R.I.P. “Rabbit” with Love, Mouse
My friend
My friend with cancer
My friend
My friend who had chemo
Three runs of chemo
Radiation
Two surgeries
My friend who was cured
Whose cancer had gone
My friend who was cured
Who wanted to write a book
Who wrote to me often
Who listened to me with Heart
My friend
Where did he go?
Why did he die?
Why when he was starting anew
With his wife who stood by him
Helped him when he was sick
Why did he die?
I want to know
Where did he go?
I want to know if the chemo
Killed him
Chemo
It did not help my father,
My mother, my brother
My best friend
I thought I was wrong
I thought this time it helped my friend
Yes, it helped him alright
It killed him!
Why did he have to die?
Why?
My friend, “Rabbit,” Rest in Peace
Love forever, Mouse
Death of Fear and the Beauty of Death
Tears
over fears
of what’s to come
Husband such a
precious soul…
Stay in the present
Enjoy every moment
of together
It is fleeting…
Bipolar mind
medications
fight living
in the present
So unZen
Why can’t I
just be
like before
breakdown and
before medications
Why can’t I
be jolly with he
whom I worship
Why the constant
chatter of
loud thoughts
Would that I could
go with him
when it comes time
And if not
hope that I can
help with his
last breath
Secretly
I want to
be the first
to go
quite selfishly
He who cared
for so many
deserves that I
care from me
for him
and more
Would that
each moment
were not filled
with looking
at Illness
Old age
and Death
and the fragility
Of having a body.
Life Eternal
On this sad day
13 years ago
unspeakable things happened
to uncountable thousands
we have gone on
aching for those lost
Let us affirm life today
and always
By going to the One within
Overloaded Circuits: a Poem for World Bipolar Day, March 30, 2014
I’m in somnia
with jackhammer brain
a buzzing mind
a humming with emotions
thoughts and pictures
memories of joys
lost to death
spirits close to my heart
seemingly worlds away
guilt, loss and happiness
sickness and death
as well as
breathtaking beauty
a bedfellow with
gnawing worries
and gnashing nerves
fleeting images from films and
music playing at high speed
in the library of my mind
voices of today, yesterday and
fears of tomorrow
vying for an ear
asking me to listen
to them all
all at once
a cacophony of sounds
in the humming silence
of the specter-filled
haunting darkness
with fearsome death dangling
its loathsome threats
before my darting eyes
afraid not for myself
but of losing him
as he lies beside me
breathing noises
breeding worry, sorry
dashing thoughts of love, passion, doubts
a scarily-still lump beside
insomniac-hyper-racing-mind
manic me
finally arising out of
maudlin months
of dismal darkness
and deep, dark despair
when death smelled sweet to me
*
I get out of bed
to lay my face
upon the windowsill
to gaze at the mystery sky
full of twinkling stars
glittering to the rhythms
of the pulsing universe
my only hope for some
semblance of somnolence
my only chance for peace.
For info on my Bipolar memoir, please see: http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html
Cowboys and the “Dallas Buyer’s Club”
An Apparition
Here one second,
the next, gone,
with traces only in our hearts.
The ephemeral nature
of all life.
Our loved ones,
people and creatures,
here with us
for a pause in eternity
and gone for seeming eons.
*
It is as the Hindus say
all “Maya,”
a dream of life,
an apparition,
some form of us
awakens one day
somewhere
we know not
when or where or how
right now.
An Insecure Security
Gemutlichkeit* of
a rainy October morning
dry chilly warmth
in our little barn
*
downstairs
you perusing the paper
upstairs
me pumping poetry
*
rain tip-toeing
on the metal roof
a tymphanic symphony
outside the window
a masterpiece of color
yellow walnut leaves
and red sugar maple
the steady drip-drop of water
*
what bliss is this
precious moments of Now
a heavenly haven
from a frightening, tipsy-turvy world
*
I wish to always be
in your aura of calm
and the beauteous bounty of Nature
but
for sure
death will come
*
please take us together
and
find us in each other’s arms
*
blessed bliss
pure peace
and
true security
the everlasting Now
only exist
in the presence of God.
*German word meaning “coziness”.
