To My Son at Eighteen, Optimism and The Envoy

I was going to talk about the poetry and caregiving conference I went to at Duke, and the wonderful reading and master class with Jane Hirshfield, (who I think is wonderful by the way), but I think I have to talk about something else, too.  Will found this picture in plain sight in our study, and put it on his senior page.  I hadn't really looked at it in many, many years.  I know Chip, my husband, took it and has always loved it, but I hadn't looked at it--really LOOKED at it-- in years.  You know how it is, the picture goes on the bookcase and we never see it again.   In these few days before high school is done and we all start a different way of relating every day to our son as he goes away to college, I can't seem to take my eyes away from it.  I guess it justt captures that breathtaking (or so I think) bond between mother and child so well.

Oh, the boys are still in the championship race!  They have a very big game tomorrow that is in no way a guarantee.....but, if they win, they are on to the State Championship on Saturday just before graduation on Sunday.  Very exciting around here!  Hope for a little sun...or at least no rain!!

I have included three poems.  Two from Jane Hirshfield that I love--"Optimism", and "The Envoy", and one of mine that I am working on about that picture.  I think Jane H's poems also capture a great deal of what I'm feeling these days.  Both the feeling that some huge emotion keeps raising its head that I can't always name, as I contemplate Will's leaving, and my hope to be resilient through all of this and able to embrace all this resinous, unretractable change!  Enjoy!

To My Son at Eighteen

I didn’t think I knew how to hope

for the man you have become

when this picture was taken.

Then I looked at it again,

all these years later.

We are both so young here,

You’re must be two, I’m in my

early thirties, and I’m holding you

naked against me, your thumb

as usual, in your mouth,

your heart to mine. 

We are framed by grey stairs rising

above us, a palm trunk at your back,

a beam of the stairs at mine.

The lush Florida world stays

slightly out of focus behind us,

soft light except on my shoulder

away from the camera,

a patch of brightness drawing the eye

into the circle our bodies make.

The white of your baseball cap

turned backwards on your head

and my white shirt parallel

again the rising steps,

and focus the scene on our

faces, inches apart.

My hair touching yours,

colors matching perfectly,

we seem to whisper the world

to each other;

our silent language loud.

In the intervening wash of years,

Time has tumbled us like white water

over pebbles, flinging us forward,

driving us into a rock or two,

releasing us changed and gleaming,

But in this photo we are anchored

forever in this mute moment

together.

As I look, I can see the man you are now

so clearly in your boy eyes. 

I can feel your goodness and wisdom,

even pain in the heft of your body,

and somehow you’ve always known mine.

As if we knew then what we know now.

As if we have always been telling each other,

that through it all,

I am here.

Optimism (Jane Hirshfield)

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the  light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

The Envoy (Jane Hirshfield)

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something -- terror? happiness? grief? --
entered and then left my body.

No knowing how it came in.
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.