i sat down to play the piano with everyone home for the first time since she died
two at the kitchen table working out fractions, one disappearing to his bedroom, one in the back studio teaching someone, trumpet i think, and me, back at the keys
but not playing two of the regulars, my hands kept reaching for everything
but those particular two. i opened the red hymnal to my trusty paper-clipped spot
faltered on the first chord change, unusual, moved slower, took a deep breath, let the sound seep
into each finger tip as one brushed by, "Oh, that's my favorite" he declared, and began describing the harmonic shifts to the two doing fractions, who then shushed him to help me keep focusing on those harmonic shifts, which i was in fact, at that very moment, fucking up.

it was a birthday dinner day and three of us were in the kitchen with green olives, and one
was at the piano, improvising on this tune which afterward i couldn't chase out of my morning teacup until one day weeks later i opened the book and found the paperclip and let myself stammer through it each morning, remembering the afternoon of his re-harmonization, when something was happening between human and piano, and two of us softly hummed along, and waited, all in its own time, over the chicken and spice, while the third ran off again somewhere to do something of his own design

we listened to the first birthday song written many years ago, and i sat quietly,
wondering about the birthday song i had written, and wondering, about the music
that was so quietly and firmly taking over so much of me, that all i could be filled
with in the meantime in my dining room chair was awe and caramel and hope and tears

a morning

"my lord, what a morning"


Scrolling through facebook this morning, this was the phrase repeated by parishioners and visitors in response to the service yesterday at St. James for the visit of Bishop Michael Curry, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of all of the United States. You might know him as that dude who talked forever at the most recent Royal Wedding. The one with the great cellist at the beginning. Turns out, Bishop Curry is truly one of the sweetest preachers out there. It was the hugest honor to be with him in our church, and to receive communion from him. And to hear him preach about something I've been thinking about a lot this year: love.

I had a big job to do as a singer for the service yesterday. Not only was it a massive sing, with several descants and quartet bits, but it was an additionally emotion-filled and sensitive time being together with the musicians. It was going to be the first time we would all be together at church after my friends returned from the burial of their beloved, sweet mother.

I say friends, but I actually mean my family here in Austin. These people have become the people I cancel Friday night dates for to just go be at their house and bake brownies and watch movies. They've become my hiking buddies, my favorite lunch partners, and people who I spend holidays with when I'm too broke to fly to Boston or too tired to drive to the beach to see my mom. I've dropped by the house having spilled coffee down my front and borrowed t-shirts fresh out of the laundry, and I don't even know how many cups of tea and card games we shared in just the past school year alone.

So many times, I popped over to their house, with chickens in the backyard and the piano in the front living room, a mountain of laundry folded on the dining room table, and I found a place where I could be exactly what I was at that moment, and be loved. I learned to sit down at the piano and practice, first the two pieces that I knew and only when just grandma was home, but then I started bringing more books and rifling through the stash of sheet music in the piano bench, and finally, began writing my own music on the piano, so much was it that I needed to play that instrument, no matter what it was or who was in the house or how sheepish I felt about my abilities.

Like anything given a little love, attention, and consistency, my piano skills grew. And its place in my life grew too, and a new part of myself starting speaking, a part of me that has always loved the piano so dearly. Eight or nine years ago, when I was a student in Vienna I took a class on piano pedagogy in the 19th century with all pianists. When asked to tell them why I, as a flutist and soprano, was in this class, I said something I wish I had paid more attention to at the time, simply "well, I love this music".

At the same time, my heart grew too, and healed. When I think back on the last year, I'm realizing how lonesome I was. How little I trusted people in my world, and how little I was willing to receive love from anyone, wanting only to give and then to be self-sufficient on my own. Teaching doesn't really work like that, I've learned. Especially with pre-K. When a 3 year-old comes barreling into your arms to hug you, you simply have to accept it. There's no other choice.

