Wednesday Vignette:

There are days I’ve carried like candles
to light the rest of my life, and I will not
let the new days snuff them out, though
the new days are trying. Watch me hold
a decade-ago snow night, moon-bright
and silent, right next to my hammering rage.

(from Poem for Right Now, by Catherine Pierce)

No snow, no evening, no moon-bright (but silent); yet I hold this, over a decade ago, February 2007, against all that threatens now: a visit with my father just diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him three years later (“Is there anything you want to ask me?” as we walked among smiling orange trees), my sister undergoing an excruciating pacemaker insertion error hundreds of miles away, screaming on the phone as they urgently stick something into her lung from outside her skin, and me losing cell coverage on a spit of land near my father’s house in Florida, benign vultures everywhere, the whole world shaking, then coming to rest, and yet, soft, no rage, no real fear, just connection, just knowing what matters. I carry this day like a candle, the rest of my life.

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