I love poetry. Not every poem I read, and certainly not every one I’ve written, but since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the imagery, the rhythms, the depth, the stillness, the variety. I love listening to the stripped-down similarity of so many souls that have come before, all trying to express the most unchangeable things, to capture the most fleeting. I fill up notebooks of random thoughts…few become real poems, but when they do, there is such satisfaction. When I go to a bookstore or a library, I always end up in the poetry section. Just leafing through the pages makes me feel more centered. The older I become, the more I am drawn to poetry as a purer kind of language that gets more quickly to the heart of things.  Only yesterday, when I listened to a wonderful podcast in which the poet Naomi Shihab Nye was interviewed, did I begin to find better words to explain why. She says that in a way, we live within a poem:  “When you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.” That was so helpful for me, with my over-wordy tendencies and runaway train of a brain that really only wants to make its connections for a truth it can hold.

I start with that because my mind has been having a difficult time making certain connections as of late. Bear with me while I try. Perhaps if I could turn these musings into an elegant poem, I could be forgiven for my reach. As those who have read this blog over the years will know, I am interested in the significance of anniversaries, the patterns of time. This is the closest to caring about numbers that I come, so I make the most of it. For a long time, I was counting the Fridays when we turned left past the fatal stop-sign at the end of our street. I was relieved that Vernon almost made it to our ten-year wedding anniversary so that I could celebrate our marriage with a party instead of just marking a death with a memorial service. I’m aware that my ten-year anniversary with Maki living under my roof is coming up in a few months too. I recognized on my birthday this year that I was the same age Vernon was when he was hit. I don’t know if numbers have any real significance, but there is poetry in the patterns, something to stop and hold a moment for, if I’m paying attention.

Somehow I got the idea in the past weeks to do the math, to figure out the time that has passed since Vernon died…and how it matched how long he had been in his injured state. Sure enough, the two seasons were almost exactly the same: 27 months. Of course the first season seemed much longer than a mere 27 months (I have the lines on my face to prove it) but if the past 27 months were the equally long second half of the book, we’d be at the end.What strange meter our lives are broken up in. We all know that life doesn’t make simple sense of numbers and there is no such thing as equal halves, but if this were a poem, can you see how evenly those seasons have been split into stanzas?  On realizing this, I didn’t know what to do but cry…many times over many days.  I cried in a way I hadn’t since he was hit, which startled me at first. These were a different kind of tears, opening up space in my heart that I didn’t know existed. Perhaps it hadn’t yet. Does saltwater taste different if it comes from a deeper place in the sea? I tried to stay present, naming things I’d never named, and at last, there was a sense of moving through another threshold into a hazy new season where I’m no longer defined by what has happened so far. If I try to imagine the grand timeline of my life, I can see these two matching verses were not long at all. There is a lot of space—and a lot of stories—on either side. My poem is not limited to 54 months, and I don’t want to be limited to all the things I decided were true during that time (even if I needed them to be true during that time.)

In another 27 months, I’ll be 49, the same age he was when he finally passed away. I’m sure I’ll try to process that pattern of numbers too. I imagine I’ll cry (I hope so) but maybe not so hard. Perhaps by then, I’ll need to find less meaning in everything, to string together less bizarre and wild connections.  But who knows? The future doesn’t exist. What I do have is now…which is filled with great possibility. And I still have poetry: a gift to help me make a loose sense of things, whatever comes and goes, to break things up in bite-sized verses, to make connections along the long way.