It's been a time of letting myself be loved by people like me-- artists and wanderers and cooks, and believers. Questioners, doubters, imperfect people too, but still believers in that hope, in that truth, in the silver linings in life. I'm who I am today, on the other end of this first teaching year and five years into living life in Austin, with three as a confirmed Episcopalian, because of that love.

It was a shared love of music and of food, and of God that made me grow to love the dear and late Betty Pulkingham so much. Every moment with her was a gift.

The many inspirations she gave me I will not forget to practice. I will open my mouth in praise of God, and lay fingers on the piano keys. I will pray and listen to people, and spend time with those I love. And then if I'm really feeling bad sometime, which always comes around now and then, I will eat key lime pie and close my eyes and remember sitting at the table with her one quiet Friday night, after meatloaf and wine, when she couldn't wait for the pie to be quite finished and we cut her a pre-preemptive slice. Later, when we were having ours, she got quiet a moment watching us eating. We asked if she wanted another sliver, and she smiled.

Her smile was in so many faces yesterday singing her music in one of my dearest homes away from home. Her joy was so present, I couldn't do anything but sneak away and cry off all my eyeliner before, during, and after the service. I'm grateful for the words of a nun I met teaching at my school who told me: "Tears are a gift from God. Let them fall, and rejoice."

My Lord, what a morning. And what a mourning. I'm grateful for the space yesterday and today, and tomorrow, and always, to hold it all and to be held too, and to sing all about love in the goodness of God.

susu's bakery

quiet french melodies swirled
among frostings, batters, and doughs
prepping in the cafe kitchen of my
three-days a week employer in the
sleepy self-important college town

was i filled with ennui?
or content to sweep floors
and ride home with a grin

key lime pie - an elegy

soggy friday morning mass
lenten prayers and somber
singing lifting edges of gloom
stepping over railroad tracks
space a moment, steam rising
glance askew to lines of text
the morning across the sea
the mourning of peaceful
praying people on their island home

"ms. b--," they asked, "could we just play music today?"
"ms. b--, " they added, "would you play with us?"

afterward i let tears drop from green limes
the cost of therapy only $3.49 this time
exhaling tenderness and sorrow
slow squeezing of each half by half
opening, an unexpected sigh--
yolk, butter, salt, patience,
beloved preparation to be
together, three, at the familiar table
not a word of the mourning,
of the morning, we all understood;
I looked and looked
and stayed quiet; I knew it would
only be this once, and no more

abecedariusly yours

alone together
before you left
considering the potential
direction of syllables
even the vowels
followed your
gaze
hovering
intimately
just above my shoulder
knocking gently against the
lobe of my left ear

maybe this isn't a
natural end but an
opening
precision laced with a
question but this time no
real answer satisfies

substitutions of our bodies
take more than they give

underneath did you find a
velvet crushed heart?
would you understand it? an
x-ray won't tell
you what you're not feeling
zip me up, dear, before you go.

lenten chicory

forty days of silence

forty days of sighs

forty days of star-scarred sorrow

drained teacups, sleepy eyes 

forty days of tumult

forty days of cries

forty days of stretching backwards

forwards, straining to be wise  

forty days of wonder

forty days of hope

forty days of bare feet tapping

tip-toeing, stamping, hopping, smoke

forty days we've waited

forty days we've tried

forty days find us, knees to the damp earth

hands no longer tied.

a reflection after the vigil, saturday march 16

This weekend I was supposed to finally get to see Patty Griffin play live, right here in Austin, and on her birthday. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.

Then on Friday, a mosque in New Zealand was targeted by a terrorist. I heard the news after my 8 am mass at school, the first one with my extracurricular choir of 2nd-5th graders, and was shook. My church in East Austin was contacted quickly and became the host for a vigil in fellowship with our Muslim communities here in my home. I saw the email on Friday night and thought, bummer, I’d have to miss it, I still want to see Patty. Saturday morning I woke up and started my regular teaching day, and partway through dancing around the green, sunlit studio with two three-year olds, I almost began weeping for no reason. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of the peace I was feeling in my body in that moment, compared to the torture my brain was undergoing anytime I let my brain wander off on its own and imagine how many fifty people was. Or which fifty people I might know who would be together in one place like that at any given time, peacefully. In that moment, a quiet voice said, no, dear one, not today. You have a job to do, and in your own spiritual home. You gotta be there. 

