I did not know I was writing a collection when I started.
I started because I needed to write, because writing is how I process and how I grieve and how I understand things that resist understanding through any other method, because the poem does something the essay cannot, which is get to the center of a thing by circling it rather than walking straight at it, which allows the truth to arrive sideways, through the particular image or the unexpected turn of a sentence that says the thing the mind was not ready to say directly.
I wrote about the work and the body and the sea.
And then I kept writing. About the children leaving and the mother needing and the retirement and the mirror and the grief that has no name and the grief that has too many names and the garden and the soup and the lamp and the coat and the songs that stay when everything else goes. About the ordinary Tuesday that was the whole of it. About the coming-through. About what is possible on the other side of the hardest years, which turns out to be more than I knew, which turns out to be the particular morning I am in right now, which I did not know was waiting for me when I was in the middle years doing the middle-year work, which I know now and intend to be present in for as long as it is available to me.
This is what the writing gave me.
Not resolution. Not the tidy ending where the arc of the difficulty completes and the lesson is clear and the woman who has been through the thing emerges wise and finished. The writing gave me the record. The evidence of a life that was in the world, that paid attention, that felt things and named them and got up the next morning and paid attention again. The evidence that I was here, that the Tuesday happened, that the soup was made and the coat was held and the songs were sung and the lamp stayed on.
I was here.
That is the whole of what I want any of these poems to say, underneath everything else they say. Whatever else is in them, the labour and the love and the grief and the tentative returning to joy, underneath it all: I was here. I was in my life. I paid attention to it. I wrote it down so that the paying attention would be in the record, would outlast the forgetting, would be findable by whoever comes next and needs to know that a woman was here and noticed things and found, in the noticing, that it was enough.
It was always enough.
I am still here. Still writing. Still paying attention. Still, on most mornings, glad.
