I Never Knew How to Hold You

It’s true that I never knew how to hold you. 

The nurses had to show me how to fold 

The blankets around you and I wrapped my arms the same way,

Following their lead, 

Tighter at first and then loosening as you moved.

It seemed like you were always trying to see something just out of reach.

We were always shifting to adjust 

And then you’d grow and I would just try again. It’s true. 

I never knew how to hold you.

Now that you’re half grown and I still don’t know 

If I gave you what you needed. 

Mothering is as one-sided as grief is—

A relationship made for constantly leaving

(And returning)

I never knew how to hold this awareness 

As a constant 

Other than to keep coming back and trying again. It’s true.

I never knew how to hold you.

The House

I wonder if they know how their house looks
From way down here as I run by, 

Threading my line across these hills
The only way that I know how to,

Each step a stitch in the fabric of my time here. 

It’s always a surprise as I crest the last hill

To see it standing up on yet another hill 

Off to the left. It is two-dimsional,

As are the three generations I have seen out in the yard—

House, swing set, people, sky stand atop this hill upon the hill,

Straight out of a child’s drawing, at the edge of the world,

With nothing on the other side- a curtain maybe- blackness- backstage.

And I wonder, too, if they look down at me

What they might see— is it the path I tread, or me?
Or maybe those have become the same thing,
Sewn as I may be into the fabric of the landscape.

When we fade from view, are we in one world, or two?
And do we regain our other dimension again?
Is it only just in each other’s gaze
That we seem to inhabit this imaginary space?

We each tread so lightly in this world in our own way—
One of us to find our way in, the other to escape.

What It Means to Live

Poetry is truth and sometimes that’s beautiful

But sometimes it bleeds and that means

That it’s hard to read like the way it’s hard

To walk on the scene of a car accident

In the moment of silence after the crash

When the blood is still fresh and absorb 

All the pain of what’s lost even though

It’s just your mind leaping, and no—

You don’t know what this means.

But you feel that it’s true, don’t you?

It is. I am telling you.

The screams of the one who lived—

The ones that echo down the years—

That is the sound that life makes—

That is what it means to live. 

The Things That We Know In Our Bones

This spring I watched my youngest play many softball games. She's been playing for a few years but at seven years old she is really starting to understand the rules of the game for the first time and is asking me a lot of clarifying questions after games (or I will explain to her something I saw her missing during play). It's been interesting to try to articulate the rules of the game to her because they are something that I feel more than know. I grew up playing ball and learned the rules of the game through constant playing and repetition-- I know them in my bones. My mom was a Phys Ed major in college and a softball coach. I can remember being the age where moms play that game of rolling the ball across the carpet to their kids using their legs as bumpers because their aim is so bad-- well instead of a big rubber ball like most kids, I was wearing a tiny mitt and scooping up softballs. That's how early I started. I was probably two.

When I watch or play softball I just feel what's supposed to happen next. It's kind of like when we used to listen to CDs. There were certain albums that you listened to over and over again, and you would hear one song end and in the silence between songs your mind would already start to play the next one because you knew what was coming next. That's how I feel a play in softball- it's so rehearsed that I can feel in the silences what comes next. Yes, it's all governed by rules, but the rules are in my bones. For someone who loves articulating everything (especially intricate rules- yay lawyering!) the rules of softball have escaped that mental process for me, and I think it's because I learned by doing and also because I have held that knowledge for over thirty years now.

But that also got me to thinking about other arenas in which we learn by doing and have long-held knowledge, where intuition and long practice begins to drive behavior because we start to feel what comes next in the silences. I think that can happen even when you know the rules quite well and can articulate them. Once you have applied them enough times, over a long enough period of time, you begin to feel how they should apply to a situation, and retrofit your strategy with language that follows the well worn paths of intuition. This is what my work has become- a complex game whose rules are deep in my bones. I started acquiring my knowledge of immigration law over 17 years ago, when I was 21 years old and the frontal lobes of my brain had not yet completely formed. I have been applying that knowledge to fact patterns every day since 2001. When you play a game for long enough and encounter enough variations on how things can play out, the solutions present themselves to your mind. You just know what to do.

I should be careful to note that I do not practice law just by feeling- that would be malpractice, most likely. Once I create a strategy I review the relevant law, regulations and case law to clothe my arguments in substance and ensure that they are correct. Sometimes I realize a fatal flaw in them during that process and have to re-strategize everything, but most times the research process is a matter of fleshing out the barebones strategy that simply popped into my mind upon reviewing the facts of the case. That's what long practice gives you-- a deep intuition that is the culmination of years of addressing similar fact patterns.

I don't think there's any shortcut to acquiring practical intuition. It is always the byproduct of long experience. But what a marvel the human mind is, that it can assist us so creatively in our work, giving us an understanding that bypasses the lingual process, circumventing even the language that imparted the knowledge of the game to us in the first place. The mind truly is a wild place.

Teddy

There is one fractured day that I can’t quite recall-

One of those memories whose mismatched images

Won’t quite assemble into a narrative,

And to this day, I don’t know quite what to make of it.

I know that it starts with two doors opening up in the ground

In the middle of a crowd of kids, who all step back, and I

Am one of them- breath sucked in.

The doors are big and blue; opened, they are taller than two

Of us, atop each other’s shoulders.

