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Tin and I walked over to the New Orleans Museum of Art this morning to see a few exhibits – Patti Smith donated some of her photography to the museum and those were interesting. There is also an exhibit called Beyond the Blues, which is reflections of African American artists that had some interesting paintings. But the most striking were the Joan Mitchell large canvases that were hung in the lobby – gorgeous. It’s quite a treat that the museum is just steps from our house.

As we left the museum, we detoured over to the big lake and went under the big oak tree with the wind chimes. There was a nice breeze blowing as clouds were forming and rain was on its way. Tin looked up almost startled to hear the chimes and I could see in his eyes that he remembered something about those January mornings when we walked to the park and stopped under the tree to hear the chimes. Even I stood there mesmerized by the sound and the thought of how much younger he was just five months ago and how much he/I has changed.

I came home and as I was preparing his lunch, my mother in law walked in back of me and called Heidi “Vushka” (T’s name for Wolfie), and I suddenly felt as if Wolfie’s ghost was here in the house with us. Later, I came upstairs to wait out the rain before heading to the grocery and I kept thinking of Wolfie and looked at my calendar and saw that she passed on January 9th. We let balloons go into the air for Wolfie just a few weeks ago, just like we did for Arlene a year ago. It’s good to let the dead go.

Voices from the Corners of the Sky

Some of us are leaving now.
Some of us have done our time.

Some of us were taller candles and had more burning to do.
“Poof,” you said, and it was true, “Poof.”

Maybe we loved you, but not always.
Maybe you loved us and it will never be done.

We’re finished now with lost keys, the dust
of teeth grindings milled mostly at night.

The shimmering is falling off your names and the names
of things, the pots, the colors, the books that fed us.

Whatever language we take with us—the murmur
of flowers fallen face down in the mud, the drink’s ice

chinking to seal the sunset, the exhalations at the end
of circling a place to lie down a dog makes, lying down—

think of it as one day coming back to you
in the rain’s slow trickle down panes of glass.

Now, please. Let us go
like a meadow of balloons let loose to the sky.

By BARBARA RAS

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.