shells in an envelope

Seems that shedding old ways, old skin, is a bit of a theme here at chewing the fat.

Let me tell you a little bit about my day yesterday...at least what occurred after I posted "up the mountain" here.

I took a nap with S. There were thunderstorms, big booms followed by torrential rains that lasted about 15 minutes, enough to start street flooding. We had plans to have dinner with my parents, who came in yesterday, and we'd decided to try a new Richard Sandoval "concept" restaurant, La Sandia, so we'd planned on going on the early side, around 5:30. Between the nap and getting dressed for dinner, I went to the mailbox and found a letter. A real letter. Addressed to me.


I'd written to a dear friend of mine while she was visiting her mother in Florida. The letter I received yesterday was a response to that letter, but it was OH so much more. It was in the form of a poem--a sestina, no less-- called Letter from a Friend, and before I could even finish it, I was weeping.


You see, everything I wrote about yesterday--all those feelings of being misunderstood, or of people not really caring about me or wanting to know how I really am--much of it was emotional spewage born from frustration and impatience. Though I do believe that most people aren't comfortable around illness, it's too easy for me to forget that there ARE people close to me who get it. Completely. And my letter writing friend is one of those people.


S. was in the basement ironing as I read the poem, stopping in places to breathe, literally, or to let my body shake with sobs. I have not cried that hard in a long long time. At one point, I was leaning on the counter, looking out the window, utterly blown away by what it feels like to be seen, understood, late day-post-thunderstorm light creating haloes in the garde, the air still thick with water. As I stood there, or more to the point leaned there, I felt Daisy come and lay down right at my feet, her body leaning into my legs. This, of course, only made me cry harder. Such intuition, this wonder dog has, such love. And at that moment, I was filled to the very brim with love...I can't explain it in any other terms than that, it was just love, simple and unadorned and plain as rain...and I realized how it felt new, like a revised and better version of what I had felt in the past but more pure. And I was able, at that moment, to actually let in that love, feel it. It wasn't drama disguised as love, or pursuit wearing love's knock-offs, or the all-consuming intensity that comes with overwrought infatuation...this was more like a gift that came when I least expected it, wrapped in a plain envelope with tiny holes created by a handful of delicate sea shells that had been included with the letter. It began:



Dear Meghan,


I sat on a dock this evening as the sun folded

into the gulf, cool coral clouds reflecting light

onto the waving ribbons of the horizon line, shaping

the end of the day as I held the body

of your letter, breathing the words in deeply to the shell

of my own shadows, the sea lapping gently in my ears.



Each stanza a repreive, a nod of affirmation and understanding and yes, hope. It was when I reached this next stanza that I had to put the poem down and let my body release its own water as if a dam deep within me had burst and tears were coming fast, faster, spilling all over the floor and my hands and onto Daisy's soft head.



You write of long days wishing for health, the shelling

out of hope and the slow recovery from pain that shapes

your decisions; the neuronitis a siren; swollen glands like bright flashing lights

on your flesh; the husk you learn to live within; the ear

that betrays you; the skin that hurts; the agonizing folding

walk that staggers your step; the defeat of the body.



What would life be without the battle for the body?

Would we be the people we are without these broken shells?

Pain is in everyone, but symptoms and end results unfold

differently--sometimes anger, resentment, retaliation--for you it shapes

itself into gifted words, the spiral tunnel of an ear

that listens to the world and grieves for its beauty with the poetic grace of shifting light.



When it comes right down to it, I don't know that I can adequately describe what it felt like to receive this blessing of words, an understanding nod to relative experience. I suddenly felt less alone, and had to smile through the tears when I thought of what I'd just posted on the blog--how little credit I give to those in my life!!! It's too easy for me to think that no one "gets" me or my health problems, too easy to resort to the age old way of isolation and self-pity. It's much much harder to open myself to the possibility that I AM loved, seen and accepted, just as I am. Just as I am today, right now, here in this scarred and imperfect body.

I'm sure someone else would read this poem and say "what a beautiful poem" but have little sense of all that lives between each line, or how the repitition of carefully chosen words--the wonderful way of the sestina--can usher in an otherworldly-ness not anticipated or expected by the poet or the reader. Such is the magic of poetic formalism, and the gift that emerges when the writer uses form to create a specific framework. Sometimes it takes the rigor of self-imposed rules to bring what is yet unseen into the light. Yesterday I bathed in that light, drank it willingly, and counted my blessings one by one by one. I think I'm beginning to understand this thing called love. Surprise! This dusty heart knows the real thing when it feels it. It's just been confused by other stimuli that look like love and sort of feel like love but in the end are mere stand-ins for the real thing. I'm learning. The line that keeps running through my head is from a poem by Marge Piercy..."learning to love differently is hard..."

To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open,
love with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch;
to love and let go again and again.
It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed in the work that gutters
like a candle in a cave without air,
to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing me,
but you thrive, you glow on the street
like a neon raspberry, you float and sail,
a helium balloon bright bachelor's button blue
and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding,
to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice,
hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.