#instead of sadness

[mortalpractice]

Awake at four a.m. to the ocean arguing with the Lord again and in the waves a silver tumble of words too many to catch in such a dreamy net, I in my pajamas and so far out. --- Catherine Abbey Hodges, from “Last Night’s Words,” Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

Safe I am six. I don’t like coffee, but the smell of it drifting up the stairs along with breakfast-making clatter              means I’m safe.                           I lie in bed, point my toes, think about the secret language I’m making, my list of words and their meanings. Today I’ll write them in the book I plan to make with sheets of my mother’s onion skin             typing paper.                         The summer I turn nine, my father will find a bat, rust-colored and furred, roosting among the loquats in our backyard. The breathing fact of a wild creature so near             will alarm and thrill me.                         By then, my private language will be forgotten, not to be remembered until I’m forty and look back to glimpse myself in the amber             wilds of my childhood, first and last speaker             of a snatch of language                         without a name. --- Catherine Abbey Hodges, Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

Everything Important happens behind my back. Water lilies open, then close. Nations are born. Friends up and leave their sturdy bodies. The stonechat takes flight. A son learns to whistle. A daughter finds the greatest common factor, then falls in love. One morning the leaves are off the elm and halfway down the block. And in the spring, however faithfully I check for the first bloom along the secret alley of camellias, I will be looking away, will see them only once they’re a jostling palaver of pink and white, so impossible a brightness I will forget to be disappointed. --- Catherine Abbey Hodges, Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

How the Soul Feels      after Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Like a rowboat of wet sand at pond’s edge in September. Like a feather on that pond and the ripples that run all the way to shore. It feels sequined, seared, alight, aloft. Feels like a song you remember from another life, then recall composing. Like an ear pressed to the heart of an hour inside the one you live now.

--- Catherine Abbey Hodges, Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

I’m lying in the bathtub thinking about death, land that welcomes every immigrant, no questions asked. No quotas, no wall along the border. More and more of those I love, not to mention acquaintances and people I’ve only read about or seen on the news, have packed nothing and moved there. But I don’t know. I have what’s probably an irrational devotion to the mess I’m in right here, a lot of which I’ve made with my own hands. --- Catherine Abbey Hodges, from “Instead of Sadness,” Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

There Should Be a Word

for the morning your daughter  comes home from college  for her friend’s mom’s  funeral, for how all  you know to do  is bake oatmeal bread,  for how the dough holds  its own against your palms

before it sighs in the pans.  For the flare of song  from a passing car, heartless  sunlight falling through the window,  playing on your skin, along the floor.  Your daughter in her bedroom  down the hall, the chiming  of the hangers through the wall.

--- Catherine Abbey Hodges, Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

For now, though, it’s a jumbled     life: shabby, incandescent.

--- Catherine Abbey Hodges, from “Instead of Sadness,” Instead of Sadness

[mortalpractice]

I recognize the impulse, the urge to reach the furthest edge, west of west, press up so close and hard to beauty that it surges in, then sweeps me new and desolate, then enters me again. ---Catherine Abbey Hodges, from “Couch on the Beach,” Instead of Sadness