Stages of Being
Beauty in Life
September 1
In denial
Death in Life
October 1
Forboding
Beauty in Death
November 1
Acceptance
Afterlife
December 1
SILENCE
Just Renters
The house that we think of as “our” house does not belong to us. Not because we are still paying the mortgage on it. Not because it, like so many others, is in foreclosure. No, though it is still “our” house, we are just renters.
This becomes evident one morning while sitting in a moment of calm before the day has begun, watching the bird feeder which my husband is lovingly filling. He has dumped out the seeds too big to fit through the wire mesh of the feeder. About 10 little birds, sparrows and juncos and sometimes a dashing male cardinal, are feeding on the seeds on the leaf-covered ground. They are not scared off by the lone squirrel who comes to eat the peanuts from the mix. Larger birds flock to the now-full feeder. The largest birds, too big to land on the feeder, sometime take over the small bird territory, eating seeds on the ground.
Rain is falling as we prepare to go to work, cleaning up the kitchen and locking up the house. The birds fly around in my mind. So vulnerable they seem yet so brave, so tiny yet enormous in their freedom to take to the air. I want to hold them in my hand and stroke their soft, downy feathers, give them love. But truth is, this is purely a selfish wish on my part for they don’t need my love. They don’t really even need the bird seed my husband religiously puts in the feeder. There are bushes out back with berries which they love. It is we who need them, to make us feel happy, to make us feel loving, to make us feel alive and connected to something larger than ourselves.
As we pull out of the driveway I take another lingering look at the birds in the brightening light. And then it hits me. They get to stay there all day as we drive off through the rain to our respective jobs in the cement jungle of a nearby city. We drive past horses, grazing in a neighboring meadow. They get to stay home, too. Often I make an effort to remember the birds and the squirrels and the horses to bring calm to a fraught work day. Yet I usually get so caught up in my frenetic, little life that I forget to think of them. Or if I manage to conjure them up, the image of them in my mind is thin, pale and lacking in substance.
I imagine the animals laughing at us as we have to drive off to go to work. Our house belongs to THEM. Sometimes they even invade our living quarters. When we first bought the house, it had 50 or so little brown bats in the attic who would occasionally fly around the bedroom at night. One year we had a pair of squirrels. We even had the company of a milk snake one afternoon. And every fall as the weather turns frigid, the field mice run in.
A little more thought on the subject reveals to me that in actuality we own nothing. Not our house, our spouse, our children, our pets, nor even the body we inhabit. All of these things are on loan to us, rented to us if you will, by the Maker of the sun and the moon and the stars. Such a wealth of beauteous bounty is there for us, ours to enjoy for the mere act of attention. The trees, the summer breeze, the blanket of snow in winter, the flowers of summer, the butterflies, the deer who eat our lilies, the possums and ground-hogs, the ever-changing species of birds, the occasional coyote and the thousands, if not millions, of insects underfoot in a terrestrial universe. And the universe above our heads with the planets, the sun, the moon and its trillions, gazillions of stars and whispers of other universes beyond what we can see. And yet we are so caught up in the dramas of our mundane lives that we fail to duly honor the ever-present gifts except in periodic snatches, when we turn our attention outside ourselves and our little lives. We may pay a sum to rent a piece of the earth but that piece contains a seemingly infinite multitude of gifts given just for the taking. Or rather, I should say, for the renting.
September Mind
September sunlight dances on drying leaves, sparkling like diamonds against a flowing stream, an azure sky. The plants of summer are dying. Flowers that have given such joy all summer long are now spurned by us as they shrivel into the paradoxical beauty of old age. The sun burns lightly on summer-drenched skin as clouds intrude intermittently into the almost- Autumn interlude– a gentle foretaste of the cold to come. The last butterflies of summer flit among the blossoming Goldenrod and browning Joe Pie Weed.
The beauty of Fall is the beauty of a dying season. It is the season of death– an alternative to the dew-like bloom of youth in Spring.
