Your writing has a way of making memory feel like a landscape we can walk through rather than simply look back on.
I found myself lingering over "whatever the years dropped." We spend so much of life believing we've left old versions of ourselves behind, but perhaps they're still waiting for us in the places that shaped us—not to make us grieve who we were, but to help us see how far we've travelled.
There is such gentleness in this piece. It doesn't try to resolve the ache. It simply sits beside it until something softer begins to emerge. Thank you for sharing it.
Your kind response feels like something only a woman who tends gardens and inner landscapes could offer. You honored the ache without naming it. It made my eyes leak a little ... you recognized that I wasn’t just remembering, I was returning. Walking back into the places that shaped me.
You read memory not as grief, but as a guide showing how far I’ve traveled. You lingered over the lines the way someone walks a garden path, slowly, noticing what the years have dropped.
You saw the younger me standing beside the present me, and you read that tenderness gently.
Some memories open like flowers when someone reads them with care, and you did.
I’m resting with this glimpse into the layers, that place of tired and maybe drunken eucalypts or saints and the wide bay below and two young men who would go different ways. I didn’t know if your companion meant he would let go this life altogether, or just the questing that you shared, the reaching, that goes with being young and trying to climb higher than our names. Personally, I don’t believe we ever really leave those younger selves behind, however busy we become, they tend to catch us unawares and say, “remember when,” and what we wanted then, simply reappears. You caught the mood completely. Thank you for sharing. Vivien
"Wife. The word still tastes like driftwood ... soft, swollen, impossible to swallow | without splinters."
Just, WOW! So many lines jump out, but there is an entire life story hidden inside those few lines. Leaves me, the reader, wondering about the poets life. Did he find his anchor, his harbor, and lose her, or did he never find her at all. Your words leave me pondering the relationship between the two standing in the wind, and I can see the one left behind. Sharing the same air, but not the same future.
Thank you for reading with such tenderness. You caught something I never said outright ... how a single word can carry a whole tide of years inside it. Driftwood, swollen with time, still holding its splinters.
Your words feel like you’re standing beside me on that overlook, tracing the silhouettes, noticing the quiet things the wind doesn’t carry away. I think some stories live in the spaces between what we say and what we can’t quite swallow. Maybe the anchor was found, maybe it drifted ... but the splinters remain either way.
Some futures part quietly, like tide lines in the sand. Some tenderness thins but never fully disappears.
Your writing has a way of making memory feel like a landscape we can walk through rather than simply look back on.
I found myself lingering over "whatever the years dropped." We spend so much of life believing we've left old versions of ourselves behind, but perhaps they're still waiting for us in the places that shaped us—not to make us grieve who we were, but to help us see how far we've travelled.
There is such gentleness in this piece. It doesn't try to resolve the ache. It simply sits beside it until something softer begins to emerge. Thank you for sharing it.
🌸 Dear Nat, thank you,
Your kind response feels like something only a woman who tends gardens and inner landscapes could offer. You honored the ache without naming it. It made my eyes leak a little ... you recognized that I wasn’t just remembering, I was returning. Walking back into the places that shaped me.
You read memory not as grief, but as a guide showing how far I’ve traveled. You lingered over the lines the way someone walks a garden path, slowly, noticing what the years have dropped.
You saw the younger me standing beside the present me, and you read that tenderness gently.
Some memories open like flowers when someone reads them with care, and you did.
Steve
"I thought God might mistake me for a bird and let me pass..." Oof. Beautiful
I’m resting with this glimpse into the layers, that place of tired and maybe drunken eucalypts or saints and the wide bay below and two young men who would go different ways. I didn’t know if your companion meant he would let go this life altogether, or just the questing that you shared, the reaching, that goes with being young and trying to climb higher than our names. Personally, I don’t believe we ever really leave those younger selves behind, however busy we become, they tend to catch us unawares and say, “remember when,” and what we wanted then, simply reappears. You caught the mood completely. Thank you for sharing. Vivien
"Wife. The word still tastes like driftwood ... soft, swollen, impossible to swallow | without splinters."
Just, WOW! So many lines jump out, but there is an entire life story hidden inside those few lines. Leaves me, the reader, wondering about the poets life. Did he find his anchor, his harbor, and lose her, or did he never find her at all. Your words leave me pondering the relationship between the two standing in the wind, and I can see the one left behind. Sharing the same air, but not the same future.
Dear WFD,
Thank you for reading with such tenderness. You caught something I never said outright ... how a single word can carry a whole tide of years inside it. Driftwood, swollen with time, still holding its splinters.
Your words feel like you’re standing beside me on that overlook, tracing the silhouettes, noticing the quiet things the wind doesn’t carry away. I think some stories live in the spaces between what we say and what we can’t quite swallow. Maybe the anchor was found, maybe it drifted ... but the splinters remain either way.
Some futures part quietly, like tide lines in the sand. Some tenderness thins but never fully disappears.
Steve
Beautifully expressed. Saving these with the original in a folder I keep of your poetic writing :-)