the last blue iris

  Santa Installation, somewhere in PDX I have spent a lot of Christmases alone, waking late in the morning after singing midnight services, walking the dogs through snowy trails, or doe-brown trails, making the batter for a coffee cake, listening to the previous year's Lessons and Carols at Westminster. Waiting for J. to come home. Two Christmases since he was born has he been with me--once in 2015, once in 2005 when he was only 6 months old. I have spent a lot of Christmases alone, but I have also had the grace of adopted chosen families who have taken me in Christmas eve, who've had me and J. over for Christmas dinner. This has been the hardest year since that first year I was alone and had no idea if the future existed, but I am not lonely. J. will be home after New Year's, his face flashing on my phone screen. We are all alone this year, though I am not lonely.  In 2007, I walked home after midnight service through Bronson park, through ankle-high snow, families strolli...

 I have been in Michigan for a week now, the longest stretch since I left in 2014. However, because: pandemic, I have seen no one. I have been to the store three times, I have gotten a COVID test from a mean nurse who chastened me you need to write down a local address  and when I told her I didn't have a local address (she was holding my driver's license after all) spit like we care what happens in orih-GON"  which made me burst into tears, which made her nice when she did the stupid test (my fifth?) and told me you did a really good job, sweetie, a really good job . I have, however, hiked and run 56.4 miles, have thought long and hard about an alternative life I could have had here, if I had been brave enough. This may be the last time I have this length of time alone. Maybe; who knows. I have listenend to YoYo Ma, taken my temperature at least 100 times (my basal temp is 96.8, my morning temp 97.8, my mid-morning temp 98.2, my evening temp 98.8 if you were wondering)....

I think you like to pile it on , my new therapist said last week. So what's the worst that can happen? You get COVID and you have to stay longer. So you'll get a place and you will stay.  I was curled in the armchair in my office, and wanted to throw my phone across the room. You seem to want to keep punishing yourself. I'm not saying this isn't hard. I'm not saying this is fair. But.  Believe me, I know that the worst case scenario is worse than that. I can imagine that in exquisite detail. I also know that it is almost impossible for me to imagine anything other than the worst case scenario. What if we are okay? Foredune trail If I am not punished, then who? My child? He is a remarkably normal 15 year old, making it through the pandemic with grace. ( At least now it isnt' just me who is isolated, who has to spend holidays away from friends , he tells me when we walk the dog). If I do not take this upon my body, then who else will? And if it is my fault, if I c...

  The chicken run is muddy, slick. Our days are small with light; the chickens have slowed their laying, and only one or two days a week do I have three eggs (one pink, one green, one brown) in the nest. The baby has started to grow her comb, has started perching on the feed bin outside my office window to peer at me while I attend Zoom meetings, or write faculty evaluations (YOU'RE ALL DOING FUCKING GREAT; ANYONE GIVING A SHITTY EVALUATION TO SOMEONE WHO IS TRYING RIGHT NOW IS AN ASSHOLE.)   In a few days, J. and I will board a plane and fly to the current epicenter of the pandemic so he can spend the week with his father. We have decided it is smarter and safer (what is safe? more and more friends who are being safe are being diagnosed with COVID19) for me to quarantine in an AirBnB rather than fly home and then fly back. R. and I have not been apart this long since we were dating and went a month at a time without seeing the other. We will be as safe as we can be: i will s...

The view from here: almost full moon, and in the middle, slightly to the left, the tip of Mt. Hood lit pink in sunset, Mt. Tabor (a shield volcano left over from the Boring Lava fields) sloping gently to the right.   It has been difficult to focus on anything. I've had a spate of good writing news: two poems accepted at Colorado Review, an essay at Heavy Feather ; 20 poems in this newest cycle published or yet to be published.  But the world (--election, supreme court, fires, hurricanes, COVID, continued extrajudicial murder of Black people, etc etc etc)--presses its heavy hand against my throat. Our throats. I have baked bread and cookies and cake and more bread and made chicken alfredo and pizza and beef stroganoff and manicotti and  and three of the four hens are laying and they've eaten the entire lawn and daily dig up the garlic beds. I am running more, upping my milage and listening to podcasts about cults (the latest is about NXIVM) and I'm singing again, though on...

Sky over the neighborhood after days of rain Rabbit man in neighbor's yard Boy and dog  Pink eggs at top and bottom from Athena, the bully; double-yolker in the middle from Lilac the barred rock, tiny green egg from Artemis The weather has turned toward autumn,  mornings chilly and damp, fog shouldering over Mt. Tabor. The rains have begun, or are almost begun in earnest: leaves just starting to turn, moss and lichens greening, apples and pears softening in yards on our walk, a few lazy yellow jackets on the sodden fruit. We have been to the orchards, have baked apple pie and apple cake and apple cobbler. J. asked for a change, so yesterday I made chocolate chip cookies, long-rise bread, manicotti. We have bags of apples in the kitchen nook. J. and I have also been to Sauvie Island, which he declared he had never been to, though when we drove over the bridge and past the farms we both realized we'd gone last year in search of pumpkins but of course, had gone too late. Last wee...

It’s not just the pandemic, not just that I have been working from home for seven months, that I haven’t seen my friends or anyone outside of my family and a slew of essential workers. This is part of it, but not all.   My world has shrunk to the size of a pin. A phrase that has its origins in hyper-specific arguments about theology and angelism; or, a modern idea to prove the inanity of academic arguments. But the fact remains-for some of us, the world has become incredibly small. It is a world that my mother, that my grandmothers, would likely recognize: a world the size of the domestic sphere, the household, the family. This yard, to the chain-linked perimeter of our little house, the neighborhood—the fancy rich western side, the working class eastern side. Each side extends a half mile, our house the center.   I still work—the thing which I believed made me meaningful in the World-writ-large, but I do not exist as a Writer, or Singer anymore, as most of us don’t exist as t...

I thought when i began writing this that we would have a few days of scary-ish weather, a little thrill, then we'd continue on with this fucked up September and that would be that.   This has been a remarkably cool summer, it's nice there have been no fires. It seemed the one blessing in the most difficult of years. But.  Monday, September 7th Three years ago, the skies were orange and the sun was blood red and ash rained onto our cars, and the air was so thick with smoke at work that you couldn't see from one end of campus to the other. I haven't been to campus since March 11th, though when I went to the country feed store in July to get Duck, the blue Andalusian, I drove past it and the weeds were high and the parking lots empty. Six months on, and who knows how long to go. I have told my faculty to prepare not only for fall quarter to be online, but winter too. I will be surprised if we are all back in the spring. I am lucky this way; so many of my friends work for c...