Story Telling

Once, dying bees fell on me as I slept naked.
I woke to a blanket of failing wings.
That is true although other things are not.

For example, I cannot say if the stray cats
who wandered through our house at night
are a memory or a memory

of a dream as vivid as John Wayne
talking to his wife's grave
in the orange twilight.

I cannot say if wildness is escaping
through every open space, or if it is lying in wait
like the seagulls I imagine flying over my bed

if I forget what I am supposed to do
with all of this living and dying
and everything in between.

So I might as well start at the moment
I leave the door ever
so slightly ajar.

Afterlife

Your predictions of the future,
the plague, the crashes, yes, all of those
have come to pass,
as if racing toward me, as
if I were the
finish line.

I have released them
into the dark night sky,
along with the broken armies
of Verdun, the failed campaigns,
those fistfuls of dust.

And no seances, please.
No ghostly knocks, no
disembodied whispers
signifying nothing.

What I crave is
the random lights,
the blessing of
uncertainty.

My meditation practice started in the months following my husband's sudden death, and has grown into an essential part of my writing. Up to then, I'd been writing prose, but now I find myself writing poetry. Each morning, I do a twenty-minute meditation with a visualization component and afterward, I take out a notebook (no computer!) I let my mind go free, just as I let myself go in meditating; and then the shaping seems to flow naturally over a period of hours or days. I also do an evening "reflection." These two poems grew out of my reflections on acceptance, in which I posed the question: what are you resisting?

Carla Sarett's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Prole, Boston Literary Magazine, The Virginia Normal, Halfway Down the Stairs and elsewhere; her essays have been nominated for Best American Essay and the Pushcart Prize. A Closet Feminist, her debut novel, will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2022. Carla has a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, and has worked in TV, film, and market research.

More on Carla Sarett’s work can be found on our Links page.