Rebecca Schumejda

Migratory Grief

On page 441 of my father’s Field Guide
to North American Birds 
the Red-Winged Blackbirds’ migratory pattern
doesn’t support my sighting,
but the habitat fits the marshy area
where I spotted dozens of them
on my drive to and from work.
Their scarlet and yellow shoulder patches
stand out in the bleak surroundings
like a smile during a funeral

like my oldest daughter confronting me
about how she felt abandoned 
during the nine months spanning
her father’s cancer diagnosis and death.
I was there but I wasn’t, I wasn’t there
but I was and somehow the reversal
explains how we travel from
one place to another
in search of what we need.

Dog-eared, the page is a reminder
of an unexpected burst of joy
after a stretch of long distance grieving.
My second husband sits
at the kitchen table listening
to my oldest daughter and me
trying to understand how
we both traveled the same route,
ended up in different destinations
and somehow ended back
where we started.

 

Anticipatory Grief
For Mark
 
During the nine months before you died,
I primed and painted the walls of our old home,
the house sold after you passed away.
I didn’t attend the closing or write your obituary.
There was so much          then            there was nothing.

Through chemotherapy, radiation and each new drug,
I wrote lists of things I had to take care of.
I put our summer clothes away,
took out our winter clothes 
and reread The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I kept track of your oxygen levels,
helped our oldest daughter dye her hair aqua blue,
learned how to drain your pleural effusion at home,
everything and nothing mattered simultaneously.
I put up a Christmas tree and hung twenty-three
years of ornaments on its fake limbs.

I didn’t take the tree down until
the end of April. I threatened to hang Easter eggs
on its branches but you didn’t laugh.
The only time you laughed during those nine months
was when you discovered how I had

taped pink, paper, bunny ears onto the bearskin cap
of the authentic German Nutcracker
that you bought me that first Christmas after we married.
You asked why I hadn’t put that toy soldier away.
Sorry               I fell apart          I just wasn’t ready.

 

Harmonica

Before his tracheotomy, my grandfather tried to teach me:
pucker your lips and block the holes with your tongue,
but I couldn’t master these simple directives.
Later when my first husband tried to teach me how to whistle,
I tasted that same metallic taste of failure.

What we don’t learn is often more informative
than what we do. Somehow my grandfather taught me
to dive in one afternoon and my first husband taught me:
take risks, line up a bank shot, transfer debt back
and forth between credit cards as if migratory birds.
Easily learned lessons aren’t always the most valuable.
Sometimes lessons need time to gestate

like what my paternal grandmother taught me
after my grandfather passed away,
when I stayed with her during his funeral,
when she caught me crying. She told me:
stop crying for yourself, the dead don’t need your tears. 

and for decades I thought she was merciless.
Did you know that if you’re right handed
you hold the harmonica in your left hand?
Do you know what can be held in your right hand
but never your left? My father always said:
Life should never be taken too seriously
except for sometimes. Grief retaught me that lesson.

My grandfather told me: cup your right hand
around the instrument as if it were a moment,
breathe gently and steadily from your diaphragm.
and because love never dies because love
is a mandala transforming suffering into joy,
My second husband’s adopted mantra is be love.

 

Rebecca Schumejda is the author of several full-length collections including Falling Forward (sunnyoutside press), Cadillac Men (NYQ Books), Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog Press), Our One-Way Street (NYQ Books) Something Like Forgiveness, a single epic poem accompanied by collage art by Hosho McCreesh (Stubborn Mule Press) and her new collection Sentenced (NYQ Books). She is the co-editor at Trailer Park Quarterly. She received her MA in Poetics from San Francisco State University and her BA from SUNY New Paltz. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family. You can find her online at: rebecca-schumejda.com