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Aging
Five Months After My First Husband’s Death
My son posts a picture of himself at three years old / with his father, my first husband, / who still has black curly hair and is looking right out of the photograph / at me, as if he knew this day would come, me staring back / at him and wondering where that moment has gone.
October 2022At Sixty-Five
This morning I fell back / into deep snow / and dug myself into a snow angel. / Yeah. I didn’t tell anyone. I mean, / c’mon, right?
June 2022My Fight Against Time
The desire to hang on to youth for as long as one could — to see that as greed was new to me, and the idea had deep implications for how I saw myself.
June 2022Four Poems From Ancient China
Call next door, ask / neighbors on the west if they can spare / any wine, and suddenly a jarful comes / across the fence — fresh, unfiltered. We / open mats beside Meandering River’s / long currents, crystalline winds arrive, / and you’re startled it’s already autumn.
June 2022Love In Our Seventies
We don’t take each other for granted, because we know we’re old. Sometimes when we’re bird-watching — field guides, binoculars — happy to be looking at egrets or green-winged teal, I think, One of us is going to die first.
June 2022A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
June 2022Evanescence
Everything new disappears, within and without. Alzheimer’s disease is eroding her hippocampus. . . . She has what the neurologist calls “rapid forgetting,” so she lives in a state of evanescence; nothing holds.
March 2022Winter Of Flying Walruses
I should have seen the breakup coming. After just a few months with Shaye I was frightened by her inability to make concrete plans for the future. She was like an iceberg: pretty from far off, but scary the closer you got.
January 2022Sunbeams
January 2022A memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Memory: Short-Term Loss, Long-Term Gain
I am not so sure it is “we” who look back. The commemorating imagination seems to come alive on its own. We are not the sole instigators of remembering; memory seems to push itself on us.
January 2022