Friends who do not go to St. James and who do not share my Christian faith had checked “attending” on the event page on Facebook. I checked in with myself and knew that either way, the evening for me would be spent weeping. On day one of the news, it was spent with people I love in quietness and with food and a thought-consuming baking project. By day two I was ready to let the processing begin. 

It seems each time this happens it’s harder to read. It’s harder to listen to the news, it’s harder to interact with media of any kind. Something has been changing since I started working as a teacher, and I think it is good that I have become gentler, softer, more sensitive, maybe more aware of the suffering the people around me hold inside themselves. The suffering I keep inside of me. The ways we harm each other, both intentionally and unintentionally, with our words and our actions. It is so scarily easy to do harm. It is scarier though, to see young people who have grown up to commit acts of terror. As a teacher, this is the most frightening thought when faced with wanting to instill in my students a yearning for a safer, more kind and loving world. 

As much as I can, I try to bring comfort and kindness to the suffering and pain in other people. It’s what I love about my role in my new school I started this year— I get to do this all day, sometimes 6 or 8 classes of students of all ages, and then I go home and I am very quiet and full and happy thinking about all of the myriad of moments and changes and growth I witnessed that day. And it feels as though good work has been done, and so far, I have been finding that I am able to tell myself each day, at a certain point, that it is enough. I have done enough, I can leave my work where it is, and come back tomorrow. And I get to rest. 

Saturday night I got to the vigil early to be ready to do whatever folks needed, and after 25 minutes of tasks here and there, people began to arrive. In pairs and trios, families with young ones and adolescents, and I started to feel it all. I took a walk to the car after a while to get my handkerchief, and made a mental list of additional things to do. After the evening prayer in the parish hall, still more people were showing up, and I saw a mother with two tiny boys looking a little exasperated. I motioned to her boys, bent down, and asked them if they would like to sit up front, criss cross applesauce on the floor. Jim Harrington approved, so I started asking others, and went out to the narthex to see if more families wanted to come up closer. 

The more children I spoke to, the more I was on the verge of losing it entirely, so eventually, I retreated back to calm down and stop looking beautiful humans in the face. It was too much. 

It just seems to me that there is no reason to not love every human around you. It is so easy to love children, but in the space of bringing them to the front to be in the center of our gathering’s embrace, I looked at their mothers and fathers and saw their fear and trepidation too, and saw that they are beautiful as the children. Beautiful, and innocent, and beloved. 

After that, I stood in the back a long time. 

It was hard to listen to all of the people who stood to speak, one by one and sometimes in pairs. But I kept reminding myself that my offering was my presence and my attention, and that this was a space for everyone to feel as much and however as they needed to, and that I wanted to honor that. 

Eventually the crowd thinned and I found my friends seated in their pew. The final speaker, a rabbi, asked us to stand. He started to sing a note, a hum or an Om, I’m not really sure, and he invited us to take his note, or to pick another note. The sound in the room swelled as hundreds of voices became brave together, and strong. And then the rabbi’s voice rang out clearly and vibrating over everyone else’s in a language I did not understand and a tonality that is foreign to my ears, and the cord holding my heart separate from my mind snapped, and I was burst open into all of the shuddering, shocking, emotion I had been holding in for 24 hours. Maybe 28 years. The burst was like a string popping after forgetting the guitar in a hot car and tuning the E string impatiently, and it reverberated through my whole body. The woman next to me, a stranger, responded by putting her whole self against me, and wrapping her arms around me, and I let myself sob. Breathing in and out and shuddering, stumbling, to let all of the stale and miserable and angry and exasperated out and to breath in this sound, this ancient, mysterious, yet present and alive warmth enter into me fully. 