When I was very young, I felt death in nature. I could feel what it must feel like to be a tree or a flower—to just “be”—the Buddhist dictum which I cannot now master. In my late twenties, my mind broke into smithereens like shattered glass, and I had a choice to make between going on psych meds or going to hospital. I chose the former and have lived some 40 years more with that choice. I will not say it was a happy choice, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, because I have become driven into a fury of manic activity and self-seeking in stark contrast to the just “being” of my early youth. The psych meds have dispelled my “egolessness” which, in turn, makes me more able to “function”– at a price. For I no longer feel the waves of peace lapping at the shores of my mind and my religious feelings have, comparatively speaking, shriveled up like the summer flowers in the Fall. “It’s always a trade-off” I am told over and over again. My doc told me once that I am one of the lucky ones because for some people the meds don’t work at all. That shut me up and those words periodically pump gratitude into my system. I have remained med-compliant mainly because the meds have kept me out of hospital, DO allow me to function, and, most importantly, I have discovered that being able to function means allowing me to love.
And although more self-seeking, paradoxically this med-induced functionality allows me to give back to the world. My gift is to describe the “just- being” in nature that was imprinted indelibly on my mind when I was young. Death seemed beautiful to me then, a state of simply being at one with the soul of nature. Now I confess to a fear of dying, rather than a fear of death, but most of all, a fear of loss of the love of my life. For we are in the September of our lives and all is intensified now that we are more aware of our finiteness. Truth be told this was always potentially the case, but we lived, like most youth, in the inevitable delusion of immortality.
So I function now at the cost of loss of my revered altered states of consciousness. Perhaps I am in September mind, channeling words and images of the beauty of nature that flooded me long ago are a mere trickle now, as my time to “just be,” once more for this time round, approaches.
Abandonata
Abandoned by life
choked by overgrowth of unkempt green
once upon a time
breathing, seething with energy
steaming with the hot breath of cattle
teaming with the tenuous tenure of life
*
Your body long gone
your loving heart now ashes
your caring now a memory
which nothing can erase
and time cannot erode.
*
How I long for thee
though a mere thin veil
separates your spirit from me
small comfort
when I miss thee mightily.
“Life Goes On”
“Life Goes On”
*
That’s what Dad always said,
Remember, Tony?
My dear swarthy brother,
dark of skin,
warm of heart,
we shared the same hazel eyes,
a mix of Mom’s Sicilian brown
and Dad’s brilliant blue.
We lived separate lives,
you in Michigan,
me in New York,
you with three adopted children,
me, childless with Ko-ko and Tom.
You weren’t supposed to DIE!
You and I were to be
fellow way-farers
on the road through life.
We were to live parallel lives
and you were supposed to die
when you were old and feeble,
not middle-aged,
in a tortured death!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
*
“Life goes on.”
*
Today I light a candle
on my altar to you and Mom and Dad
and send you Reiki
like I did while you fought for your life
for two years
after a prognosis of two months.
My heart aches
on this second anniversary
of your death.
*
“Life goes on.”
*
Your wife, your children, and I
cry out for you
but you have moved on to some higher form.
You paid your karmic dues,
with your diagnosis, cancer.
Long before,
you always told me
not to worry,
that you’d live long because
only the good die young.
But you were too good
and you died far too young
and I live on in my little, reclusive life,
Ko-ko no longer here,
just me and Tom.
I should have been the one to go
but the good die young.
*
“And life goes on.”
Dropping Dead
Jack Kornfield reads a poem on the finiteness of life while talking about meditation practice (3:26 min.)
Oh Dying Lily
Oh, Lily
in the valley
of despair,
the devil’s lair,
thou seemeth to be shy
with your glossy, glassy tears.
One day we all must die
and we all have fulsome fears
of dying.
It is not
for lack of trying
your life to live;
it is not from sins of lying
or reluctance to give.
You lived your life purely,
always kneeling demurely,
and though your petals turn to crepe
your form still has a humble drape,
still praising He who made you
in your last living days
and inspiring us to follow suit
in your reverent ways.
Blossoms of Heartbreak
Teardrops/raindrops
upon the nascent leaves
of spring weeds in the marsh
a chance april shower
the brimming overflow
falling from red, watery eyes
Dreadful is death
most of all in spring
our Dearest dying amid booming, blooming life
and Spring sprinkling
blossoms of heartbreak
on our final goodbye.
