the last blue iris

A week ago, while deep in the brambles of working on some new poems, I remembered a journal my Aunt J had given me when J was born--dark blue, puffy silver stars, fancy thick paper. My poems are stretching into new territory, and I remembered this journal as only having one entry, roughly written a month or so after J was born, and a letter to my new child wherein I promised to see him as a person, not as an extension of myself. I thought the rest of the journal was blank--the paper was too thick, I didn't think I wrote at all for the first few years of J's life, etc. The journal was my on bookshelf, along all of the other journals I've kept: the spiral bound expensive journals from college, the leather-bound, Celtic-knot journal my first best friend Acorn gave me (and my two dogs-ago dog chewed), the multiple composition journals I have used as writing notebooks since. I pulled it off the shelf, expecting that one epistle, and instead found multiple entries in 2005--the le...

 One year ago tomorrow, I called into work with a low-grade fever, cough, splitting headache. The headlines were about the shutdown in Italy ( can you believe it? that must be so weird!).   Every time I went to the bathroom, I counted to 25 while washing my hands. I coughed into my elbow. A few weeks before, I'd run my second race of the season and actually won my age division in the 5K, something I had never done before. I had never run that particular race before, but thought: well, I've been doing a lot of speed work, let's see how that plays out if I run full out? Apparently, it worked out well. So I was looking forward to my annual 5 miler for St. Patrick's Day, then a 10K near Easter, then I would start training for my favorite half marathon in July.  Spring break was approaching and I knew my boy and I had to travel.  The first COVID case was confirmed in Oregon, in the town where I'd won my race.  Monday, I told another colleague who I knew always r...

 The closer it gets to a year, the-- what. Emptier, more wordless, more-- I got my hair cut today and could barely hold a conversation with my hairdresser, one of the smartest and most interesting people I have met in Portland. I felt-- tongue-tied, floaty, out of my body. In her yard, peacocks. Her cat as big as a small dog. Her dog a sausage with satellite dish ears. J. was with me and I had a hard time talking as we drove home.  We were out of the house, for a few minutes. Further away from home than we've been since we got back from Michigan. It was the first non-family, non-zoom-work/opera board/therapist interaction I've had. the first in-person interaction. I still feel like I'm the tin man, like I no longer know how to move in the world. It's almost spring here--song sparrows are singing, towhees and jays and juncos are making their nests and little clouds of lesser goldfinches swoop over the earth. The sweetbox has bloomed, the edgeworthia, now comes the daphne...