When I felt brave, I closed my eyes and breathed in deep, and began to sing.

I sang for New Zealand, and I sang for the people gathered in that space. I sang for friends I don’t talk to anymore, and family members who live far away. I sang for people I disagree with and who are difficult for me to love, and I sang for my three year old student with Leukemia. I sang for my friends standing right next to me also singing, and I even let myself sing for me. 

I am very grateful for the small voice that said “Go to the vigil. Be a helper today.” I am very grateful for my Muslim friends, old and new since last night. I am grateful for love and community and connection. I am grateful for you. 

would you love me forever?
i know that could be quite a long time.
we both get bored quite easily.
so maybe i'll make you learn russian
with me on mondays. on tuesdays
we could write poetry and recite it
to our grandmothers in
the clouds. on wednesdays we
might cook stew and chew on greek
philosophy, i'll practice stoicism for
five minutes at fix o'clock while you
perfect headstands with the dog
and on thursdays we'd be bound
to spend the blessed afternoon
rearranging furniture and tossing pizza
until our ceiling turns the glorious
color of spinach and anchovies
and margarita sauce and it's a bit
drippy but it'll do. Fridays are my
favorites, we'd go explorin' in the
mornin' and by the evenin' settle
in to read a good, long chapter
and laugh and talk quietly forever after
and the weekend goes by so quick i
can't even make a plan and
sometimes you'll have to travel
and i will too, and we'll be a little
blue apart but it's always true,
that monday together awaiting us
will be, and oh, is that a precious
warming thought, to me.

i would spend so many early mornings
and quiet mid-afternoons
learning and reciting
and pronouncing
just to show you
when you get
home and
see you
smile
again

you are my brave song.
my morning cup of tea.
the honeysuckle scent
lifting Lippen edges and eyes
scattering grief from
mountainous piles of lies

mardi encore

treize jours
boston is a better
place to be so
lonesome for
you pathetic
fallacy has
always been
a dear friend
of mine

dearly loved

do you know
dearly loved
you are dearly
loved each morning
when you rise
stretch the stardust
from your eyes
wiggle your pinky toes
heaven knows

the sights you'll spy
voices and the colors
of your eyes

fly away,
fly away and come back
dearly loved, oh
dearly loved,
you'll be

moving day eve

moving tomorrow
six good months
450 square feet
of freedom and
barely manageable
monthly bills

it's time.
we packed the dishes
and brought the milk
crates overflowing
pages of my precious friends
flapping in the gentle
early spring chill loading
into a borrowed jeep
my beloved temporary
chariot, vessel of desire
quenched and satisfied
rumbling and huffing
and bouncing merrily
down each of my wandering
ways these last several weeks

tomorrow early I'll do one
final load of laundry; all
of my underwear is dirty again;
in school i used to walk into
the ville and buy new underwear from
the gap, but now i just make myself
do laundry once a week
then i can spend more money
on pastries and subsequent yoga
classes; it's a good system i feel

i'll get the laundry started,
sheets and towels, jeans and
dish clothes, and then honey
and i will take one final walk from
this particular dwelling along
our path of the last six months
often traveled, early and late
to our spot, the tiniest dog park
in texas in front of a cafe
with the most quaffable cappuccino
in this caffeine mecca i call
my home, my chosen place
my twenty-something, growing up
perhaps less of an ignorant asshole
zipcode and voter registration
precinct. three minutes down the road
no stairs, just down a long hallway.

honey dog and i will walk slowly
to the cafe. we pause to inspect
various plant life and cacti along
the way, now that it's past valentine's, i
stop more frequently than my pup
to put my nose in the air, eyes
closing, softly, unaware of anything
beside the drifting scent of longing

our destination; a raising of steaming
beverage to my lips, elixir of awakening,
this is not 'having' coffe, but the way they
do it in france of 'taking' coffee, cradling
it in my small hands and taking in its essence,
consensually devouring it sip by sip.
i allow it to enter me fully and do whatsoever
it chooses. sometimes i regret this decision,
yes, but i am content to have consented
to partaking in the taking and being taken.

