VERONICA LEE

​Our life... and its forgetting.
I'm forgetting. Are you?
And the kids?

The forgetting is keeping me anchored,
here and now, I suppose.
Helping me miss you less.
Or, if not, maybe it's bandaging unhealed
wounds prematurely.
Wounds that can never truly heal.
At least not while I'm in a body.
This body. This heart. This wound.

So the forgetting.

What songs did we love together?
That's my latest grasping.
We both loved music and there are
many songs that sing "us."
But my memory can't find them all,
and my heart so desperately wants to.
To string together our story - our kaleidoscope
of stories - into a continuum of remembrance.
But there are gaps on the string.
As there were gaps in our life.

The life I envisioned anyway.

And some of the songs are heavy
with those shattered times.
And those are the memories
I'm not sure how to remember.

I only want to remember
the joy and perfection, bu the
chaos splatters across the images.

The forgetting, I guess, is not just
human, but seems to be my
coping mechanism. A habit
I incorporated early.

Your memories of your childhood were
always so crisp, corporeal and
brought with them the aroma of
homemade cookies. I remember your
stories as if they were my own.

But our own thirty-one years together are
fading, sometimes in chunks.
And it scares me.

Will I have the courage and
wherewithal to capture it in writing?

I once tried. I wanted to honor
you so, yet the pain of telling
our story was too great, my grief
too raw, all of it much too fresh.

So I look at that canvas. Of all
of us. I remember the bittersweet
day it was taken. A fundraiser
for you.

You couldn't button your own
pants that day. I did it for you.
You also recognized the challenge it
would be to get around using just
a walker. So, on a moment's notice,
a friend rounded up a wheelchair
from a thrift store and you were
held.

Held safely by a wheelchair, by a strong
community, by me and the kids.

And, as much as the day
remains in my heart, the
pockets of forgetfulness seem
to be growing.
And I don't know exactly
what to fill them with.

Inspired from a line in a poem by Li-Young Lee: "our life, and its forgetting"

​The sidewalk is cracked. Imperfect,
even in its first few days.
Oh, and printed mischievously
with the paws of our cat.

It needed to be made.
The step was becoming
too great for his wheelchair.
Thankful we already had a ramp
to the front door.

But the step.

So our landlord mixed and formed
the cement. An interesting slope
met the carport floor and the
edge of the house.
But slope, blend and form, he did.
And the cat, of course,
offering her influence.

She was perfect for the part
as she was born behind our home;
a litter of ferals caught
and domesticated.
She is the only of the four
that we still have.

The bulky electric wheelchair
sits empty in the carport, unused
for almost three years now.

The sidewalk, the only strip of
anything on our property that
could hold such a name,
reminds us of the support
we needed and received
during those critical months.
​
From upright muscular strength,
to using the railing on weakening legs,
to being pushed in a thrift-store wheelchair,
to surrendered navigation in the
custom-fit contraption that held
every limb in place,
my husband - once a carpenter
and contractor - should have
been the one to create that
sidewalk to our house.

I felt it in my soul. They knew.
They were singing about awakening.
The words revealing their knowing, 
offering me hope that I wan't the only one 
who "got it."

It was the early eighties, and I in my teens.
A somewhat mystical life, but confined to 
the sanctity of my family.
Early on I learned I could not talk about 
such things. That not every family 
recognized the mystical. That, in fact, 
most were afraid.

Lifetimes of separation. Fear.
Being misunderstood. Misplaced, likely.

But laying on my bed, heart open, the song -
its imperfect grooves casting out the rawness
of the record - illuminated my longing.

The words, with poetic clarity, written on the 
album sleeve,  thumb-tacked to my bedroom wall.
And the lamplight of the hermit,
reminding me I was not alone.

I am now a we, with two offspring still in my home.
They, nearly twenty, are older than I was when 
the song anchored in my being.
It is early morning as we get into my Subaru.
They are not yet drivers, so I dutifully taxi
them to work. A half-hour, one way.

