To you who are not yet entirely worn

To you who are drying on the shore

Shorn, but

Born,

Awake not asleep,

PEACE!

I tell you,

Find peace,

At

Least.

 

©  Susan Lynn Gesmer

August 2016

 

Not long ago, what, maybe twelve years,

And believe me, twelve years makes all the difference,

Then eleven, now a married mother with a child of three,

The pharmacist who yesterday said to me at Stop and Shop,

“Every time I see you, I want to ask, and so I shall: You, you were Kerry’s Susan, yes?”

And my world was shaken up like my photographs

Into multi dimensions of time and space

As I tried to merge the woman before me now

With the little girl sitting behind me at the synagogue

The day we buried Kerry.

 

Outside my windows a row of trees that were not there,

A decade ago,

Now tall shining birch trees,

 

How do we comprehend time?

 

Once living breathing loving, planning the morrow,

Now in a pine coffin encased in sorrow

We were sitting at the kitchen table,

My old father and I, as we did,

So many hundreds of times,

But now he was in a wheelchair, the legs than ran from

Roxbury to Boston Latin, the prizes, achievements,

Lost like the distant mountain outside my windows in the haze of this hot summer day, today.

Two sides of the same coin, we were,

A coin pressed from deep philosophy, too many regrets,

Too many losses, from history, and soul,

And a shared quest to understand it all, though he was worlds ahead of me, and he said,

You know Susan, you should know, soon,

We will all be forgotten.

How many years, after our deaths,

Will everyone else who ever knew us,

Also be no more?

 

So what is the point of our lives

I ask you?

When, soon,

We’ll all be ashes or dust.

 

© Susan Lynn Gesmer

July 17, 2016

 

 

Red tipped fired wild wings of wondering,

Will, and when will you flaunt yourself into my caverns,

Fly your controlled flapping feathers to my

Ledge, make your way through deep waters,

Calling to you, enclosed with songs no woman could not hear,

Hundreds of years of years of lapping.

I wait for you,

Knowing you are very rare,

I have no arms to bear,

A presence only clear, for you, my dear.

If you can come, you will

And far further.

©  Susan Lynn Gesmer

Written first in 1983. Revised in 1988, for Kerry. “My brilliant beautiful lover dead at fifty: Could we have know what the future would bring?”

 

For desert tonight

Have a memory

A poem a day

To keep the doctor away.

 

Grand-ma,

We’re both older now

And I wonder

Do you still remember me?

 

Did those soft warm years

That we shared

Touch you?

Together

Paddling back and forth,

Forth and back,

To the pantry, to the

Big oak table, through

The musty halls of comfort.

 

I loved you, I love you so, as a girl

I’d almost forgotten

How close we were

 

I remembered membered remembered last night

As a woman

Struggling,

Many years after

Time turned bad and sour in the family

And our love ceased to be sweet.

 

The memory is vague

There are so many cobwebs to be lifted

And to think of how you are these days

 

Brings me futility and pain.

Last time I saw you I could hardly see

Through the tears in your eyes

I choose to feel instead another life far away.

 

A life that would have comforted

And nurtured you also

As it does your grand-daughter

If you’d only had the choice.

 

It’s too late now, it’s too late, your old

And wrinkled and they give

You drugs to destroy you

In your wisdom and beauty

 

In our moment of strength

They tie you down

 

To the chair we once

Played on together.

 

Your thoughts are scattered

And recently you’ve taken on the habit

Of suddenly screaming

“Oh God oh God oh God”.

 

The others turn away from you

I try to talk with you

To dull your pain and fear

I try to piece together your words

Each coming from a different decade of your life.

 

It almost seems

You were purposely leading me on

Giving me clues.

 

I’m alone tonight

As you are grand-ma

And I miss you more

Than you will ever know

 

You are my roots

You shared my struggles

To grow as I share yours now,

To die.

 

For desert tonight

Have a memory

A poem a day

To keep the doctor away.

 

A Poem A Day To Keep The Doctor Away

©Susan Lynn Gesmer, 1979-1980, Keene, NH

A peony, at first,

Although, past the stage of symbiotic stinging ants,

Who returned en masse, after,

Burnishing, a dying, flower.

 

When he left me so suddenly, the only choice I had was

To go back to the beginning,

To close my petals tight,

To reverse time, like one of those slow motion films of flowers opening,

Playing backward.

But, we can never go back in time in anything but our imaginations,

Can we.