we will walk home, irrevocably changed,
taken, given, and i'll drive over the first load
of my small collection of worldly possessions.
i'll wonder, probably, what will be taken from me
in this new house. will fear and anxiety be gifts or offerings?
will love and courage be prizes or burdens? What dreams
will i dream with my new window looking out to a live
oak tree in the late evening and early morning what prayers
will i unknowingly offer siting outside on the back porch stairs
what hurts will i give back standing silhouetted some night soon
by the flames of a fire on our tiny patch of green earth
what tendrils will i nurse up out of the forgotten ground
rejoicing, and hopping barefoot in the dirt, taken up
by the daily joy of the ritual of being alive.

staying is good, but moving is better
i'll practice the art of it tomorrow, no
matter the weather

oscillation: a variation

day to day month to  month year to year
my body changes; my hair curlier my calves
leaner, my arms stronger but today shakier too my mind
sharper, contented, but cautious, aware of so many facts it cannot hold
i'm finding myself forgetting the scent of my highschool boyfriend'ss jeep but
imagining it was cotton hung on the cottage line where we took photos for the senior
year smiling with a navy criss-cross lace blouse i wanted to wear every day that
summer i don't remember when it was i got rid of that garment how quickly
the ornaments of a life shift while only a few remain always a watch
my brother gave me the summer after i finished college a hand-
written note on a sheet of notebook paper folded, hidden
under a  velvet pillow in the dark brown box i opened
for no reason last thursday; the note fell onto the
floor of my small room no one else there to see
stooping down slowly to retrieve parchment
remembering, suddenly, the moment i read
the letter the first time, seven years ago,
in my first apartment the one on
commonwealth avenue where
the above-ground subway
train rumbled by every
forty-five minutes
and the sunlight
came in green
waves in the
springtime
when i

was almost ready
to  be happy again.

a monday

gray morning
coffee & key lime pie
dark-winged bird-filled picture-taking
sometimes you need actual family (blood and
bone and smile lines shared) to make art
with you to feel how good it is to be
alive making art
every single day especially
the gray ones the shudder of something
you lost something you forgot something you
dreamed and somehow
loved
tiptoeing along clavicle and elbows
hushed, tender, murmuring, then
taken up, away, away!
in the february wind

there was a three-story gray house at the
corner of elm and lakeshore. the row of
mailboxes in front for the folks up the hill
big wraparound deck built at the second floor
cold cream colored tile in the kitchen
they caught me hiding beneath the
dinner table eating butter straight from
the tub with a silver soup spoon

we loved the spiral staircase in the far corner
of the kitchen leading up from the cold to the
spongey new carpeted living room, squishing the
fabric between our tiny toes and climbing over
the yellow crushed velvet love seat scene of
the crime time I felt off it and broke my arm
I fell off a wooden chair in the kitchen years
before, a tiny cast on my one year old left arm
I'd fall off a neighbor's trampoline years later,
third time's a charm, this time broke something
in my shoulder, and sometime afterward in
the fourth grade maybe, was the last year in the
big gray house, yes, it was the year of the
rollerblades for turning ten and my mouth
bled and bled and bled in the long car ride
to concord to see the picture of my grandpa
on the wall and wish he could be my doctor
like he had been everyone else's they said
they felt better as soon as they walked into
his basement office in the big white house
with the black shutters and the christmas
wreath still up, skiers etched into gimlet
glasses, quiet sadness sketched into the
walls, i think he must have had the gift
of presence, perhaps the ministry of it,
even, but i only remember stories i heard
so much i think i recreated them as memories

maybe it was the summertime when we moved
down the hill, i can't remember
i remember my sister kicking the for sale sign
with S O L D in big red letters across the name
of our real estate agent's name and telephone number
she'd give it one big kick every day on the walk home from school
until one day it fell over and no one picked it back up
i can't remember what else though
i can't remember much of being little at all

