25 February 2017

The first two stages, though good and purifying, end when we die. A friend asks how--at our age--to deal with losses. My mother Martha refused to grieve for her husband. She thought she'd break apart, and she did anyway, slowly. This year, in an effort to speed up the game, pitchers can call their intentional walks without even throwing the ball. Speed entertains. The turns on a dime of the president's opinions jazz us, before we fall back in confusion. Gas lighting is a dead metaphor. To grieve is to vacate tenses, not to mix them up. I pull the past forward as if it were a dying cat on a maroon blanket. (That was two years ago.) The beautiful door in Trump's wall is all that should be built. We took my mother to the cemetery, where she pulled back, like Lilith on her green leash, abhorring the box my father's ashes had been placed in on the day she refused to come with us.

--25 February 2017