The Line is Dead
She’s finally gone
after fighting for life for
6 months of painful half-life
and multiple causes of death.
*
Gone is my last link
with Grandma and Grandpa
and happy days in Larchmont,
Grandpa playing the mandolin,
me dancing,
and Grandma cooking
unimaginable treats.
Happy days in Larchmont,
the Larchmont one weekend
Aunt Nina and I revisited
with our respective spouses
and cried tears of nostalgia.
*
Aunt Nina died Saturday,
the last of the LaMannas,
the aunt who knit the best-ever
Christmas stockings for
my brother and sister and me
which I still drag out every year.
The aunt who let me
play with her jewelry
in her blue bedroom
in Larchmont
with light that slid in
through the venetian blinds
and danced a jitterbug
atop Renoir prints,
with twin beds
covered in puff-ball bed spreads,
kept so clean by Grandma and
Aunt Nina wanting to sleep
and me pestering her to play.
*
Aunt Nina took me home once by taxi,
back to the city I hated
when I was sick.
She nursed me on the ride
And said “hang in there”
and held my hand
as I said to her a month ago
as she lay shriveled into a ghost
of her former self.
*
Gone are the days
of spaghetti and meatballs,
Arancini and sugar cookies,
wine and mandolin,
chewing gum in the desk,
watching at the windows
with Grandpa, as evening
fell all around.
Days of Big Grandma Castiglione
in her light-filled, white-tiled,
lace-curtained, one-room apartment,
with holy water font
and the smell of steam
in the yellow kitchen.
*
Gone are the days of
visiting Nina as she raised
her two “adopted angels”
as they were called,
and, who, with my uncle, she crafted
into two magnificent children
and later had four grandchildren
who adored them both.
Larchmont repeated.
*
Gone are the days of
visiting Aunt Nina in Kent, CT
and later in Danbury,
now much older and
with my husband whom
Aunt Nina and Uncle Ray
welcomed with open arms
and grew to love,
my husband of almost 24 years
who never knew this love as a child
and so does not know its loss.
*
Gone are the days
of a phone call
every few weeks,
Aunt Nina always seeming
happy to hear my voice as
she exclaimed “Ellen!”
as we talked about problems:
difficulties in the best of marriages
the downhill spiral of my Mom
after Dad died,
Nina giving support while
my husband and I cared for Mom
during her difficult path to death,
Aunt Nina listening to me recount
the downhill spiral of my brother
as he spent 3 years
dying of lung cancer.
And we talked of our
problems with anxiety
and later of her sorrow and fears
as her friends were dying
and she was fighting Parkinson’s,
bravely shouldering through every day.
*
Gone are the days
of pasta salads and olives
and prosciutto and provolone
as Aunt Nina and Uncle Ray
visited our little barn upstate,
where we laughed and laughed
in the Memorial Days sunshine.
*
Gone gone gone
my Italian heritage,
the last of my blood elders.
Aunt Nina was there
For 63 years,
All of my life
and all I can do
is cry
and try
to imitate
her admirable character.
For the Lord giveth and
the Lord taketh away
but why such pain
when he taketh away?
*
Because love grew
year by year
visit by visit
phone call by phone call.
I did thank her,
before the end began,
in a foresightful note,
telling how great an aunt she was.
God put the thought in my head,
and for that I am grateful,
for now it is too late
for now the line is dead.
That Extra Squeeze
?
Hold your dear ones a little closer today
Give them an extra squeeze as you say goodbye
*
Rejoice in making their breakfasts
and doing their dishes
and mending their socks
or working in a job you hate
to keep them
housed, clothed and fed
For the work you do means
they are still alive
*
The horror of terror
has struck again
on our soil
What is de rigeur
in other countries
has happened here
and shaken us
out of our complacency
Terror “there”
is now terror “here”
*
Hold your dear ones a little closer today
Give them an extra squeeze as you say goodbye
For after yesterday
many cannot
*
And pray for the first responders
and their families
the unhailed heroes of our land
who face bad odds everyday
*
Hold your dear ones a little closer today
Give them your blessing as you say goodbye
For each goodbye could be the last
has always been true
but terrorism has taken that truth
and shoved it in your face
*
Hold your dear ones a little closer today