 

I was, a magnificently opening blossom, one of the most stunning

Of all flowers,

Endlessly layered, radiating wanting, and

Rose rose rose were my still pre-menopausal lips.

But this was before, before, before

Tree-shadows-sweeping-tornado like destruction,

Hovering menacing green boughs arched over dark waters, I was

Caught unexpected, in a fierce storm,

Way, too far out on the water.

 

So, I did the sidestroke, the backstroke, the crawl,

I floated, trying not to fight the currents,

I did everything I could think of,

Everything learned so many decades ago, in that swimming pool,

In Brookline, in 1959, and

Everything learned since,

Everything, everything, every single thing.

 

I flung myself through raging waters.

Gray swirls reflecting the gait of the sky

Above me as I splashed, unwavering, straining to see the shore.

Where was the shore?

Where was the shore?

 

I was far out far out so far out past safety,

past past past I was so far past, I was propelled into the future

I was nowhere I had ever been before,

In this, lifetime.

 

While he lingered.

As he lingered from the beginning.

When not diving, deep deep deep,

Into my opening,

(I had never before let any man this close

But what can I say

I came to him as a blooming peony),

He jumped away, came close, jumped away, close, back again, away,

He was like a fish leaping out of the water for insects just above the surface

Jumping higher and higher

Until he was amphibious sprouting small legs,

A mudskipper, a lungfish, convergent evolution,

Forefins and skin that breathes.

 

When he followed me into deep swirling beautiful waters with the sun high above us,

At the same time the moon was rising

And the moon and stars visible in the sky

In the middle of the day, oh my God,

He was there but only for a moment.

How could anyone be

In the place that is the center of the universe

The entire cosmos

For only a moment?

 

Suddenly, in the middle of all of this

Appeared kayaks, green, blue and aquamarine.

Softly around me silent people paddled.

They were my only hope and so I reached out, arms raised, implored,

O please please pull me in, take-me-away,

Far away, from this first love of so many years, whose

Penis was soft as a rose but whose heart was encased

Beneath quills like those of a porcupine.

 

 

There was not a lot I could see, without my glasses,

Except the water

And the endless darkening sky.

 

The silent ghostly kayakers drifted past

Although I could hear their paddles moving through the water.

 

They stared through me,

Or was it me,

Through them?

 

I do not think they were from this world.

 

So, welcoming those tentative wings along my side as they unfolded,

Soft soft skin growing into feathers, neck collapsing, crown nape ear receding,

Pink soft mouth into slender hard beak almost the length of my body,

Two still lovely childless breasts miraculously free from surgical removal,

Merging into ribs, above a soft bird belly,

Long legs shrinking, femur, patella, becoming tail,

A rudder to help me balance and steer,

I rose with a skeleton even more porous than my human osteoporotic one.

Five toed arched feet with 24 bones and 33 joints into four tiny claws,

One human toe remaining, because of course I have become what I am,

A hummingbird.

Lastly, finally, my arms morph into wings,

940 bright radiant iridescent colored feathers,

And I fly away, leaving him,

This first man in so many decades,

This foundering flounder of a man,

Leaving him like the fish he was not.

 

Rising up from the water

Winging over ancient kayakers,

Toward the swimmer’s beach

So many years alone to come

So many years alone to come

A world of green green solitary beautiful forests.

Why?

Why?

 

Because,

It is much better to be a leaf hanging alone,

Than to be

With

Love

That is

Not.

 

© Susan Lynn Gesmer, Winter Soliloquy Seven Years Thereafter.

August 2009 – July 2016

A breeze bedazzling through the trees.

Waves gentle against the shore of a dark night.

A phoebe calling. A dog snapping her teeth.

Maple branches grow flush against the screen,

From two weeks of steamy rain.

Soft pine needles downy like, in the distance.

I am trying to pay closer attention to what is

Closer attention to the deep green moss

Growing on the thick tree bark.

Where did I get the impression trees were brown? Instead,

Decidedly, a hundred shades of green and gray.

@ Susan Lynn Gesmer, The Porch, Summer, 2005, Goshen, Massachusetts

The Ancestors

Line the hallway wall

Through the long entrance

Into my bedroom chamber,

Where once you pass them all,

A cherry sleigh bed

Covered in ochre down,

Sits before a wall of windows

Looking out onto the Highland Forest,

Landscape paintings, oranges,

Golds, greens, blues, browns and grays

Surround.

