I’m touched by my readers’ response to my poem Ode to Memory, and the what and how poems convey meaning, conjuring new ideas, relationships, old and new, a “carving out of  memory,” for one, “with the intensity and wonder of life itself,” for another. How mine could take one to Russia in thought, which then took me there as well, to Anna Akhmatova, cult figure of the literary scene in 20th century St Petersburg, to a spoiled morning rethinking the language of stories and who we are.

Of reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as I did the year I moved to Oakland–the complexities of family and matters of the heart. And to August: Osage County, an intense, sadly-funny portrayal of family dysfunction, a Tony award winning play at the Curran in SF. Let’s say we sat in disbelief at its stormy truths–where did we fit in all of this we asked ourselves (I saw it with my cousin)– but couldn’t help laughing, if not painfully, along with the crowd.

I was attempting to post a poem in pictures, a visual sense of who I am, what I live with, my understanding the nature of things–that which I love, love, like Neruda, with a craziness and desire for what those things evoke, the movement and shape of a hand, disparity between feeling and matter; the sound and breath of a tree laced with symbols, sweetly muttering. “The infinitely/small/thimbles/spurs/plates/and flower vases”  upon “whose feathers/love has scattered” the pause of time.

To see myself in my 2 grandmothers–as in portraits here–could be its own story, drawn from different lineages, arriving somewhere in the middle, in the vast plain that is my life. All in the becoming of who we are, what we make of ourselves. As in my bowl of lemons in a blue bowl, likening them to Miller’s home, where once I lived. His broad, heavy table, thick and worn like builder’s hands, still against lime-green windows framing an avocado tree/overcoming water where a “sea of clouds floating listlessly above the ocean” drew its own associations. Still does, I can only presume. Where the “blue of the sea rivals the blue of the sky.” Where I first began to write. Lay down my own thorny thoughts. Eat. Cry. Love. Run a brush over paper. And so it was, and so here I am. Books, notations, paintings, beautiful plums for jam.