but there was tea
yes, tea! mama brought us tea on the side of the house she called
her english garden, usually after she put us through the ordeal of her
hair cuts in the front of the house under the deck, watching john swing
golden locks freely flying about, safe from her old metal scissors and
worried hands messing about with our gnarled and twisted locks
two times to the hair salon with brushes stuck at the nape of our necks
and afterward we little girls were taught to separate our hair into two halves
well-brushed after a bath, and twist the sections into two identical braids
each night before going to bed, to keep ourselves and our mama tear and tangle free
braids worked better than fancy shampoos with false promises
overtime our hair grew more and more wild and untamable, but still we persisted in the
nightly ritual of brushing and braiding and braiding and brushing
but flossing was never as highly enforced

the english garden was never forced to endure detangling; it rejoiced
in reckless abandonment of regular tending, ivy cascaded down the side of the house, lilacs grew where they pleased, when they pleased, and if they pleased, at all.
we sat and sipped, quiet after the tension of mama's brush pulling our heads and necks
and little shoulders, relieved that the haircut was finished and wouldn't have to be seen to
again for a good long while. we pretended our biscuits were crumpets and
i always wondered why mama seemed sad but also seemed glowing as she
watched us, her girls, and sometimes johnny too if they had their fill of swinging,
sipping tea and having a little conversation, among the weeds and pansies

after the rollerblading fall and once my teeth grew back i was older
i asked mama if I could make my own tea in the mornings when
she was leaving before work before i awoke, and she agreed
each morning that spring after i made a cup of english breakfast tea,
two splashes of two percent milk, two spoonfulls sugar,
always missing the clumps they had at the beautiful restaurants
in london that christmas, toes cold in my slippers on the cream-filled floor I
crept to spy on the garden and see if my flowers were growing
they were mama's too, but my eyes feasted on them just for myself a little
i checked on them every morning of april and may to see if the bells had arrived
usually, just before my birthday, i could hear their little lily-of-the-valley song

it followed me down the hill and to the city for the week-end
it followed me to italian seasides, the old men and womens' arms clasped
around each other singing "turna sorrento" eyes closed and chests proud,
it followed me even to school, one morning
it whistled softly, forlornly, down by my toes, and i
bent down, too early for any other
wayfaring stranger to see, and i let
the bells kiss me on my nose

i've gone much further away now,
and have had many more cares and woes
but i carry the lily clear bell song in my heart
and where ever i go, it grows

to donny:

one october
i hit my head
getting into my car
parked too close to the
cambridgian curb and a few
days after began the big new job
and a few days after read on facebook
that you jumped off the george washington bridge
and a few months later he questioned why i
still got sad about you even though i
hadn't seen you in a few years and
a few months later he dumped me,
twice, and a few years later i
left that city, and another
few years later, i,
wrote this song,
and a few
moments
later

i still felt sad, but, i
felt better,
too

sun and earth

perihelion; 

we perch, our tall chairs pushed tightly together

at a square table opposite the bar (no room 

at the inn) the wine, an aged italian dripping 

lusty barnyard moonlight and black pepper,  

absorbs perilously short range pressured rays

the impact will throb in the morning, but for the moment, 

it's safe here, leaning closer for your

didactic confidences painting portraits

twenty years young and centuries old

i perse my lips, pondering a list of sweets

Go on, you say, it's your choice, you continue, 

I know decisions are difficult, and you pause. 

i feel you watching me.

i let the wonder linger.

hazelnut and chocolate, or something new, something

sunflowery, olive oil and grapefruit. cream. pistachios. 

i've already had my first anchovie tonight, ah well--

qui ne risque rien n'a rien. 

i catch our waiter's eye.

something unbearable traces the etches in the thick ring 

you wear on your right hand; spells of it dance twisting the blue, i know 

your eyes are still smiling at mine. i don't let myself look again,

one more glass of wine. one more stolen story from your magpie lair.

any second, we'll shift; i'll move, you'll stay the same.

i'll drift back, back,

away.

aphelion:

apart.