Ah Elizabeth another year without you

Without your lovely grin, your ability to download photos at the speed of light, without your found images on the walls of the your room, without you carefully groomed fingernails and your ability to be friends with males.  You were  passionate about Harry Potter and the Golden Compass.  When you dove into a book you wouldn't come up for air until you had to eat or starve.  You let the book consume you as you consumed it. 

I loved reading on the porch with you toe to toe, you and me, lazing in the summertime, lost in our own thoughts, nobody breathing down our backs with some deadline.

You and I would sometimes walk along the railroad track to the one mile marker, then skid down the sooty bank to the river below where its clear shallow waters took us down stream and we could float on our backs and watch the birds.  Sometimes there would be an eagle, or the merganser ducks who swam in packs herding their little ones into the shallows where they could dive for minnows.

You were a great swimmer.  You were good company, funny and bright and stylish. 

Sometimes after the cat has eaten his fill he walks around howling.  I call this his postprandial howl.
I think that he is calling for you.  Can you hear him?  It is a soulful howl, and it says what I feel, left here to navigate without you.

Scooter, August 2010

Memory of Akumal

We swam to the open waters from the closed inlet, crowded with snorkelers. So many swimmers  seek the brilliant colored parrotfish, the blue tang, angelfish, sergeant majors, royal gammas, needlenose. We swam to the open water where I imagined I could see in the distance Captain Jack Aubrey's HMS Sophie, but looking straight down, there is a turtle, a big sea turtle, just galumphing along. I point, so that she will see it, but she already sees another and points for me to notice.

Elizabeth's Channel

When she

finally

discovered

the channel that

her daughter used

to swim
upstream

she felt as if she had joined her

and found a way of countering

death
throwing herself

into her daughter’s skin

or was it

her daughter in her skin

the two

of them

working

furiously

to beat back

the waters that must go down.

Sitting on the rocks at the falls

water gushing over her body—

it is good to be alive.

Sometimes when all three of them went to the river
and Richard fished, and Patty and Elizabeth swam
they were happy together, letting each other alone
yet staying together in an ideal place, with the rapids
not too fast, and the fish big enough to keep,
and when they grew hot they could cool off in the water.