Resurrection Clothes

Quirky, funny girl—at 60 still so open to the world! (Too open, you might say— it’s often filled with so much pain.) But you have eyes that see, have hands that make of things already beautiful more beauty still. Your bunnies and your baubles and your people met at random brighten in your camera and then fly through cyberspace like stars, Instagramming to our hearts. Follow Vickie on Instagram: bollingvickie

for Anna You said that reading my poems was like watching them unfold through lace. What a vision! You’re the one who has the poet’s sight! Deep calls to deep, it’s said. But I’m just reaching for a thing that wants expressing in whatever words I get—plainspoken. I’m peering through the lace myself. It’s why I write. July 28, 2018, on retreat at Ignatius House ~~ ignatiushouse.org

Folks in Alcoholics Anonymous speak of having “the RIDs,” meaning they feel restless, irritable, and discontent without knowing what’s causing it—a generalized feeling of anxiety and fretfulness. I know the feeling only too well, although my addiction is not to alcohol but to fixing people and circumstances. I say that, but of course it’s really an addiction to trying to fix, which results in being unhappy because I can’t fix other people—or most circumstances. Thanks be to God, over the past thirty years or so I’ve learned to more quickly recognize this temptation to fret over what’s beyond my control and instead to refocus on what I can fix: my own thoughts and actions. When the RIDs come, once I realize what’s going on, I may go for a walk, pray, meditate, read, journal, talk it out with someone, do “the next right thing” (another AA term meaning “something constructive”), do something fun, or use a technique called “focusing.”* But the RIDs eventually return, and I find...

"The fever left her and she began to serve them”  ~Mark 1:29-39 I never felt a thing so good, so right as that one magic touch, as if he found the place where heat and pain were all dammed up and opened it to flow away. Surprise relief! And then surprise again, the strength! Like nothing I have ever known or could have asked! And all I wanted then, I tell you, all I wanted was to cook, to slice, to mix, to bake enough to serve them all. And soon that “all,” the hurting and oppressed, came flooding to the door. He healed, I served, he healed some more, and then in dark of night he left. Out talking with Yahweh, they said, as he so often did. But this new health he gave with that one touch has never left. The vigor at my age! Well, who’d have thought? But I can also sit like this, and reminisce, just quietly recalling, giving voice to what he gave that day he touched my head, a touch that reached my heart, and...

How did it happen? This hiding of my gift to concentrate on his? I’d trained myself by not pursuing math because I saw (or thought I saw) so much more talent in the boys, for whom it seemed to come so naturally. I let it go, the math, and even more, the poetry, the writing—hid it underground. But like anything with half a will to live,  it will emerge again. Am I to judge it? Would I judge  my human child unworthy  of the trouble and the heartache of her raising,  of providing what she needs, of letting her emerge into the world to rise—or seem to fail, then rise at last?                                        …But then, what if she fails at last? What if this gift long hidden has not grown but rotted underground? What if the flighty muse has taken all her offerings to someone else? Well, come on back, I’ll try...

Of all the detritus in this drawer (why did I save this stuff?) amid the paperclips, the capless pens and penless caps,  the rubber bands, the scraps of paper with a title of a book  that someone recommended once, the business cards,  addresses from old envelopes, my daddy’s magnifying glass —again I see him reading as he sat in his upholstered chair—   there is a tape… An old cassette... the label says it's “Prince and Leslie playing.” Underneath the names I’d written “12” and “7.”   Then, past the early '80s tunes they had recorded from the radio —and so I’d never played it through, just thinking, “Well, I’ll listen to the rest someday,” and now that I am cleaning out the drawer I let it play on that old tape recorder that I found while cleaning off a shelf the other day— I hear my children’s voices. “I’m thinking pos-tiv-ly,” the younger drawls. “Prince is gonna…” Crack! A cue stick hits a ball and then more cr...

“Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” ~ Mark 11:11-26 Jesus, why did you curse that tree? You knew its time had not come— just as yours had not, that day you turned the water into wine at Cana. Oh, that’s right. You said your day had not yet come, but you did it anyway. Your mother asked and you said no, but she knew better than to say, “Oh well, now’s not the time.” Instead she told the stewards, “Do what he says.” O Lord, may I remember always that the time has come. May I be instant when it’s time and When it’s “not yet time” because it is the time for You to live in me. 6/2/18  See also John 2:1-11, II Corinthians 6:2, and II Timothy 4:2 This may be a poem in progress. I’m not sure I won’t be editing it later, but it’s a “do it now” poem, so I decided to go ahead and toss it in here. Maybe this is part of the “Resurrection Clothes” I’m to wear—being ready to act, whether the time seems right or not, when s...