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Meditations on Mother -
Shredded Things When I was young on a walk that involved crab grass white oak passionflower fences hot and heavy air I found torn to shreds a page of notebook paper Fancying myself solving a mystery I collected every shred tracing the steps of the author or lover or both I can’t remember exactly the story it told or what purple or fragrant or thorny weeds it tangled itself between only that it unfolded with love and pain that I right then could not understand but anyway put back together piece by piece following its course around our poor suburban block until it was whole again Is that what I’ve done with you taken pieces of so much love and pain from your own life, mother from sources unknown and sources too well understood put them in a strange frame of memory and forgetting? Wholeness after broken-ness is a different animal you know than the original whether received torn to shreds and never sent committed entirely to memory or tried and tried to forget shredding leaves its print But then again inconceivably the heart knits together things soft and sharp These shreds of life now a nest keeping everything tender First Contemplation Thank you for teaching me to dream to write to listen for the secrets of stars on black nights that may have perched themselves miraculously ridiculously into the plastic lights of an artificial Christmas tree you sat in front of staring for hours or was it minutes in a dark living room the smell of you cheap perfume and cigarette smoke for me spreading into the heart as all love one of my first experiences of contemplation