"A wide-bosomed teacher took me in."
May you be loved with thoughtful actions.
Colored engraving frontispiece for a New York 1846 edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Public Domain
Curriculum Vitae
by Lisel Mueller
1992
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an old man's loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller, published by Louisiana State University Press, 1996.
Creative Invitation
The Pink Moon gets its name from wildflowers that bloom in April. If you take a night walk, you might see evening primroses, satiny pink and light as a butterfly.
My mother has come to live with me as she recouperates from injuries. Today, a friend came to the house and put together a hefty white metal tub chair with a seat that rotates 360 degrees. It attaches to the side of the bathtub and will allow unstable legs and arms to have shower freedom.
Another friend ordered and bought the chair for us. Everything that comes in the mail comes in a cardboard box. My friend flattened and folded a big pile of our boxes in my kitchen and stacked them in the empty aluminum planters in the yard. These planters are cattle watering troughs that another friend rescued from a demolition site. I’ll cover the cardboard boxes with soil and start my mother’s raised Texas garden.
Here is your creative invitation: Number a page from one to six. Notice six kind things that friends have done for you. Note down or sketch six ways that others have contributed to your wholeness, shared your burdens, doubled the love.
Behold the tub swivel chair in the Mamie Pink bathroom ~
Thank you for this morning nourishment and reminder of the power of kindness and memory.