Love is a nest full of hot feathers,
Splayed feet,
Wide-eyed possibility.

Before you know it
You are up there
On the edge
Of dried grasses, moss, feathers, and fur,
Spider silk, mud, saliva, twigs. You are
A Golden Plover nestled in lichen,
A Burrowing Sand Martin,
A White-breasted Nuthatch
Your head emerging boldly
From your tree cavity
Surveying the world.

You are a teeny being
Overflowing with enthusiasm,
Leaping about, twittering excitedly,
Standing on the heads of siblings
Competing for the first or best morsel
Dropped into your beak.

Until, one unexpected morning,
You decide to take that unbelievable leap.
Having never flown before but
With so many millennia of genetic sensibility,
You open
Those magical spectacular wings,
And let go.

May you make it through those first days
My beautiful one,
Not gobbled by another creature,
As you are crawling up the bark of a tall tree
Digging into the ground with your back to the sun,
Catching dragonflies midair.

May you wrestle yourself from near doom
My beautiful one
Soaring ever soaring
Higher and higher.

How many fluffy feathered ones
Leap off the edge of the only place they have ever known
Flying blindly into
Fields and forests
Of what?

What compels us out into the world
Beyond the self?
What madness,
What passion,
What hunger,
What hope,
What kind of faith?

What allows us,
All the while,
To maintain our innate knowing,
Even in light of
Our initial disbelief,
Over the utter and endless vastness
Of the sky?

© Susan Lynn Gesmer

There Is A Poem, Within

February 2015

Death came, for our fathers, first,

You and I, and then, our beautiful mothers,

Inside whose bodies we first lived, thrived,

Grew into softly cooing babies.

Intertwined roots, her and us, we can never fully unwind,

Could never imagine two entirely separate braids,

Hair woven together with so much more than DNA,

Even when the tree of her being is no more,

Even when we are no more,

Our roots are forever plaiting together

In ways we can no longer see with our eyes nor hear with our ears.

Death came, for our fathers, first,

And then our beautiful mothers,

My dear friend, as it will, one day,

Come for me, you, and for us all,

First a quiet whispering in the night,

A soft nudge like the paws of a kitten

Gently raised to your cheek,

Teeny sharp claws caustic for only a moment,

Quickly enough to put out of one’s mind,

Bury in the back of our dresser drawer,

With the clothes or jewels we are waiting to wear,

One day when the occasion presents itself.

Until, unexpectedly, death comes loudly

Screeching our names like

A Barred Owl in the night,

Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo,

Who cooks for you?

Who cooks for you-all?

And we,

What can we do to withstand this fact of our lives?

This inextricable mystery

This one-day we are here

And the next, we are no longer.

How do we survive these deaths,

Of those we hold most precious.

We must keep a space for each other,

A space in this world,

When the rains whip through our hair,

As the hair of those from whose bodies we came

Thinned more each month,

As their bellies and calves swelled with fluid

As icy penetrating fear blew through our hearts like those

Nor’easters, when you would stoke your stove full and

Place your mother before it.

I watch you now,

Continuing on with the necessary tasks

Of the living,

Hanging your laundry to dry on your line, in the summer breeze.

Picking vegetables from your gardens, garlic drying,

Laid out on the floor of your mudroom like

Little gravestones.

Driving down your road for your farm share each week,

Carefully preparing small meals for one,

Going to sleep early and sleeping through your mother’s hour of waking,

In the mornings.

Her bed sheets remain tightly tucked into the

Mattress where she slept all of the nights of her

Recent years with you, there,

In the home of her loving daughter, she spent her last days,

In the bed, in the room, in the house on the hill

In the rural country town in the foothills of the Berkshires,

And then lay breathing no more.

You, her dearest daughter

By her bedside,

Where she spent the last night in death,

Hoping to journey alongside

As far as we mortals are allowed,

Into the world of The Dead.

In that room there now sits a box of ashes

On a table by the window.

Oh, how much she loved sitting and looking out the many windows to the distant hills and closer gardens,

With your two cats coming and going.

In our lives we must make a sacred place together

Under the redwood trees,

Hummingbirds twittering.

I am not sure there is another way through this forest.

© Susan Lynn Gesmer

There Is Not Another Way Through This Forest

August 2014

Inhaling fertile smoke

Of remembrance

(How many cigarettes a day did we smoke then, my love?)

White painted clapboard

New Hampshire house

Up the stairs

I walked

 

She stole

Through the night

Without fright

For her children

Christmas lights

Off the common trees

Of that small town,

I laughed at her cunning

Her daughters

And her

Knowing he would be gone

No longer still in the “mental hospital”

She thrashed

At the constraints

On the wrist of her soul

Anticipating

My warmth

She sobbed

Me across the room

She shook

Cried out

Us never touching

The grief of her past

And I sat, unspeaking, so long ago now,

Watching

Its many faces.

 

I cannot honestly say I did not love her stories,

My beautiful friend The Outlaw, when

Drunk she drove

Police cars on the chase

Through red lights of a faraway city

 

I took each step with her even though

We never held each other through the night.

