the last blue iris

Some nights--oh, most nights if I'm honest--I hold whole poems or essays in my head but cannot bring myself to write them. Here, or in a draft, or in my little composition notebook. I feel like I haven't written in months, feel utterly estranged from that part of my life. Am I writer? who is she? I drive through  the city on the way to rehearsal, rain pummeling my windshield, downtown Portland flickering across the river. I sing, I put on my costume, I come home exhausted, unable to sleep. J. continues to figure out his young-adult life. I drive through the wet city, uncertain where to turn and on the wrong bridge. Is the Steel  Bridge north or south of the Burnside Bridge? Does Naito Parkway go all the way up or? Am I in the bike lane or am I in the right lane? I read my tarot. I listen to a colleague talk about another colleague's recovery from COVID--a miracle. I tear up as she explains it. Am I an atheist? Do I believe in any god? I  see every fellow Leftist take a si...

It has been a difficult autumn, full of unbloggable things that aren't my story to tell. And there are things in the world that are unbearable. But there has also been beauty. I run through rain, and then unexpected golden afternoons. My boy brings me and his camera to the little mountain, to the woods, to the Rose Test Garden and the old money neighbhorhoods around Washington Park. We walk, we cry, we talk. I have never been prouder of him, nor more heartsick.  I wake up most nights drenched in sweat; J.'s cat has taken to meowling loudly while she brings his discarded  socks down the stairs, or dirty laundry up from the basement--until now, she's been mostly silent for the first 13 years of her life. She yowls and then drops the sock beneath the Chinese cabinet in the living room. When J. is here, she wraps herself around his legs. I spend my days at work, then at rehearsal for the opera; this week, I started having double rehearsals for the opera and for the chamber choi...