Notebook - It’s Easier to Say Hello

Notebook
Here’s the poem my mother wrote — actually spoke would be the correct term — shortly before my brother and his wife left yesterday morning after spending the last six weeks with her here at her house: It’s easier to say hello than it is to say good-bye. Their luggage was piled high for their journey to Armenia, big pieces, small pieces, all bulging. And though the visitors’ absence will be temporary, the scene recalled the terrible finality of countless painful departures. Our mother is almost eighty-six. Will that hug be their last? Will she still know them when they return? * * * She wants us to take her to see the cemetery. It’s not an unreasonable idea, but the request itself is impossible to fulfill, since the cemetery is 700 miles away and she isn’t up to traveling. A trip to the foot doctor is an ordeal, and his office is only a dozen miles from here. And yet she is lately under the impression that the cemetery is no further away than the doctor’s office — in another direction, perhaps, but every bit as accessible. She wants to see where her husband is buried, and where she will be buried. She is convinced that there is no longer a place for her, despite the fact that she and my father made their arrangements years and years ago. It’s easier to say hello than it is to say good-bye. * * * It’s the nineteenth day of April, and it’s been snowing on and off here in Salem. I don’t know if that’s a record, and I’m certainly not going to look it up. But it is the latest it has snowed since we moved here in 1987. And now I’m looking outside at our main garden space, and at the sun, which has just come out again. . . . * * * I’m reminded of this poem, which I added to Songs and Letters on December 29, 2005. It’s interesting, to me, at least, that I’d write such a poem in the heart of winter: Maybe on a Summer Day Maybe on a summer day I will bring you roses while you look up at me in bed, smiling at the stranger who used to be your son. Each one will make a bright bouquet, with thorns that sing the blood of unremembered deeds and roads. Maybe on a summer day I will find you standing in the rain, melting like brown sugar into girlhood again. And the rain will be warm, an urge without an explanation, sweet beyond reproach, gently healing fingers. Red for love, pink for shy belief, yellow for the sun, a rainbow-ribbon of light upon your hair, whispers like the breath of dawn. Maybe on a summer day I will take you home again, a caravan of one along the narrow country roads where eucalyptus grows and the dry grass lies sleeping, ever sleeping.	Also by William Michaelian POETRY Winter Poems ISBN: 978-0-9796599-0-4 52 pages. Paper. —————————— Another Song I Know ISBN: 978-0-9796599-1-1 80 pages. Paper. —————————— Cosmopsis Books San Francisco Signed copies available Main Page Author’s Note Background A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Cosmopsis Print Editions Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Let’s Eat Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation Flippantly Answered Questions E-mail & Parting Thoughts
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