Dealing with our parents’ grief

A couple of weeks ago I had a phone call with my friend Joy and we talked about what we’d planned to talk about quite efficiently and then got into the things we wanted to talk about. Poetry and poems and writers we love and writing we love. Before I hung up, I’d ordered another book of poetry. I’m fortunate to be constantly in conversation with literary people and they lead me down new book roads and I’ll order those and then avoid opening them because I have to finish what’s on my plate first. Right? Right? Well sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. I avoided picking up the package that contained Tina Carlson’s Ground Wind, This Body from the front desk of my apartment building because I’m trying to read the other books. But my son picked it up and I opened it and…well. There went that morning. It’s a difficult read, she doesn’t pull punches, but it’s also, to borrow Joy’s word, it is luminous. Here’s an interview Carlson did with Joy a few years ago. Joy’s introduction of Tina’s work:

Tina Carlson, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, released her first book of poems, Ground, Wind, This Body, through University of New Mexico Press in March. The book is a chronicle of sorts, one that winds through the wretchedness wrought by war and the deep, lifelong impression it leaves in the lives of a returning soldier’s children.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how important it is to deal with our own shit, and the grief passed down from our parents, with forgiveness, so that our kids can go to therapy for their own shit instead of ours. Carlson does such heavy lifting here in just that realm. It’s been hard to choose a single poem from the book to share with you. I keep coming back to this one, written to her brother, I think. I read it and then put my forehead on the table for a minute. And then I read it again. It’s intense, read it with care.

Wild Wind

Your daughters are angry you've found another love
so soon after the last one, and the one before:
you weave a wreath of women to hang
on your heart. How you turn from the door when
your daughters come knocking.

I could say your yearning is a tropical bird
lost in a winter storm. Or a white horse starving
in the neighbor's field.
Your daughters carry pain in their own hearts now.
They stand at the door calling.

I want to show them one day of your life as a child:
Our father's hands on your ankles, your shaved head
bouncing up the outdoor stairs, the crush of stone
reddening your scalp.
How the cork floor kissed and held you after.

They would see you listen at the ground
for snow, the blue sky of your eyes
clouding over. Our mother hovered near,
warming at the stove. Your bony boy's trust
broken glass at her feet.

Each new love cradles your head in her lap
as you bloom in the temporary thaw
of a woman's touch, the windows
curtained and closed, the wild wind of our father
at bay.

Oof. The prompt I’m offering from this is a poem addressed to one of your parents, starting, “I want to show one day of your life as a child:” and imagine what they lived through, what made them, with the kind of compassion you would show a child. It isn’t meant to excuse terrible behavior, if that’s what you experienced, but to begin to understand that it isn’t our fault, that there wasn’t some way we could have stopped it, that it began long before us. Much love.