A Thin Thread

What Holds Us

What is it about fall that makes us think about the past? I think it has to do, at least in part, with harvest. We’re gathering what we’ve planted and tended, the past come back to be held our hands. And it’s also the time of turning under whatever’s gone uneaten, ungathered. It’s the time of year when we might reflect on our choices, on the turns in the road and how we’ve weathered them or been weathered by them.

Often there’s a single thread that holds us, thin as it might seem. What could be more slender than a poem? Dorianne Laux likes to quote Miłosz’s line, “I fashioned an invisible rope, and climbed it and it held me.” The way in which something that seems to be almost nothing can hold us. Even for a lifetime.

And I want to be held now more than ever. Every day I look at the news and it’s a slow-motion parade of macabre absurdities. Cruelty. And every day I wonder what it might look like to live, even to bloom, in the midst of all that.

Right now, it’s drizzling outside and I am at our two-month rental home in West Sonoma County. I’ve eaten a bowl of the chicken soup I made yesterday, with carrots and tiny sungold tomatoes I picked from the garden right outside our window. Earlier today, I gave Pumpkin, my little Havanese dog, a trim, combing through some matted bits of fur or cutting them off. I’m about to put in a load of laundry. Most of life is like this; bits and pieces, talking to a friend on the phone, taking out the recycling.

And somehow holding a piece of ourselves apart, an onlooker that peers in on our lives and keeps noticing. Look––there’s a patch of zinnias right by the front door. And look, a hawk is circling the field. These intimacies with the everyday that give us a sense of life’s continuity and beauty.

Let us keep collecting these, keep gathering. Let this a be a part of our resistance––insistence on what is good and plentiful and true. I include here a poem I wrote in the early part of the pandemic that is its own gathering of sorts. Its own savoring.

Today the Pleasures

By Danusha Laméris

Today the pleasures are too numerous to name.

Walking over the bridge and up the drive

to get the mail, then setting down the packages

to open by the front door, a fat swath of sun

falling against my arm as I open a box

of two slim books, then a box

with blue ink refills for my favorite pen,

one that glides so nicely across the pages

of my grief. All this, I think all this, and also

the broccoli soup I made with bone broth

from last month’s turkey, blended to a creamy green.

Yes, the world is falling down, death taking

a stroll down every street. And yes, it’s getting hotter

by the hour. And still, today the wind

has quieted and the dogs next door announce

their gods, who, so far, keep lifting the sun

and letting down (just enough) rain.

(from Blade by Blade, Copper Canyon Press)

May you gather much to hold dear. May we hold the world in tenderness and remember what tenderness is. And may that remembering––in the long view––save us.

For more about how I hold a space to focus on wonder and the craft of poetry, check out my new community offerings at www.litfieldwriters. com

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