The Weight

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We live backwards and forwards.

When the child was three,

I felt the weight of her against my chest,

Her legs dangling, her feet hitting my thighs

As I carried her sleeping form

From the car,

And I thought, Remember this.

Today, she's twenty.

She can lift me.

Sometimes, she sits her lanky self

On my lap,

And I feel the weight of her,

I wrap my spotty arms

Around her skinny waist

And I think, Remember this.

I'm reading Without,

Donald Hall's elegy of

Grief and remembrance and beauty

To his poet-wife Jane Kenyon,

Who died too young.

My beloved is on the phone,

Pacing from microwave to bookshelf

With his coffee cup.

"Yup," he says. "Uh, huh."

I hear his voice all day,

Every day,

Our desks just five feet apart.

Sometimes I, who lived so long in quiet,

Want quiet.

And I think, Remember this.

Let me write a pseudo poem

To hold on to the sound

Of his voice in the room.

There's time enough for quiet.

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Thank you to @Kcecelia and @BumbleWard, who led me to Donald Hall this morning.

Seasoned

As Paul Simon said, Yesterday it was my birthday; I hung one more year on the line.

It wasn't a significant birthday, and I spent most of it at my desk dealing with the massive work project that's kept me silent here for lo, these many months. But it was an April birthday in New York City in a season that's been full of gifts. A weird hybrid spring-winter-spring season that's been going on for months, and about which we can only say "global warming" and shake our heads and then gasp appreciatively at tulips and ornamental pear trees coming on stage way before their cue.

A wise friend of mine (and you know who you are, dear M.) once said that when you've been away from your blog for months, you shouldn't try to write the definitive recap. You should post pictures. So here are postcards from a winterspring (wing? sprinter?) in New York, the city that gives me gifts every day of the year.

New York aglow, January.

Public art, Riverside Park, February.

The Hudson River and Hoboken, from the High Line, early March.

The High Line coming into bloom.

Spring on Charles Street, West Village, New York City, March.

Madison Square Park, April.