Where did the poetry go?

It's been said you have to be depressed to write it. And for awhile, then, that made sense when I didn't, cause I wasn't. Last year, I sunk to the point below poetry, but only for awhile. And then, eventually, I came back to solid ground. Now, though... surely, there's a poem somewhere in all this glum black-edged three-month snow and the melting knives of February.

Maybe she took them with her. I wrote her a poem once:

She's building poems,
petal by petal,
In the hours between moments,
drops them where need is,
Seeding them into dry pasture,
One now on the house in the valley,
One into the splash river to grow wild,

The town don't know
What hasn't hit them
Because of the poems
She builds
Like bridges
Parting waves
At old moments

She is a poet lariat,
Bringing in the strays,
Biding her time by the campfire,
With a half smile,
Waiting...

~k~ dec 30, 2004

It's been a month, today. And the moon, as then, is in Scorpio. Scorpio, in my world, at least, is acquainted with the Goddess, Hlin. Hlin consoles us, but she is the lady of sorrow. That's how she knows how to console.

You got to understand. In our family, we don't do this. In our family, someone dies and we go the funeral and then out to a movie or for pizza. It's not that we don't love them or won't miss them, it's that their time came and... I don't know... we don't want to impose? Don't want to keep them if they meant to go?

I missed Mom, of course when she died in 1989. Felt like an orphan. Grieved from time to time and still do -- still miss her. But she would be 99 year old if she was still alive and she hated old age, was terrified of nothing more than the thought of walkers, wheelchairs and being immobile. She moved on when she wanted to, and it was good, the way she went. Reading the Homecoming and then going to sleep. And none of us knew what to do, then. We would have called Mom to ask what was appropriate, but... well...

Then, when Dad died, everyone gathered at our place and played horseshoes and went swimming in the pond. It wasn't that we loved Dad less, really, its just that we didn't need him as much. He could mostly only be depended on to not be depended on. That was part of his charm. And when I think about it, he spent most of his life playing, so why wouldn't we have done the same, giving him a send off.

Anyway, what I was saying is we don't do the whole grieving thing so much. It just isn't who we are to carry on like it's the end of the world. Even when it is.

But I'm still pretty much right where I was a month ago. Still can't think of things like going to the writer's camp or going to Richwood.

Come warm weather, we were going up to get Joy and go visit Goldie Webb and Zadia Greathouse. How fun would that have been? Joy would have met my old friends from long ago. And we'd have driven up on the hill and showed her around.

Joy said sitting in that house all day was so depressing, the house was blue. And she said that big church across the road was so imposing, it left her no view of her own.

See how she worded things? She lived in a blue house and it was true that every front window was full of church and you couldn't see the lovely mountains beyond or the river down below or anything else. Out back, of course, you just saw other houses.

Any trip to Richwood is sure to remind me that it's too late to go see Joy, get her out of that blue house for awhile.

Marilynn Robinson wrote that when someone dies they are more present with us -- like a mirror that breaks -- it held one image, and now, broken, holds the same image in mulitple shards.

I feel like I'm being indulgent. But, you know... the moon of Hlin is the right moon for mourning. It's just that, we don't do that. So, that must not be what I'm doing.

When the snow finally melts in this squat valley town and the grass comes up and the flowers bloom, I'll move along to things that need doing and I'll move along from this. Death, after all, is part of life, like winter is part of the year -- but in Joy's case, winter came in the middle of the wrong season. It was a shock we'll not soon be over.

Me, I'm looking for a medicine poem.

The last prompt that Joy gave me for writing was "Write about a washboard." I did that assignment, but was not satisfied with the results. So maybe I'll try that one again.