 

And then

That day

She didn’t come back

I gathered her most precious things

It was the first gathering of many to come,

Photographs,

Papers from her desk,

And waited

Only for her.

In the cold and bitter winds of winter,

She came

Into my three-roomed world

 

We slept together not touching through that night

When we woke she told me I was beautiful, and

 

As she was leaving

In that damn rabbit-furred coat I will never forget,

Wobbling on heels too high for hitchhiking,

I mean really leaving

Never to be seen again,

We embraced.

 

© Susan Lynn Gesmer

1978, Love Poem To Janet

February 1982

 

1.

For the seabirds

Of Spectacle Island, I watch

Fear come

With a shadow —

Seven foot wingspan,

White head, hooked yellow beak,

And 6-inch talons.

For us

On earth’s larger island

Fear haunts in many guises

Endlessly reinventing itself

For each of us

In the shadow of

Something long forgotten,

Imprinted in our genes, cautioned by our mother,

Remembered from

A story we once heard about what happened in this

Or another long-ago life,

To someone not even us

For us on earth’s island fear comes with a shadow

On an x-ray, a six-inch knife, an arm from the right,

A scream in the night.

2.

Wizened wings warp ragged rocks,

A mad flurry of filigreed feathers below, as

Fifty-one screaming gulls levitate.

One pissed-off Cerulean Warbler trilling in mad pursuit, altitude

Above, the back of Eagle.

© Susan Lynn Gesmer

Flying Above Eagle, Cape Rosier, Maine

2007

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orange yellowing multicolored graying feathered body.

Long curved beak meant for digging into earth and wood.

On concrete she fell,

Like the moon come down round and full.

Wings spread open,

This wild bird in the middle

Of the wild street.

Fear pulsating her tiny bird heart,

Cars speeding by

Right and left and what else am I to do,

Trembling, as I move between traffic,

Losing touch with my mortality.

 

She, quivering,

In terror of me, a comprehensible danger,

Now that I have come closer to her sudden accident,

Somehow gathers the strength

To drag herself toward

The direction I am not.

 

In this way I guide her,

Brown thrush eyes wide as a barred owl,

Into the underbrush.

 

Susan Lynn Gesmer

© On Concrete

1987-88

Montague, Massachusetts

 

The days are

Short as midgets

And you my bear

Have bedded down.

Your metabolism will slow

But your body temperature will remain

High enough for hovering over little ones

As they nestle into your fur

Your hot breath keeping them warm.

Neither food nor drink for such a long time,

Sun rising and setting upon your half-closed eyes

The lengthening days of your lingering hibernation.

Fattened, hungry, the patience of a deity.

You are my deity! And

With your better than believed vision

Many a night

You will see the moon bright

And shining through the branches.

Eight weeks from now

You, my mammalian kindred one,

Will give birth to naked cubs

The size of small squirrels

Who in the depth of the dark frigid dusk

Will suckle on your six hot nipples with

Pulsing humming contented pleasure. And

All will be,

As it should, be.

Dear Ursus,

Every year

I tussle with my inexplicable furlessness

My strange lack of fur,

                                                         Like you will scuffle

Come spring, with your demanding cubs

Who all winter you have kept warm within

Your legs and arms, high protective walls,

Layered,

With thick inviting fur.

Like a kid holding the string of a kite

Tempted by

The sky,

I do so long to go

Walking, serenely, down into the forest

Following your prints in the recent snow

And slither like a silent snake up to you,

Once arriving by your restful side

Bewailing moaning cooing soft squeals of deploring distress,

Hoping to fool you,

Black-furred white-crested dark-nosed pregnant sow

Into thinking I slipped out before your time.

Bright lights, this December,

Grate against my senses like sandpaper.

 My instinctual animal self lulled into winter-lethargy,

As I blow air from my mouth, clack my teeth, and paw at the ground.

© Susan Lynn Gesmer, Dear Ursus, 2014

Quiet death,

And I, sitting, by her initial disbelief

Blood death, dog death,

Her dog dead, by hunter’s shot

Here, so close to town,

He was swinging his rifle

Swinging it down

To level ground

Fawn terror,

Wild ducks in frantic flight.

Full of  life, Freckles

Dragging herself there

Falling, finally

Before her door,

Where inside we were

Engaged in rapport.

And she knew, my sister,

The second she saw her dog lying before her,

Her beloved dog would die that day,

In this tragic way.

With tender touches

To still warm face and fur

Blood clotting the underside

Where we could not easily see

This fact, the hunter’s act,

She sat, aching,

Tears streaming down her shaking

Sorrow.

Early evening finally falling

All shades of autumn leaves,

Mountains also behind the trees.

When I depart

Freckles, still,

In the same place she had fallen.

My sister,

 And her lover,

Across the drive

Digging purposefully, into earth, under once-green grasses,

With a tenderness seen, between,

Two beautiful women, together in life, side by side

And death not just dreamed.

© Susan Gesmer,

Around Us Was A Sharp Bright 6:00 October Light, 1981

You lying

On your back

On a cheap foam

Mattress, covered with

A ripped, loosely woven, blue cotton sheet.

Hard large pillows not right for your ancient curved spine.

