Apprentice to a Poem

inside a feeling/ outside of memory

Hi there, my dearest of readers.

What’s up?

How are you? has become fraught for new reasons. Remember when the problem with “How are you?” was its lack of depth? I remember when “How are you?” and “Fine” were the “six-seven” of an earlier generation; signifiers whose signification was shared humanity sometimes confused with/for meaning. Now, answering that bid for connection requires the respondent to tug on a thread too delicate to disturb yet too intricately bound to awareness of context that it necessitates a preamble of comic proportions or a collapse of that context that renders the answer meaningless… maybe?

How are you? I am just back to this keyboard after pacing and retracing the same irregular track around my studio searching for my glasses…unsuccessfully. But it was funny to me even as I was doing it. :)

Last month, my family and I visited my parents in Arizona, where they are snowbirding for the very first time at 79 and 85 years old. Upon my return to Oregon, a poem about my dad’s dementia started to form itself. Throughout my childhood and much of my adult life (so far), my dad was one of the most curious people I know. Until a few years ago, he was actively learning something new every day. He asked everyone he met questions.

He was also a storyteller in every sense of the word. He generously sprinkled in stories of his childhood alongside oddball idioms I’m always shocked to hear anyone else use. (“Don’t take any wooden nickels!” and “Keep your powder dry” were among the most often-repeated as I ran out of the house in high school). He also embellished and told tall tales to the extent that I never did know what had really happened. Some of this uncertainty, I can chalk up to the difference in how children and adults experience the world, but even still, I’m never totally convinced I’ve gotten the straight facts from him and often need to consult other sources for a more accurate picture of what happened. When we were kids, my sisters and I didn’t trust what he said and called him a “liar” amongst ourselves while we listened to him tell someone on the phone “I just walked through the door” when, in fact, he had been home for at least four minutes.

Children, as Portland’s own Beverly Cleary wrote about extensively in her Ramona Quimby books, demand accuracy, and a true storyteller like my dad is beholden to a force stronger than such a desire. A story has its own demands: tension and timing being two at the top of list. A storyteller must tell their stories. That’s the rule, or rather, that is the path. Like gravity pulling the water over the rocky ledge, the storyteller is activated by mysterious means, but once they begin, you’re pulled along with them. But on our visit to Arizona in March, even my dad’s most often-recited stories were swirling in an inaccessible eddy in his mindstream. Not only could he not remember his most-told story on his own, he couldn’t recall any of the details when prompted. Not even after I had repeated his own story back to him.

This devastated me more than any other aspect of his dementia.

And here, now, as I sit typing in my studio, the forgotten story is no longer the story, the story must now include the framing its new teller (this teller) gives to contextualize and clarify a story that is not really hers/ mine, but because it made up such a significant part of my childhood and early and middle-adulthood that without the story, without the story about the stories, I’m not really me. This is beginning to sound like a Victorian novel with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators.

How are you?

I started writing about this last summer; this feeling of being creatively unproductive. The story goes that I feel deeply unproductive in spite of feeling purposeful and actually producing/making/writing lots of things. One permutation of this is “I used to get so much more done”; another is “I’m not working on any big projects that keep my attention right now.” I have been struggling to understand or even name the source of this feeling, and those stories I wrote in the previous sentence are as clear as I can get after nearly a year of thinking on this. However, after reading Maggie Rogers’ recent newsletter and listening to a dharma talk by my precious philosophy teacher Ravi Ravindra, I think I’m coming closer. In the newsletter, titled “silencing the noise of nostalgia,” Rogers writes about longing for “creative conviction” while finding herself in an “incubation process.” These phrases jangled a memory loose from my own files. Blessedly.

This month, I am celebrating twenty years of teaching yoga and twenty-nine (!!) of being devoted to my practice. One thing I’m noticing about teaching for this long and across modalities (in-person, audio, video, and writing), is that I am reminded of my own work— teachings I have received, wrestled with, and offered to my students— as if they are not already inside of me. It’s not as though I’ve forgotten doing or saying particular things,—not at all— but it’s as if they are in a memory pantry, waiting to be reactivated with water, like a dried mushroom. When the water hits, though, the portal opens. So, when I read the word “incubation” in Rogers’ email, it was as if a precious porcini had been rehydrated when I recalled the yogic teachings on the gunas: rajas, sattva, and tamas. In a nutshell (though I’ve written and taught about this extensively, so maybe read this for a deeper dive), the gunas are a way of describing the ever-titrating forces or qualities of all things. Rajas is action or desire; sattva is harmony or relief; and tamas is often translated as inertia…staleness… maybe when the dried porcini falls behind a jar of jam and is just gathering dust, or waiting. But the ratio of these forces is constantly in flux, I experience tamas more as the space between sattva and rajas; or, to use Rogers’ terms: incubation. Incubation is the tamasic portal where the vastness of potential reigns over the one-pointed pressure of commitment.

I was in graduate school for a long stretch time made longer by the slipstream that was the pandemic: I started in January of 2019 and finished in June of 2024. During that period of study, my focus and aim were clear. The obstacles to this project were many: parenting two children— one of whom was still in diapers when I began—, COVID-19, making time for my own academic and creative work while also working as a yoga and writing teacher, the nascent stress of having aging parents, but the path was clear and I was committed to it. Commitment, conviction, the narrowing of focus to a more defined shape stoke the inner fire of tapas (zeal) that then lights the path even when the trials of life proliferate.

