Today is the anniversary of another trip around the sun for the woman I love more than any other.
Happy Birthday to my mother, Elise
who drew me a picture of the female reproductive system
and labeled the parts
and explained the process
of *******
before my body ever had a chance to frighten me
who taught me the word
******
and taught me that there was nothing silly, or shameful, or icky
about the word
or having one.
who taught me
that people are inherently the same
and humans are valuable
and the meaning of the word
humanity
and the value of justice
and the meaning of the word
"injustice"
and consistently confronted it
often uncomfortably
but un-apologetically
whenever we found ourselves in its presence
Who responded to compliments
about my appearance as a child
with humble disinterested grace
and taught me with intention
in everything she said and did
that what is valuable about me
is my mind
and my heart
kindness
spirit
ethics
righteousness
some may say too much of the latter
who taught me about Janis, and Sylvia, and Frida
and Roe v Wade
and punctuation and articulation and diction
and the Serenity Prayer, and that Galway Kinnel poem about what is still possible...
I love you Mom. I could go on forever. My love and my gratitude for you - and what you have gifted and instilled in me - is bigger than the universe and eternity and possibility.
So glad you are with the sweetest child in the whole wide world this evening.
Loving and sending you love and bright light so hard.


Micah Haverly  2015

Here I have heard the terrible chaste snorting o hogs trying to re-enter the underearth.


Here I came into the curve too fast, on ice, and being new to these winters, touching the brake and sailed into the pasture.


Here I stopped the car and snoozed while two small children crawled all over me.


Here I reread Moby **** (skimming big chunks, even though to me it is the greatest of all novels) in a single day, while Fergus fished.


Here I abandoned the car because of a clonk in the motor and hitchhiked (which in those days in Vermont meant walking the whole way with a limp) all the way to a garage where I passed the afternoon with ex-loggers who had stopped by to oil the joints of their artificial limbs.


Here a barn burned down to the snow. "Friction," one of the ex-loggers said. "Friction?" "Yup, the mortgage, rubbing against the insurance policy."


Here I went eighty but was in no danger of arrest, for I was "blessed speeding" - trying to get home in time to see my children before they slept.


Here I bought speckled brown eggs with bits of straw ******* to them.


Here I brought home in the back seat two piglets who rummaged inside the burlap sack like pregnancy itself.


Here I heard on the car radio Handel's concerto for harp and lute for the second time in my life, which Ines played to me the first time, making me want to drive after it and hear it forever.


Here I hurt with mortal thoughts and almost recovered.


Here I sat on a boulder by the winter-steaming river and put my head in my hands nd considered time - which is next to nothing, merely what vanishes, and yet can make one's elbows nearly pierce one's thighs.


Here I forgot how to sing in the old way and listened to frogs at dusk make their more angelic croaking.


Here the local fortune teller took my hand and said, "What is still possible is inspired work, faithfulness to a few, and a last love, which, being last, will be like looking up and seeing the parachute dissolving in a shower of gold."


Here is the chimney standing up by itself and falling down, which tells you you approach the end of the road between here and there.


Here I arrive there.


Here I must turn around and go back and on the way back look carefully to left and to right.


For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there - which the young know are infinite and all others know are not - get used up, that's it.


(c) Galway Kinnell, The Past

The weight of everything shapes the early morning,

the quick early morning,

the heavy plum purple time

between the 3 and the 5.


It's then begins the heaviest of hours

The time when you come calling

when the weight of you bangs at the door, when you lean back and watch the chimney smoke and wonder ...


let me in you say, let me in....

let me back in you murmur, in you mutter..

In you sob.

But I don't.....the weight of you


and the weight of everything

still pushes and piles against the entries

only mist and fog and crimson tears can cross these thresholds,

only they may worry the  sills.


i let nothing in...you are not allowed,

the red of you, the danger of you ,

the weight of you....

pushes the Dawn

you know i love you dearly and will wait for you to come forever  

and if you don't come then I will wait for you one day more...

until then i will hold you in my mind and talk with you like we used to do  

before the curtains closed

then I will go over and over again and again

that first time you came into my life and

i'll remember

how the childlike sweetness of you washed over me

and how my heart ached
that you were not mine.....