…it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. —George Eliot
My mourning is quiet, stealthy like the pause before bad news. An inherited trait near as I can tell. All the men in my line are instinctually stoic & hidden—brackish bodies. damned at the gates.
My last uncle just passed away, also of cancer, and with my brother Tyrone I discuss this too as inheritance— annual X-rays to hunt what would prey on us.
Memories surface of fishing trips and nickel poker, except my grief has substituted his face for Tyrone's and dad's for mine.
What am I if not mane, if not king, if not crown & control & grass-shadow eyes hidden?
My son's first time sinking a hook in ocean water was with him just a few months ago and we split a can of High Life and hovered over the entrails of a sausage sandwich and laughed
at everything and he was the last of his brothers and the closest thing to seeing dad again—I breathe deep and slow like a big cat when blood is in the air
or ground, drop the phone on the bathroom floor, slide down the wall against the shower door like an avalanche crashing down a glass mountain,
head cupped in open palms & become a prayer built on bad knees, become swinging
Mary Ruefle talks about reading and writing on the How to Proceed podcast. "The experience of sitting in front of a book that fills you with light and intense passion and joy or deep thoughtfulness, that experience is the same with all great books. I love that experience, and I read to have it again and again and again."
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"Studying my declensions, conjugating those verbs, the endless rote memorization of vocabulary, all felt meaningful in relation to this wild, instinctive possibility—that thinking was the body’s work, that apprehension in all its senses (grasping, fearing, knowing) was the thinking poetry could offer, a thought that is a sensation, as natural and instinctive as the hawk’s dive is to hawk or the mouse’s hiding is to the mouse, all eyes bright with purpose."
