I don’t hear the voices of my children anymore. I don’t hear the word “Mommy” or the giggles from little-girl sleepovers. I don’t hear the wails from scraped knees or the high-pitched snorts at dumb knock-knock jokes. I don’t hear the harsh blast of Metallica playing to a crowd of rowdy 14-year olds, or know-it-all teenage voices declaiming deathless 80s and 90s slang such as “Mega” or “Burnt.”  I don’t hear the muttered whispers when they creep in way past their curfew, or the shrieks about broken nails or messed-up hairdos.

No, I don’t hear my children anymore. But I do hear their warm voices talking about their women’s concerns and I am happy when the phone rings and I hear them say, “Mom.”

Here’s a writing exercise tip:  pick a sensory word, a word that expresses color, shape, texture, sound, smell, or taste.  Then write a couple of paragraphs with every sentence (or most of them) beginning with that word and “is.”  Here’s one I wrote, using the word “darkness.” 

Sometimes I wake up with a song playing in my head. I wish I knew what this meant, or if it means anything at all.  What could it mean that one morning I woke up with “Holy Holy Holy” playing, complete with crashing organ chords as the background to a church choir?  Since I don’t go to church, I haven’t heard that song for decades, but here were all the words, present in my head: holy holy holy lord god almighty god in his mercy blessed trinity. It lurked in the back of my mind the rest of the day.

But then the very next morning, when I woke up I heard “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” playing, sung by chirping Disney-esque bluebirds – what about that? Does the juxtaposition of Holy Holy Holy with Zip a Dee Doo Dah have any deep dark meaning?

 I ask myself these questions, but I get no answers.

I taste mushrooms in my dreams sometimes. Almost sweet, almost nutty, they taste like a thick slab of moss heated up and sucked dry. Eating a mushroom is like eating a piece of the forest. If I wasn’t scared of being poisoned I’d like to taste all the wild kinds of mushrooms there are – those lemon-colored ones wearing white lacy veils; the Black Helveticas that look like deer turds; the magical mushies that cluster together in fairy rings; the flat-topped shrooms that look like Swedish pancakes waiting for jam; the brown ones with red slimy tongues erupting from their bellies — I could go on but I won’t. I guess you can tell that I admire the infinite variety and endless creativity of mushrooms. I want to write like a mushroom, bringing color and life out from the dense, dark undergrowth covering the grave.

While you are dead, you will miss tending your garden; the dew on the early morning spider webs strung between the rosebushes, the dark smell of earth in your nose, the rough feel of dirt between your fingers, and even the ache in your knees. You will miss the little breezes freshening across your damp forehead, the pull against your hands of the weeds clinging to life, and the dog turds decorating your uncut lawn. While you are dead you will miss them, but all things come around again, perhaps even you.

I touch the smooth paper of the notebook, all blank and waiting for my words. There is nothing else that feels like paper on the fingertips, so smooth and fast, a racetrack for my pen. I touch the pen, gripping it between my finger and thumb and I feel its hard barrel unyielding, reliably delivering up my words. I touch the floor with my bare feet, oh how I hate to wear shoes, because then my feet touch scratchy wool or claustrophobic nylon or sweaty leather. I prefer to be able to wiggle my toes on the ground and feel my toes spread apart from each other, each one sending its little pad of smooth cool glassy tile up to the receptors in my brain. My whole body is one big toucher, if I try I can feel the separate red hairs of my sweater against my arms and the elastic tightness of my bra straps and the soft folds of my pants waving around my legs. I am alive and I am here because I can feel.

I don't know how to dance a measured dance, meeting the beat of tradition's music, and swinging to meet a partner's arms. I don't know the feel of his arm around my waist guiding me in the steps of the time-honored past. I don't know the sweet peace of families sewn into my dress or braided in my hair.

I don't know who my blood is. I don't know what my race is; my skin seems covered still by the soft cheesy membrane I was born with, moldy and crumbly like mealy little warts. Even my time seems distant, as if I am living behind smoked glass.

Seen from space, I am not even visible. I am microscopic dust, blowing away in the blink of an eye, and as much missed. We are, all of us, Halloween ghouls with clackety skeleton bones, dancing as all marionettes do, pulled by unseen strings tied to strings tied to strings tied and retied and retied. All is meaningless, and I am therefore free.

I don't know why my cat Mab makes so much noise. Surely by this time she knows I cannot understand her? Perhaps she just likes the sound she makes, halfway between a squeak and a scrowl. To me it's an annoying sound like fingernails down a blackboard or a baby crying in an airplane, from the seat directly behind you.

There she goes again, interrupting my writing; it's a squeal this time, reminding me of a teenager's whine, that meaningless voice of anger and disappointment with parents, wanting nothing so much as recognition of how pissed off they are.

Mab makes me scribble off-balance, but I'm going to try to write through it anyway, no matter how unbearably trivial it may seem.

To write poems you must have a yearning for home beyond home. All my life I have cried aloud, alone in the wilderness, "I want to go home." All my life I have followed the answering echoes and found — more wilderness.