Wednesday, May 5, 2010

A box of nothing.

How quiet your mailbox is, knowing you will not return to it. Anonymous spam, updates from a news site you signed up for, that will not unsuscribe. Emails from your school account, labeled "from me." As if you were still sending yourself reminders about alumni meetings, lectures, web sites for law studenmts. Your friends are gone. They know you won't answer. I keep after it, peeking in, pruning the spam; knowing you will not return.

1 comment:

  1. Heavy

    ~ by Mary Oliver

    That time
    I thought I could not
    go any closer to grief
    without dying

    I went closer,
    and I did not die.
    Surely God
    had His hand in this,

    as well as friends.
    Still, I was bent,
    and my laughter,
    as the poet said,

    was nowhere to be found.
    Then said my friend Daniel
    (brave even among the lions),
    "It's not the weight you carry

    but how you carry it --
    books, bricks, grief --
    it's all in the way
    you embrace it, balance it, carry it

    when you cannot, and would not,
    put it down."
    So I went practicing.
    Have you noticed?

    Have you heard
    the laughter
    that comes, now and again,
    out of my startled mouth?

    How I linger
    to admire, admire, admire
    the things of this world
    that are kind, and maybe

    also troubled --
    roses in the wind,
    the sea geese on the steep waves,
    a love to which there is no reply?


    Thinking of you with love this weekend.

    ReplyDelete

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