 

They stare back at me, always serious,

Garbed in clothing from 1904 to the 1940s,

Groups of them,

My grandparents and their sisters and brothers,

Young, lovely, women, handsome men,

Surrounding their parents and grandparents.

 

Then another photo,

Years later, faces beginning to wrinkle,

Dark man tailored suits

Even on the women.

 

I stuck a snapshot of us all

From ten years ago,

In the corner of one of the photographs,

The three famous children,

Not yet born,

Now old.

The young ones from then

Long dead. And now, as I record this poem,

As I read this poem into my tape recorder,

Ten more years later, all dead.

 

As the years passed

Wire framed glasses,

High-embroidered collars.

Broaches, time pieces and flowers

Pinned to corseted lace dresses, on the women

Turn to pearls and dark rimmed glasses,

Turn to blue jeans, turtlenecks,

Eddie Bauer and LL Bean shirts,

Delicate silk scarves on the old women,

And back to wire rim glasses.

Babies in my brother and cousin’s arms

Now teenagers. Now in their twenties,

Time is collapsing against itself,

Past present and future all

One.

My hair brown and thick and short,

Now gray and long,

Now brown and thick and short,

Now gray and long,

Now brown and long.

I wonder each night,

I wonder

I wonder

I wonder,

As I walk past my Ancestors, and I

Childless, who will look,

Who will look, one day, long from now,

Upon that once lovely women

In the purple silk shirt and gray wool vest,

As I do look upon, now look upon,

Katherine, Sarah, Lillian, Hannah, Rachael, and Rose.

As I do now look upon,

Rena, Ralph, Ruthie, Elaine, Bennett, and Stuart.

 

©  Susan Lynn Gesmer, Shabbat Song. The Ancestors. Written in 2006. Edited in 2016.

The night I decided there was no soul

Was like any other night,

Maybe darker, and in early December

Here in the hills, there was already

As much snow as the past two global warming

Winters combined.

And it was cold, in the low teens,

As it had been now for a dozen days,

But it was really just another ordinary night.

The moon was a sliver in the sky and stars sheathed

The night I concluded there was no soul,

That we were bodies, completely.

It was hardly an epiphany!

As I’d been debating this question for decades,

But it was shattering nonetheless,

The night I realized how truly mad

This mad fabrication, this imaginative fantasy of

The separation of body and soul

Body and mind

Body and spirit.

The myth…

One survived

Death,

That the body,

“The cathedral of the soul”

That the soul morphed! into something winged,

Or wise, glorious, or beautiful, but certainly

Above it all,

Whilst the body

Bloated and putrefied,

Dripped decaying under the earth.

 

© Susan Lynn Gesmer, The Night I Decided There Was No Soul, December 2007

Lydia Lydia, O Lydia, in your stories you were stripping yourself down, thin to begin with, slowly unloading a very heavy burden with in your craft.

111. Yes, I come from Lydia,

I come physically, away, from, Lydia,

But to what to what to what to what do I come,

What does it mean, to write,

What the hell does it mean, to write?

1V
Our stories are of living, it means simply living

All the while setting senses down with words widening

Making marking making marking whole

Telling truths, it means truth,

It means in Nazi concentration camps

They immediately killed

Anyone

Discover

With scraps of their own writing,

For this reason,

It means writing because you write

Could not stop,

Never.

It means with attention in-attention taking pencil taking Pen pen pencil in hand

Placing keys under fingers

Paper — white yellow green onionskin cream

It means making tangible for another

A cold shower or sweet, the taste of an orange.

It means listening listening listening to that voice

Those whispers no one else hears

Those shadows no one else sees,

It means

Listening listening listening,

To everything.

Then, it’s not about having time season reason license

Not a room of one’s own

Not even a space of one’s own

Sometimes just a box with holes for air,

A toilet seat,

A bathroom with a door.

It means being a writer,

Writing through it all,

Or not writing,

But coming back

Always back

To this first and forever lover

Who is always

Waiting

For us.

Being a writer means sanding like an intricate sculpture Shaping into words our living our lives it means impact It means having power power over what was before The unnamable, unspeakable.

It means work work work work creating a new a new

A new world, a new universe,

A forest from one seed

An ocean from one river

A continent from one mountain

It means chaos becomes light

It means being a writer

It means simply writing writing writing writing.

What Does It Mean To Write © Susan Lynn Gesmer, Written, early 1981, edited December 2015/November 2017.