“Broken hip”

They keep saying,

But really

The ghostly osteoporotic leg bone,

Far below your hip,

Snapped in half,

When you fell from your bed,

Your deaf husband calling for

You to come down and set the kitchen table.

He could not hear you,

In your ninety-first-year, in your soft

Seventy nine pound bird voice, yelling —

I am coming, coming, coming, COMING

As you scrambled to get off your bed during an afternoon nap

In a half-awake daze.

For one side of a century

You clung to a great happiness with our father, but for

Almost a decade now,

You have succumbed

Been subsumed in the

The grooves of a long tradition

Of wife as lover and servant.

It’s hard to know whether to be angry or sad,

To rage or cry, we fluctuate

My brother and I,

Between extremes,

Because, no doubt about it,

As our father tells it,

Life has given him the

Raw end of the deal

Pretty much for eighty years now.

But we are still so pissed, so incredibly pissed, he

So often calls for this woman,

This old old woman

And how when he does

He expects her to appear before him

Instantaneously,

As if she could fly down the stairs

Around the doorways

Fast as a Hummingbird.

“I don’t like being

Here, alone, at night”

My 91-year-old mother tells me,

From her bed, in this godforsaken place.

And who would?

Especially someone who’s never ever

Never

Never

Ever

In her whole life, ever,

Been alone.

First with extended family, parents and siblings, aunts and uncles,

Then nuclear, husband and two quick-witted penetrating

Unwieldy children of the 1960s.

After we left, decades of woven relations,

Pared away, finally, to just her and her husband.

But never alone.

My mother tells me,

“The woman who was here yesterday…”

A new caregiver we’ve hired to keep her

Company, to keep her from dragging herself

From her bed

Pulling her wheelchair behind her

Out into the hallway for one of one thousand

Possible reasons that might at any moment

Enter her post-surgically demented mind,

And breaking another bone –

“She has two puppies!”

Who, Susan?

Lucky Susan, I say,

And longingly imagine, just for a moment, soft small fluffy canine bodies

Tiny snouts, padded doggie-scented feet,

Pink tongues, small woofs, human cheek to thick furred bellies.

The television

Behind the curtain brings me back.

Someone has put on the television for the woman sharing my mother’s room.

Even though she is deaf.

What is it about the television in these places?

Paralyzed, unable to speak,

My mother’s roommate,

Sits in a chair in a black sequined pantsuit

Like some never before seen

Black glittering bird from the rain forest,

Or a startled Starling flying by outside

Mesmerized by the trees and clouds in the glass.

Her two daughters have been to visit each day

I have been here.

There is a heavily drawn circle on the calendar next to her chair,

She is leaving on the 21^st of January and they

Have big plans for this departure.

This woman who has been the recipient of a tragic gift,

Something, which dances around us all, an unexpected

Renegade blood clot, burst blood vessel,

Groans and moans regularly, not from pain, but from

A fundamental need to communicate.

I have responded to her requests for help

More than once,

Knowing

It could be me

It could be me

It could be me

It will be me

One day,

It will be.

Thinking of a photograph taken thirty years ago

I recently discovered, after my uncle died,

He and my mother are my age,

Tending to my grandmother,

An old woman,

As my mother is now.

It goes so fast

So fast

So fast

Fast

Fast

Fast.

I have no children, no daughters or sons.

It is not hard to imagine myself into some futuristic institution

Alone in the world.

So to my lucky old mother with so much love in her life, I say,

Life is hard, Mom, there are

Times when we have to muster

All our courage

And resolve,

And surely, for you, this time is now.

Please please please try not to worry, I say, addressing my mother’s maddening

Predilection for anxiety-based perseverance.

Digging into my Jew-Buddhist

Attempt at reassurance.

All the while thinking,

When it is my turn,

My turn

My turn

My turn

I will

Take my gun out of my closet, carefully load the copper bullets,

Walk out into the marshland behind my house, and pull the trigger.

An administrator in her outrageous stiletto heels

Clicks down the hallway,

The dark-skinned Caribbean

Women who wipe my mother’s ass

Tread quietly respectful

Underpaid and anguishing over siblings, cousins,

Friends and parents,

Buried beneath the rubble in a massive earthquake,

Yesterday,

In Haiti.

© Susan Gesmer, Mother

Velvety pink lupines in exquisite bloom this June

Yet overhung with weeds and

At first impression,

This place looks like

One of those old homesteads, silent cathedrals,

Walkers stumble upon

Deep in faraway forests.

The tops of yellow irises

Peak out like children between stage curtains.

Finally you notice perennial beds, an overgrown hole into a cellar,

Fieldstones in some formation

Before which grow

Huge peony buds, tall and lush from heavy spring rains, buds,

Encircled with ants

Above a bed

Of weeds, tall grasses,

Where salmon-colored tulips thrived only

A few weeks before.

I am sitting in the waiting room

Of a doctor’s office, again,

General Hospital on TV,

Four women watching.

I am in a corner, far away, behind the voices,

My eyes fall closed

Like the petals of tulips

Spent, fall to the ground.

It’s humid and raining again.

Traffic speeds by the open door.

© Susan Gesmer

At The Doctor’s Office