Music is our air. We fill the car with a selection of
the passenger-seat's choosing.
And there is began. The familiar tune...
the beckoning flute, and it calls.

I am clear that I am the lady who's sure
​all that glitters is gold.
And I sing. And remember. The teen, 
the old soul confined to limitation.
My girls carefully applying makeup as I drive.

I remember the journey thus far. The belief
in magic, the denial of my wisdom, the real
life struggles of marriage, parenthood and loss.
Losing my husband and mom too early.

But I still sing and know that if we
listen very hard, the tune will
come to us at last. That I must continue to 
be a rock and not to roll away from who I am
and what I know to be true
as we collectively walk our stairway to heaven.

What have I shaped into, I don't exactly know.
I desire form, substance, understanding.
Understanding of self... yes.
To pinpoint "me."
In this way, perhaps there would be
a revelation, a profound "ah-ha!"
Or, an identity so certain of herself
that wondering ceases.

The shape, as she stands -
well, let's admit she is sitting -
is often harshly judged.
Too short, too wide,
too loud, too intense.

But why the "too"?
Is there even a shape that is
too much of anything?
How could that be, really?

This earth is large enough that
no-thing has been too anything
to loosen her orbit.
So why, then, do I assume "too"?

Shape indicates form and sometimes
I prefer the formlessness.
The expanse of space and
infinity and dreams.
Ever-unfolding.

So perhaps I shapeshift?
Indeed, I do.
I must.
As the confines of this body,
this life are far too limiting
for the bigness of my being.

The shape dances and bends
and knows and weaves and
does her best to open her heart.

The shape nurtures and cares
and is sometimes a bit self-sacrificing,
molding her form around
the needs of her children.

What I have shaped into is a
fifty-something mother of
four young adult children...
all of whom cradled
in these arms,
each nursing from the love of
tired, misshapened breasts.

There is no more milk.
Am I depleted?

Not really.
Worn, perhaps,
and often wondering
about what is forming next.

Is it possible to reshape a form
that has been set in identity
for half one's life?

I imagine a small ball of clay.
I see the impurities.
I wonder about my skill.
The ball is small, solid,
and full of potential.
I press my thumb into its center,
whatever a center might be in a ball,
and feel the suppleness.

Hesitance. Hope.
I slowly form with the assistance
of careful fingers.
I try not to judge.
Find the balance between
intention and allowing.
What shape is calling
to be formed next?

Inspired from a line of a Lucille Clifton poem: "what have I shaped into."

A single bird would rip it like a silk,
and it does.
The sky, or what I thought was the sky,
now open.
Tattered along the edges of this tear.
Not so big, but alarming nonetheless.

Where is that bird, and why did she
rip into the fabric of my reality?
My bubble of what was?

Imperfect under its shelter,
it was - is - still my reality.
Predictable, even.
A me. A you.
A life understood.

But now I cannot see anything
but the tear... that opening.
I feel the beyond and its
forced fracturing of my what is.

That damned bird!
I am no seamstress
but I have learned to mend.
As imperfect, ragged
as my skills may show.

I want the bird.
I want her to return the piece she's taken,
as I'm not sure how well
I can stitch the gap without it.

There is something comforting
in the sanctity of what was.

I can already feel the impossibility
of forgetting the existence
beyond the bubble.
Denial feels safe.

My mending skills may not be capable
of shutting out a new reality.
May not be able to protect me
from the inevitable.

I guess, on some level, I knew
the sky fabric was not meant to remain
forever in tact.
Yet I didn't realize its fragility either.
One little bird.
One.
​
And now me.
Standing beneath a fraying sky of what was,
uncertain - yet now curious -
of what's beyond.
Now recognizing my choices.
Bird chasing, sewing up the sky,
waiting for full dissolution, or
perhaps seeking and making myself willing
to discover what's beyond that
I never knew existed.

Inspired from a line in a poem by Ellen Bass: "a single bird would rip it like a silk."