Out climbs a lumbering, sad, and curious clown,

Slowly climbing up a set of stars into the sunlight,

Not donned as well as one at the circus,

But yellow enough, with a painted frown.

We are all mesmerized by his simple magic of emerging from the ground.

Time passes and we disburse- it seems to be a playground.
Adults are playing softball far away enough not to witness

What transpires, but I have my favorite Teddy,

Who never leaves my arms- the one whose orange rimmed eyes

I still recall seeing life in around that time, and who I sang to in the night.

But somehow Teddy ends up submerged in a wading pool

That is the same blue as the doors the clown came out of—

A frantic sense of loss and recovery.

The story ends with Teddy hanging by his ears on the clothesline

In our back yard, and Dad laughing about him going for a swim.

The postscript, some days later, is that we have to perform surgery on him,

Replacing his soft belly with a ridged patch of cloth

Cut from Mom’s worn out old corduroy pants.

He has long since fully dried out, but he’s never been the same ever since.

To My Daughter

I’m addressing this poem to you because

I know you think beyond the blue horizon of the sky

That wraps its million arms around us and you try

To wrap your mind around the concept of infinity,

And for you, it’s a real stretch still, with your mind so open

But unable to grasp it. No one can.

But most stop trying. You haven’t, and I hope you never do.

Your mind is always climbing the invisible ladder

That in my quiet moments I still imagine myself climbing up,

Hand over hand into the sky, never reaching the thing

I am striving for.

I remember when my bones were a cradle for yours,

Before you were born, and after,

And how nothing could crush you without crushing me too.

It’s still true. But now you’re you.

Most of the time, I am lost in my thoughts,

Feeling my being in the wrap of time, and stretching my hands

Outside of it into the dark, looking for the spark

Of the infinite, and I see you doing that too.

I hope you find it if I don’t. I hope time never wraps its ropes

Around your being too tightly. Because you exist

Outside the scope of all of this, and you rightly deny

The pull of time’s demands. You stand

With one foot in this world and one in the other,

And I can never lay claim to your future, but as your Mother,

I want you to know that I see you.

This Is It. Breathe.

There is no truth more difficult to grasp than the fact that the past exists nowhere but inside of us who remember it. We take our view of the world from the collective impact of all that we remember and we conduct ourselves in the world according to the understanding we have collected from those experiences and yet, those experiences have vanished from the world. Perhaps they are only alive, in any real sense, in our conduct.

I remember the feeling of sitting across the breakfast table from my father many Saturday mornings when we went to Talk O' The Town restaurant. I can recall the feeling of my size compared to his- I remember being small. I was 7 or 8. My mother would sit next to him and my sister, who is 4 years older, sat next to me. We would always get the same table and always sit in the same seats. On his factory worker salary, he would treat us all to breakfast and then, once we had finished eating, I can recall how his look of boredom, absently gazing somewhere at the wall behind my head would flicker, he would lean over to retrieve four quarters from his pocket, and he would plunk two in front of me and two in front of my sister. Off we would scamper, delighted, to a room past a heavy glass door.

My sister- older, bigger, faster- would always get there first and rush through the door, which I could barely hold open long enough to run through. Inside were a change machine and a Pac-Man game. The Pac-Man music would always be playing even if no one was in there. I think there was pinball too, but we would always play two games of Pac-Man each. On the other side of the little room there was another glass door that led to a bus station. I can remember the feeling of unsavory men coming into the room and hovering close to my sister, watching her play, and feeling the distance from our parents on the other side of the door.

And I also remember in that restaurant, how I would always choose the cheapest breakfast I could find on the menu, which was 2 eggs, sunny side up, with toast, and a glass of orange juice. They would bring a basket of foil wrapped jellies for the toast, which I would never use. It would be decades before I would look at a menu in any restaurant and pick something becuase I thought I would like the taste, rather than because it was cheap. No one ever instructed me to choose food that way in a restaurant-- I just felt like it was what I should do, because we didn't have a lot of money. As the younger child, I watched a lot, was quieter, and took in the balance of things. And I wanted to be good. That Good Little Girl persona still has residence somewhere inside of me and flinches at the recollection that I don't recall ever saying thank-you for the quarters my father gave us. I do think he smiled after us as we ran to play, though.

My father is gone now. Three of us remain from those distant Saturday mornings. Three of us- I think- remember. It's astonishing how much information about who we were and are as a family exists in those recollections. I think we went to that restaurant regularly over the course of maybe 2-3 years. And I don't remember everything about it. And I don't know how long my sister and I would be away playing Pac-Man or what my parents would talk about while we were gone. I don't ever remember them coming to fetch us, so it mustn't have been long.

It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that life consists of such experiences, and that these vignettes are what give shape to who we are. Those repeated, every day experiences in which we rehearse, with little reflection, how we respond to those around us, where we determine who is safe and who is not, what we look forward to and how we make our choices-- those are us. And even when those experiences are shared with those we love, they see them completely differently than we do. No one ever knew I was, at 7 years old, looking out for the family's bottom line in my little way (unnecessarily, as it turned out!) And I'm sure there are aspects of those same experiences that others of my family routinely experiences that I know nothing of. It's even stranger when those characters who people our memories are no longer around to discuss them. The solidity and reality of those memories seem less reliable and so too, perhaps, our sense of our own identity.