Mary K O'Melveny

Mary K O’Melveny, a retired labor rights lawyer, lives with her wife in Woodstock NY and Washington DC. Mary is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her poetry has received award recognition in many venues. Her writings have appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. Her work has also appeared on national blog sites such as The New Verse News and Writing In A Woman’s Voice. Mary is the author of A Woman of a Certain Age and MERGING STAR HYPOTHESES (Finishing Line Press 2018, 2020) and a co-author of the anthology An Apple In Her Hand (Codhill Press 2019). Mary’s latest poetry collection Dispatches From The Memory Care Museum will be published in 2021 by Kelsay Books. Visit her website for more information at marykomelvenypoet.com.

The Fifth Dimension

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

                     -Leonard Cohen

As I was talking to my friend, he broke

down in tears, recalling anew, that his

wife had recently died. Is gone. Today, 

some telemarketer asked to speak to

my long dead mother. For one tiny tick 

of a clock, I almost handed her the phone.  

How do we navigate shape-shifting grief

and still make coffee in the morning, 

exchange words with neighbors about the 

sorry state of our televised world or look out

our windows to gauge if promised rain

might fade to something akin to mist? 

Surely, it is in those split seconds when

memory’s failure blots out bereavement,

when we step forward into some state of

transcendental mercy when yesterday 

is restored. A slant of sunlight on snow. 

Before the unthinkable had time 

to be thought. Before we had to 

don mourning garments or speak in past 

tenses. Our ground solidifies. 

A conversation continues. A smile

returns. We want to stay there, 

liberated from known dimensions.

In the End, What Do We Want to Know?

My mother never forgot our names. 

What she often forgot was that we 

were once loveable. That we loved her.

As memory melts away, I have marveled at

what elects to bubble up against odds

of wish or will, lacking prediction or point

of view. Each day, we never knew which 

grains would cling to her cerebral 

colander or wash away, perhaps 

forever, perhaps until tomorrow’s

new light slanted toward them once more,

as her thoughts rose like newly kneaded dough.

As we searched for order or, failing that, 

predictability of loss, it was often her anger

that remained constant. Sometimes her fury 

at time’s passage was so pure it resembled 

monastic prayer. How did this happen?  

Why is it over before I could make sense 

of anything? And then, just as suddenly, 

she would smile, metallic taste of outrage 

replaced by something new, nearly sweet.