of asking you not to let yourself fall
into the vacuum of grief, there’s life
dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want
to dream it too, *to let ourselves be taken by some nascent hope
born from wildest illusions, the ones that in our sadness
save us, save us.”
From Let It Go by Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas
Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander
I met my friend Logan in 4th or 5th grade. After we moved to Joseph, we didn’t see one another often -- we had no social network – but after high school, as I was just floating about, we ran into one another now and then. He wanted to be an entomologist and/or open a restaurant. I was getting ready to move to New Mexico. I never saw him after that. He was killed in Lewiston Idaho in 1990.
After Issac was born, I attended a mom and baby group with my friend CJ and her son, many of the women who attended were encouraged to by the man and woman who ran it, a husband-and-wife team who specialized in post-partum depression and psychosis. We went to have the babies see other babies.
A young woman showed up one day with her son, Logan, who had one tooth (my friend had a tooth that was angled differently), and his hair was spikey and dark. Of course, you can never mention a resemblance like that, but I liked knowing another Logan in the world. I thought about Logan this week while I was in Wallowa County, I was down at the city park in Enterprise, and we used to ride or bike down that way as kids. I wondered about Logan’s family, if his mom still lived there, I hope she knows people still think of him.
I get some comfort knowing that aside from a small family pod and a smaller circle of friends, there are people in the world who knew Issac and who will brush against memory and recall him in ways I won’t, as who he was away from us. Grief and sorrow and if-only will haunt us until they are mixed in our marrow and then we’ll carry it there. The world can't stop for us.
I wrote this poem earlier this month after being in Pendleton:
Pelicans swirl like dogwood petals over McCay Creek
light & shadow, binary yes & no in the sky.
This is how I knew summer had arrived in Klamath:
Ross geese, snow geese, Trumpeter swans,
red-winged blackbirds calling high & long.
Then pelicans, at last. Not in long skeins
that unzipped the sky above Kern’s Ranch
looking for small channels to fill with chatter
but circles of the great birds searching for a perfect
waterway to grace. And they did bring grace
when winter had been so long.
