Jon is on his way to Iowa. I’m watching traffic along Highway 17 from my front window. The gothic farmhouse painted a beige bordering on butter yellow depending on the light makes me think about Walla Walla and all the old homes there, mansions in their day. I miss loess soils and Horse Heaven Hills and The Three Sisters and the lone alpaca who lived on Electric Avenue and Mill Creek and the closest crossroad to the home we rented when we first moved there: Stahl. That’s Jon’s mother’s maiden name.

Then my thinking stops. My mind hangs on the word Stahl, which in German means steel. Family of steel, of armor, of pounding the table until everyone shuts up, of long days and short conversations, of bending life like metal to their will.

But also of stall, a small compartment or enclosure from which an animal can’t escape.

Also an impediment or a stoppage because of an overload. A lack of progress where there was once progress. A deliberate way of speaking that buys time by being vague. A delay. A diversion.

Stalled life. Stalled death. A stalled family in a rural town that stalled years ago before or maybe because industrial plants moved in with their boxcars, silos, cranes, ladders, oversized pipes, midair walkways, pole-mounted alarms, and smokestacks puffing nitrogen and sulfur dioxide into the air inside billowing clouds—all of it larger than human scale, larger than the family farming that came before, larger than a faithful community, larger than a downgraded family.

I’ve learned to interpret my body and to know when I’ve reached the limit of what it can hold at any given time. The word Stahl was that limit this morning, so I turned to language as my mind stalled. It’s not that I don’t want to say more about Walla Walla, about my husband’s family, or about that little house near Stahl that we shared. This just isn’t the day.

Two days ago, I saw what was left of an animal’s body on the side of Highway 17. It was stripped all the way down to its skeleton, its bones as clean as a museum display. The curved spine is what caught my attention. This was over by the construction for the bypass road on the same shoulder where we moved the porcupine after she died.

Obviously, what I’m getting at is I think it might be the skeleton of that same porcupine. I want to get a better look at it on foot before someone makes off with it. But what would I do with the skeleton? I don’t know. Move it to a better spot, I guess, someplace she can literally rest her weary bones.

I have to stop thinking about this porcupine. Someday, I will.

I’ve conversed with the dead for most of my life. It started consciously when I first played Christoph Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits for Flute and Piano. I was in conversation with Gluck, my flute, the pianist, the spirits, ancient myths and archetypes, and my father, who had just died.

You could say I was haunted. That’s far better than being hunted, which is often what I was when my father and his friends were alive. Just one added vowel, with its open ah indistinguishable from awe, made all the difference. Haunted. Haunted. Haunted.

I no longer had to live inside the territory known as hunted, which was piss-marked at each corner with words like blunted, grunted, shunted, and fronted.

I will always give thanks to the dead for allowing me to fully live. The dead composers, the dead musicians, the dead artists, the dead poets, the dead weavers, the dead spirits, the dead mythical figures who never actually die, the dead archetypes who are alive in all of us, and the father who died an untimely death just as his abuse was moving from covert to overt because his daughter’s puberty triggered something inside him that was even darker than the dark he was before.

I want to write, but my dog, Lexi, is on my lap. Her head is where I rest my right arm when I type. She had a hard night. Wind-driven rain pelted the windows on the north side of our house, things were blowing all over the place outside, a roof vent was squeaking, and something was making a sound like water hitting an empty metal bucket one drop at a time. Lexi started shaking and licking my face in the middle of the night, even though this type of storm isn’t new to her. I finally got her calmed down. She’s tired today and still somewhat concerned about all this wind, which makes our home howl periodically as if it’s haunted. I don’t have the heart to move her, but as long as I’m pinned in, I can’t write. My body is too restricted.

I will say this: The laccolith is beautiful today dusted in fresh snow and capped by clouds.

Soon, I’ll move Lexi. Soon.

When those who are abused, erased, denied, harassed, drugged, dragged, gaslit, badgered, beaten, silenced, shamed, blamed, sidelined, traumatized, threatened, dismissed, derided, and more fritter their time away fearing and fighting each other, who do you think benefits?

The powerful—who want everyone else wiped off the face of the earth unless they can be relegated to servitude with dampened, deadened bodies whose only sanctioned individual and collective purpose is generating more power for those with power.

This is how power works, how the powerful grow increasingly powerful while everyone else grows increasingly desiccated.

Power wants you dead. It wants you on your knees. It wants you when it wants you, and when it doesn’t want you, you’d better run like hell even if you don’t believe in hell.

That’s how powerful power is. Don’t do power’s work by harming others who have no power. That’s not your path to power. You have no path to power, nor do you want one.

The other day, I had my socks on wrong. To be fair, they were complicated socks but not really because how complicated can socks be? I mean, c’mon. I went to my husband to rant about how nothing’s made the way it used to be and even socks don’t work right anymore and what is the world coming to and so on.

He gave me the most perplexed look I’ve ever seen, took a deep breath that somehow felt like a genuine pity hug, and helped me put my socks on the right way as I squirmed like a little kid.

Here’s a hint for those out there who also struggle with their socks: The ankle goes through the hole for the ankle. I know, right? You’re welcome.

These socks are now my favorite socks for so many reasons, chief among them is love. Like Pablo Neruda’s feet, mine, too, are worthy of that woven fire, those sacred socks as magnificent as marriage itself. Love is twice love and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two spouses struggling with socks in summer.

—

The last two sentences are riff on lines from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks.”

As a poet, I am not here to heal men, to do their emotional labor, to unilaterally support them, to coddle, to worship, to grovel, to beg, to fawn, to mollify, to explain, to reason, to plead, to argue, to prove that I am not nothing, that I am worthy, that I am human, that I belong, that I am a poet, too, which does not mean I was put on earth for their pleasure, their crushes, their fantasies, their abuse, their harassment, their drunk dialing, their sidelining, their dismissal, their denigration, their sublimation, their blacklisting, their name-calling, their erasure, and their defamation.

If you come at me, I won’t flinch. Not this time. I’ve survived much worse than you.

I say this to the past, present, and future. I say this for myself and for others so they may come to fully realize what they are and are not here to do as poets and as human beings.

May we all live our lives fully and without using others to fill what’s empty inside us.