Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I have a friend who recently lost her father. After a long time of suffering and hospice care, the funeral marked an end to an arduous few years of intense emotions. She visited me the day after her father’s funeral. When she arrived at my front door, she was somehow luminous. A weight lifted off her shoulders, you could see a new light behind her eyes, eyes that were clear from crying and bright with grief. She was seeing symbols everywhere. Deer off the side of the road, a certain phase of the moon, the color purple showing up everywhere in the form of lilacs or blue moon wisteria.

As we talked she kept picking up my dog and holding her and taking photos of her and I was thinking about how quickly we become tender to the world when grief has opened us up. I remember once, telling my friend Jen after my own grief, that I was Napoleon Blown Apart. And we laughed and laughed. Napoleon Blown Apart has been a key to our shared vocabulary, one that, through laughter, can unlock this tenderness.

I also remember this strange moment when I couldn’t even find the will to kill a cockroach. Listen, I’ll save a bee or a beetle any day and even trap a spider under a glass jar so I can free him in the garden, but cockroaches? Come on. Still, there was one on my sink in my old apartment on Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn and I could not do it.

All this to say, sometimes when I was grieving from a broken heart or the loss of a close friend, I could only be kind. I could only be kind to all living creatures and it taught me something about myself, about what it was to understand our communal need, our animal need to be okay.

Today’s poem connects with both grief and feelings of isolation, but out of that experience comes an unexpected ally.

Droplet
by Caitlin Scarano

He tells me if I were to watch someone
being pulled into a black hole
all I would see was them forever falling,
hardly moving. A girl
suspended in neither liquid nor air.
She is careening and static. She does not age 
at all. I want him
to be more than himself.

That night, my dreams make loose
loops of time. A battered Ford pickup, a white
German shepherd barking hoarse on the end
of a chain, a field of tall grass my sisters and I
run through, our legs latticed
with scratches. My father leaves me
a series of messages asking me to come to a show
he’s playing in Tennessee until he realizes
he’s in a cancer ward until he realizes he’s already 
dead until I realize he never called at all.

In the morning I see a spider by a drop
of water on the bathroom floor.
When I realized she’s drinking
from it, it’s enough to stop me
from killing her.

"Droplet" by Caitlin Scarano from THE NECESSITY OF WILDFIRE copyright © 2022 Caitlin Scarano. Used by permission of Blair/Carolina Wren Press.