Poem : Vespers

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Speaking directly to my thoughts today…

Vespers
by Moira Egan

One of the gifts of the evening hours
is darkness, a velt screen between your self
and the brutal art of dying.
Your knees, your shoulders, ribs,
are hard etched in the parchment of your skin.
You watch your own heart beat, you’ve grown so thin.
Another gift is numb, narcotic sleep.
Entire days drip slowly into veins,
the tubes exchanging morphine for release
from pain as deep and venomous as dreams.
Tonight I wish you this: a candle blown
out gently, the last page of your book,
and all your children near. And may your bones
sing, no longer with pain, but with roses.

[Found here.]

A Little Announcement…

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A friend sent me this photo of Anne Sexton after this bookish post I shared a few months ago. There’s something about it that I find quite arresting. Her surroundings, typewriter sitting at her elbow waiting for words and books slanting against one another, waiting to be rifled through. Her outfit, sleeves rolled up on her button down, with comfortable slacks and black flats. Her position, chair tipped back with her feet on the desk. She props her hand in the air and her lips part – she’s about to say something good, something worth writing down.
This is the life of a writer at its best.
At times I find myself fantasizing about this life, and I have to stop and remember that writing is hard. It’s bleeding and weeping and prying your hands from perfection in order to grasp hold of the truth. It’s nothing like leaning back and propping up your feet; or at least not very often, and certainly not when there’s a camera in the room to document it. Sexton knew this all too well.
But just now, today, I feel very much ready to take it on, this life of writing – the bleeding and the crying, and then, in scarce and blessed moments, with the afternoon light gleaming through the window, the happy relief of having said something good, something worth writing down.
So here is my little announcement : Ally and Darrell of Prodigal Magazine asked me to be a staff writer for their newly refurbished online mag. My first article will be published later this week or next, but you’ll see my words over there a couple of times each month. I’m excited, scared, thankful.
But most of all, I’m ready.

Inspired By.

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I’ve fallen in love.

It started innocently enough… A friend introduced me to him at a Starbucks on a rainy day. We acquainted ourselves over London Fog lattés, and now the more I get to know him the more I realize I cannot live without him. His name, you ask?

Earl Grey. 
There’s just something about his flavor and scent, a citrusy fog that is musky and deep like the best kind of cologne, that brings all of life to a low hum. In his presence I find myself unwound, loose and swoony and deeply content in the way that only a dashing British gentleman can do to a girl.
This love affair has gotten out of hand, but like any true romance, it’s a helplessness I enjoy. My best friend further enabled this relationship by making an Earl Grey Panna Cotta for dessert last night… yes, the best tea in the world transformed into creamy spoonfuls that are even more satisfying than the best tiramisu you can imagine, the epitome of relaxation and luxury.
And on a rainy snowy afternoon at the end of the week, what could be better than a cup of Earl Grey and a good read? Treat yourself…
Authenticity online : on abs and imperfections and the worst two months ever. (Love these women.)

Writing Therapy.

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“And even though their son will always be alive in their hearts, like Pammy and my dad will be alive in mine- and maybe this is the only way we ever really have anyone-there is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us.”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
I found the poem I shared yesterday written on the back side of a scrap of watercolor paper, a painting I had begun that I destroyed entirely with too much of the wrong color. On Sunday evening I finally decided to clean out a bag full of things I had taken home with me that week before Christmas, when I knew that this was my last journey home to her. So many things were in that bag. Christmas cards, sympathy cards, receipts from the hospital cafe, a copy of mom’s obituary, a Vogue that I flipped through mindlessly because I couldn’t bring myself to read the novel I brought, scraps of paintings that never turned out, scraps of writings from spare moments when fairly cohesive thoughts broke through my sadness.
Two months later, I don’t even remember writing that poem. Was I in the hospital? Was I at home? Late at night or early in the day? Before or after she slipped and fell and hit her head on the cold bathroom tile and all the nurses came rushing in at once and I cried, but she didn’t?
I left all of that out, but the emotion is there.
I’ve found bits and pieces of these experiences all over the place, scribbled on napkins and receipts and work notes. Like finding all the outer edges of a 500-piece puzzle I’ve been gathering them, trying to fit them together to keep the memories alive. Because sometimes, yes, I have to ask,

Did that really happen?

It did.
And she’s gone.
But she’s still with me.
Reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird has been very much like going to see my therapist, except that Lamott is like the therapist for my writing psyche. She tells me to write thoughts as they come to me on index cards or in a notebook. I think for a long moment about all of my notebooks and scraps of paper.
“Oh yeah… I guess that’s what I’ve been doing, in a way.”
“Good,” she smiles. “That’s normal for a writer, whatever that means.”

Poem : Ebb and Flow.

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The complex fairness of it, and its paradox.
Fair, because she doted on me my whole life :
Swaddled, nourished, comforted, encouraged.
It’s her turn now.

But how unfair, that she should be weakened, helpless.
Her strength ebbs away, just out of reach for her,
for any of us, to grasp.
It’s the thing I cannot give her.

Where is the dignity?
All our lives we’ve struggled to find it.
It will be snatched away.
It will leave her lifeless in her child’s arms,
our world turned backwards.

The ebb and flow,
of fair and unfair,
of grief and joy,
of life and death,
of strange and familiar,
wears me down to nothing,
a smooth round stone for throwing.

[Written : 12.20.11]