Priscilla Orr
Priscilla Orr, author of Losing the Horizon and Jugglers & Tides (Hannacroix Creek Books), has published in Southern Poetry Review, Tiferet, Boaat and other journals. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and NJ State Council on the Arts. She is a Geraldine R. Dodge poet and a Professor Emeritus from Sussex County Community College where she is also the founding director of the Silconas Poetry Center and founding editor of The Stillwater Review. She lives in Hamburg with her beloved Norwich terrier, Crosby. Visit Priscilla at priscillaorr.com
When All That’s Left Is Loss
1
When the sun moves west, away from the old coast,
I think of my mother—love and loss inextricable.
Her mother, the pretty one, left her in the hospital
after giving birth. Dumped at her grandmother’s,
damage lived within her every cell. Maybe
that’s why she loved dogs, their unyielding
fidelity. On her living room wall hung a bronze cast
of a Shepard’s head with a dog collar around its neck.
My terrier, a medical rescue, had everted saccules
that closed his airways. In surgery, he nearly bled out.
Tying a vocal cord to one side, the surgeon removed
the blockage, opened his airways, stitched him up.
Then we were two creatures in one home—
him healing and me watching him breathe.
2
As he healed, I watched him breathe.
I had watched dying, my friend
Lynne, only fifty. She’d been unresponsive
until she startled us by waking.
Am I dead or am I alive, she asked.
The night she died she woke long
enough to say This is stupid.
What made her rise up in the stark
light of the lamp? How was she cogent
after days of drifting in and out
of consciousness? Rose-colored
sheets softened the texture and tone
of her skin, and I saw my friend
through the skeletal frame of her dying.
3
Through the skeletal frame of her dying
I couldn’t find her. Memory brought
her back to me. Once she asked if I believed
in life after death. She wouldn’t talk
about the cancer. She didn’t say
that this time she would die.
We sat on a bench in a concrete
park on the Upper West Side.
All she said was her husband now
realized they would not grow old together.
I felt the spritz of a light rain or drops
from an air conditioner several floors up.
She twirled a tea bag in her paper cup
but she did not look up at me.
4
She did not look up at me.
Instead, she talked about her books.
She’d ghost written four,
none of them the one she wanted
to write. Help Me I’m Sad,
and Midlife Can Wait were the two
I tried to read, but her dust-ridden
hardbacks sat at the bottom
of my bookcase. Every year
I tried to throw them out,
topics now dated. Who
would read them. This year
I ripped out her inscriptions
saving the torn pages, tossing her books.
5
After saving the torn pages, I tossed the books
into a dumpster. They aren’t her, I told myself,
and they weren’t. This need to make room
for more books I could not help. But
I have the frayed pages with her handwritten
notes to me in an envelope with her name on it
in a plastic box on my closet shelf.
All those years of convent school
when everything I owned had to fit into one
blue metal trunk taught me to parse out what I kept.
Every fall, it would move with me, until one year
when my mom said take everything you want.
I’m throwing it all out. I should have believed her.
My mother let go of two husbands and a house.
6
Letting go of things is something I got from my mother.
When I divorced she told me I gave too much.
She always held a little of herself back. When she died,
there were no photos, no childhood mementos only
my bronzed baby shoes. My friend said take a dishtowel,
something she used everyday. Why, why keep the relics
from those we love entombed in a plastic box.
Once, in a guided meditation, I went so deep
I felt my soul rise from my body into particles
like dust in a shaft light. It startled me, and I sank
back into my flesh. It made me cherish
this imperfect composite of bone, muscle, brain—
borne in the embryo of sperm and egg
invisible nuclei that goad me to live.
7
How this hunger goads me to live
when even now I see my own death coming.
Like any human fool I still live in my dreaming,
live also in memory of the young woman
I did not know I was. In a photo,
I am on a dock in Maine slouched
over a lobster roll, mayonnaise dripping
onto my bare legs. Where was my head that day?
On the odor of creosote-treated wood,
or on some lover who was eluding me.
I hope it was on the thick white meat
the soft texture of the roll, and the slap
of waves hitting the dock, a resplendent
sun moving west from our old coast.