fat, lazy and useless, and hid it under blankets and books. Every so often I’d take it to the gym, and try to shape it to fit the curve of someone else’s hand, but that didn’t last; it wasn’t safe for us to be in the same room for long.

As I grow older and my soul returns, my body still limps a few steps behind. No longer young and sexy, it can’t carry me the way it used to. No longer ashamed, I won’t let it go where I can’t follow. So here it is, right next to me. But we still have our differences. I think I have forgiven what my body has not forgotten. It’s still out there in the world, stumbling through it all, sucking in its stomach, while I stay humble and here and fully at home. It’s been on it’s own for so long, it’s been so mistreated, it’s going to take a while to undo all the damage. But I hope to reclaim my body before I have to let it go for good. I hope it rises from the dead, is freed from the basement, and is saved by my own loving embrace.

Trough

What is the way we wake?
At the center of the center we feel a break.
Some fragile root escapes,
And slips from the seed of us,
From the place we were planted,
From the place we were placed.

As for the divot we were dropped in,
It’s holy ground.
But now that we’ve reached across
The underground rooting through the dark,
The scoop of time once meant for us
Will turn to leaf and lark.

Rise from your own depths,
Whoever left you here;
The furrows trench,
The rains drench,
The earth holds all the secrets in its universal plot,
To what is the way we waken,
And what is the way we sought.

Vernal Equinox

When you left
You carved a line in the center of
All my days and named them
Before and after.
Some days, I still count like that —
Stuck in the wish of before
And the yearn of after;

But in time the sun shifted and
On the tip of my finger
Spins a new world:
Before forgiveness,
Something must die.
And seconds after,
It’s spring.

The Studio

While you wait for god, god waits for you.
She waits in rooms of grief and glory,
Where pieces of leftover lives are heaving,
All brought to rest at that forgotten place
At the top of the stairs,
At the end of the hall,
Where the multiple, miniscule outcasts of our time together
Slowly rise.

Separated by color,
Sorted by knob and valve and thing,
Why they were lost remains a mystery;
(Why was this left behind? Or that?)
And why they were found does, too.

All we know is that the weight of all of this –
The sheer volume of the many losses –
All the precious bits discarded by the churn of time —

All we know is that each one was chosen
And waits to be honored,
To return to the world again;
A new configuration found
In rooms of grief and glory.