For Teena

You know how I know poetry is here?

She shrugs, empties an enormous Tupperware full of frozen roasted vegetables in to a barely steaming pot. Both the Tupperware and the pot are bigger than any cookware I’ve ever owned. I could bathe in them; use one to bunch up naked in and the other as my awkward ladle. I don’t know how she does it: a call came from a mutual friend only moments ago; could she and her husband stop by for a visit? To the common eye our home has no food. Yet here Teena goes, preparing a feast of pork and Thai soup.

Because I want a cigarette, I answer. And some cocaine.

This barely grabs the response I am trawling for—some kind of dry laugh and a bit of witnessing, a hallelujah—even an eye roll of empathy will do. Her grin is sardonic enough, though, that’s just Teena’s general style. A huge part of why we get along: soft and hard in just right the places. She moves behind me to an industrial size catering trash bag and disposes of some packaging, laughs a teeny bit uncomfortably and states that Chop has a No Tolerance policy.

Just for cigs though, right? Not cocaine?

To relax her I go immediately in to a brief update on my recent recovery-process. Really even though it doesn’t look like it, I am doing something all those afternoons and mornings out in the yard or on the dock in the white sun or even under the clouds. With the journal and the books at my side, the intermittent moments on my knees gathering or at least identifying, and well, yes, conversing with the herbs; or else sprawled out on my blue chair seemingly staring at the sky or the river or the sun, arms hung over the sides chest opened wide; or laying gentle as I can on the purple tapestry curled up and cuddled with the earth so soft beneath me, the tapestry that, even with a dozen washings still smells at once like dust and the chemical that everything that comes from India smells like. And the wild, homecrafted herbal tea at my side, really I am doing something when I am out there. It doesn’t show probably but inside of me, I can promise you, this work is the most real and probably toughest that there is. I am being gentle, going slow as my spirit demands.

But I don’t need to put any of this in to words for her. Teena does know. She kneads at me here and there by joking about all that nothing I’m doing. We both know though. Just to assure her that she’s not gonna have some relapsed junkie terrorizing her home I do go on to explain about my most recent little bout of serendipity that came in the form of a phone call from Vermont last week. How the timing was succinct with the toughest part of my Real Work Inventory. This is what we do, Teena and me. Mingle irony at our individual lives, mocking one another gently as we mock ourselves because the pain that has rimmed this house this year is enough for a city of sleepwalkers, a whole morgue of zombies, to eat their way out on and grow whole on death and when you live like that only on death eating on the dead and living on the dead it is hard to see your way out sometimes, hard to remember your way back to life. But we have, we are, we do. It’s what we’ve together, somehow, done. Our own little mostly silent means of resurrection. So the jokes, which used to come in the form of relief, like spring rain, come now more as touchstones, reminders. And they corner with the reality of individual triumph, the sharing of serendipity that grounds us each in our regular, and growing, personal moments of peace.

What happens if you don’t give her any attention? Teena says, she is talking about Poetry now. Will the words wait or will they go away?

They’ll go, I say. And if I give over to them, they may not stop for the whole day, which would suck to be in my office with all that crazy paperwork and Poetry stuck on taking me away.

Maybe you could do your paperwork at Chop? She says and even with her back to me I know there’s the grin.

I laugh and know too that the Devil’s got my eyes now. I’m gonna go upstairs, I say over my shoulder. Teena is stirring her pot. Give Poetry a half-hour or so, maybe that’ll be enough…

I pause then, when I get almost to the stairs. Poetry, you’re such a demanding little bitch! I cry, just loud enough.

And even from the stairs I can actually feel Teena’s smile.