all roads lead to roaming

 all roads lead to roaming - from riding the waves, a classic not leaves of grass, not proust, but a lesbian wandering through menopuse tale about grief, hope, raucous gods, and the red thread of longing #poetry #memoir #birds #climatefiction #lesbian #gay

that's some sandwich

Mrs. Scattergood’s dreaming had become her living.  Baubo noticed. Noticed too that she had sandwiched the mundane with her work and her grief. That’s some sandwich.  Well that is life, is it not?  The practical, the soul.  They meet in a multitude of combinations.  You can see, as Baubo did, when a person’s life feels empty.  It’s always the eyes that show it but you can hear it too.  If you are not hearing pain you are hearing someone that has let life leave them. They will feel empty, without spirit. But the person going through this might not know that they are dry as a husk. How dry is that? Dry, really dry.  No grits, no maize, no amazing.

some of the language of the nearby wetlands

My wetlands because it speaks a language I know. The winds, the ripples, all the sounds speak to me. My mother feared she lost her Yiddish. I fear that I cannot communicate this language as well as I would like to. But there are others that do and I take heart that I am part of a movement of people that know the call of the red-winged blackbird as it sways on the tall phragmites or knows the words and poetry of the small fish breaking through the calm surface of the river, or the testimonials of the gulls finding a place to gather by themselves, and the solemn odes, the doggerels and shanties, the rhyming couplets, and the lines of melodies that the winds create on the back end of the river. The small islands and sandbars that show in low tide produce gurgles and bubbles toward the edges where I come to say hello. The crabs are forming independent colonies, occasionally showing a claw. The clouds move over and past the spot where I stand, shadows and light, sun and winds, the ebb and flow. This is life. Whether you stand here with me or move down the nearby streets, the tides are talking to the wind; the birds are conversing. Not too far off, the ocean. I wait for their songs.