Start in the old country: Brooklyn.

Enter a teenage couple with New York accents

heavy as potato knishes, an old Rambler,

an early spring night, and whatever makes

something or someone happen.

 

Add a brother, a sister, a TV, a bicycle.

Start drawing as soon as you can hold a crayon.

Move from a Williamsburg apartment

to an East Flatbush triplex with a face-sized

stained-glass window of a sailboat, a pizzeria

on the corner, occasional hurricane remnants,

then the long/short drive to the Jersey burbs.

 

Land in a Levitt house planted in what was

a cornfield, add another brother, then subtract him.

Aim the bike toward the brook, the semblance

of the wild along not-yet-colonized fields

and the all-too-colonized mall. Add another sister.

 

Keep going to the city, walk lower Manhattan

like your backyard. Hide in your actual backyard.

Go to summer camp and carry candles at sunset

up the hill on Shabbat. Sing with all the others.

Throw pots, draw snakes wound around themselves,

paint with acrylics, stain your fingers with pastels.

 

Come home to more fights, louder volumes,

Hummel figures smashed breaking everything apart

with a divorce but hold onto the house

with its overgrown backyard, perfect for hiding

to draw pictures and read stories of lost girls.

When everyone but the father leaves, try to be

a good daughter wife. Fail completely.

Wonder to what to do with all your bruises.

 

Join the synagogue youth group. Meet Phil,

the advisor, who says you’re not crazy.

Find the school thespians who are.

Find drawing is not enough anymore.

Start a poem about loneliness, then another.

Fill a notebook. Get another. Fall in love

with T.S. Eliot and e.e cummings. (stanza break)

Sell plus-sized double-knit polyester pants

at Englishtown, the largest flea market in the world,

to grateful women. Write about them. Write about

the smell of subway heat rising through sidewalk grates.

Turn the bruises you can’t tell anyone about into poems.

Imagine being loved. Take baths. Hug dogs. Stay up late

with Cousin Brucie’s Top 40. Fall hard for Joni Mitchell.

 

Keep writing when the new family moves in.

Laugh at the bagels hanging from the Christmas tree.

Go to midnight mass. Learn to polka with a 6’8” man.

Bring a poem each day to your English teacher

who believes in you. Listen to Springsteen and all the ones

who say to go far away as soon as you can.

Alienate the stepfamily. Think it’s your fault for years.

 

Go to a community college. Join the radio station.

Read news, write copy, get a first boyfriend.

Eat in fancy Italian restaurants down the shore.

Miss your mother. Fail math. Excel at poetry

and Russian history. Leave suddenly for a faraway

place, which turns out to be Missouri.

 

Try to land in a blizzard. Fail and head to another city.

Get on a bus at 2 a.m. to Columbia. Figure out how not

to be so on guard all the time. Learn to talk slower

and not reveal everything at once except in poetry.

Fail journalism school. Become a journalist anyway

for labor unions in Kansas City. Live without any furniture

because you have none. Get fired. Get another job.

Write poems on the bus, at work when you’re supposed

to filling out reports, and in the statehouse between

lobbying legislators on energy conservation.

Sufi dance. Sleep with the wrong men. Live with

a large hippie family in a falling-down Victorian.

Learn to make carob brownies and grow peas.

 

Go further west. Get lost. Stop in Lawrence, Kansas

to dance in a park. Eat enchiladas. Climb porch steps

to a bungalow in the dark. Hear a voice saying,

this is where you’ll live the rest of your life.

The next day, fall in love with a bunch of people,

including the one you’ll marry. Move here, scared

and poem-writing in bathrooms at parties, on roofs

before thunder storms, in bed while he’s sleeping.

Try too many jobs that drain you of your writing.

Quit them or get fired. Go to graduate school.

Read and teach. Write about myths, blue herons, sex,

losing everything, and being lost. Get kittens.

 

Marry on top of a hill with everyone you know.

Dance “Dodi Li” in an old barn. Eat a lot of cake.

Make a lot of rice and lentils for dinner. Paint walls.

Give birth, almost lose the baby, but he lives.

Give birth again, and—surprise!—once more.

Find infinite pieces of Legos, tiny plastic hippos,

punk rock Barbies, and stuffed animals underfoot.

 

Get cancer. Fall in love more with people and animals.

Do chemo, surgeries, fear storms. Clean all the closets

at 4 a.m. because: steroids. Eat casseroles and soups

others make for you. Fall asleep at odd times with cats.

Do many surgeries and come back to earth each time.

Lose body parts, your father, grandparents, dear friends,

uncles over the years. Write the body back together.

Write the grief into a reflecting pond and sit there.

 

Read time’s pages, the bark of ponderosa pines,

the murmurations of starlings, the chill of late night

prayers and pacing on the back deck. Love the land

where you live so much that it loves you back.

 

Write it all down, whatever comes: another cancer,

two favorites aunts dying in a season, the kids grown

and packing cars for other places or returning here,

the friends walking the wetlands with you

in surprising wind and red-winged blackbirds,

the love, the love, the love that endures with all

its homecomings and homestaying. Remember

yourself back together in words that catch

the glint of rooftops in late light or catch on

whatever is most tender in hard rain or fierce light.

 

Keep walking the road of the poem.

​

~ Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

reprinted from  Midwest Quarterly