Rogers’ use of the word “incubation” prompted the memory. When I remember something that wasn’t otherwise at the front of my mind, it feels as though I’ve been restored or re-membered. I experienced this another way this morning during a writing session. I pulled a chunk of amethyst from my shelf in order to describe it, but what came to the page was a memory of a backpacking trip my now-husband and I along with some friends and our dogs took over twenty years ago when we first moved to Colorado from Oregon. On this trip, we attempted to climb a mountain in the Rocky Mountains, but were forced to turn around due to freezing temperatures and too much snow. I think the amethyst activated this memory because the mountain was known for its gems: amethyst in particular. The name my mind attached to this memory was Mt. Ararat, when I tried to fact-check the association I had made between crystals and Mt. Ararat, I discovered that that particular mountain is not located in Colorado, but is (in addition to the famed Mt. Ararat in Turkey, of course) a spot on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Although my husband was with me on that particular trip, he couldn’t recall any helpful details, so I reached out to my friend (hi, Z!) with whom we had gone on that adventure and who still lives in Colorado. Not only did she remember the mountain— Antero!— she added some details about the drive from Coal Creek Canyon to our destination in the Sawatch Range of the Rocky Mountains. My most enduring memory from that weekend is waking up to find our dog (who had refused to come into the tent to sleep) snoozing happily under a thin layer of snow. My friend remembered a harrowing moment on the drive when someone’s unsecured load of furniture flew into the air and landed behind us and another car or two. Remembering together didn’t just recover the lost name of the mountain, it broadened and expanded my memory of that weekend and about my entire time living in Colorado.

The loss of my Dad’s stories clarified something for me: they need someone to tell them in order to survive. I’m not the storyteller my dad is; not yet, at least. I am a poet, though, and from inside a poem, somehow I know what to do, even if it’s the only place where that statement is true, if only sometimes. What makes a poem so different from a story? Not much, sometimes; before stories were written down, they were often organized in verse as an aid to the the storyteller’s memory and as a means of distributing those stories across time and space. This is how epics like The Mahabharata and The Odyssey survived prior to their transcription. But more often, especially now, a poem is constitutionally different from prose; unlike a novel or an essay, for example, a poem is not devoted to logos, or the rational. A poem is a devotee of pathos, the felt reality. As Muriel Rukeyser—one of my patron saints of poetry— writes in her essay “The Fear of Poetry,”

“Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth?”

To which I must respond with a necessary follow-up questions: “whose truth?”

Whose truth of feeling am I approaching in this poem I am writing about my dad’s most-told story? In its current draft, I am writing the truth of what I am feeling as the person who heard this story my whole life, so many times I definitely stopped listening at some point, the truth of wishing I had listened harder so I could remember different details than those I do, the truth of wishing he hadn’t told it so many times so its dissonance from our everyday lives would have clarified it in my mind. But then, again, without the truth of its telling, there would be no poem.

Every time I offload a memory— trusting a my phone to hold the radiance of the moon with pixels and electricity— I wonder if my trust is misplaced. What do I want to remember anyway? The observable fact of the moon or the feeling I had looking at it on a midwinter’s night while walking our dog and listening to my child tell me about something he just discovered in Minecraft? What do I want from the story of my dad’s that he now doesn’t remember and that I do remember but imperfectly? Can one piece of writing do both things? I trust the poem to hold what matters.

In a brief moment of practicality a handful of years ago, I recorded my dad telling this particular story. We were sitting in the den at our old house on 29th Avenue (where I took all of those photos of that precious Douglas Fir). I think it was Thanksgiving-time, and amidst the chaos of cooking that huge meal while holding a baby (Nima) and encouraging my mom and Oona to play somewhere other than right where I was rolling out a pie, I had the where-with-all to hit “record” while my dad talked. I have a memory of labeling it and can see it in my mind among other files on my husband’s desktop PC, but now I can’t find the file. None of my search terms yield any results. The memory of how to access this externalized memory is itself inaccessible.

I always imagined dementia to be a kind of mental dust bowl: a defamiliarized present, windswept and desolate, with fragments of the past blowing through without context or gravity. In the past few years, my dad has struggled with aphasia, mostly where he struggles to find the right word, but more and more where he can’t locate any words to describe an experience. This, of course, can be frustrating when we’re looking for meaning from a conversation. However, the moments where he is grasping for a specific word have been a bridge to the poetic realm. Once, while he and my mom were visiting me in Oregon, he wanted to ask about insects (specifically, whether we were seeing new or different patterns in insect life with climate change), but the word insect was out of reach: he called them “tiny birds.” This reminded me of seeing a hawkmoth while traveling in France with my husband and kids a few years a go. While on the level of logic, “tiny birds” do not quite encapsulate insect, in the realm of feeling, they created a portal into which I could be with both my dad and my family in one poetic memory.

Dementia is an opportunity to practice radical acceptance. Acceptance is one of those tricky concepts, because it can sound like “giving up” or not caring— especially when applied to the many, ongoing instances of oppression and injustice— but really it’s more about living in a state of nondenial (the yogis and the buddhists love a negative descriptor lol), or in the language of recovery: “accepting life on life’s terms.” In other words, to practice acceptance is to stop imagining scenarios where things were otherwise (e.g. “if only she had listened, then she wouldn’t be in this mess”). My dad’s dementia (and all of the circumstances that led up or down tow it) is real, and it has changed everything about how he relates to the world and how the world relates to him. Once that acceptance is established, the real possibilities open up. For me, as his daughter who lives far away but who has always spoken to him on the phone at least once if not multiple times per week and who currently has no influence over his care, those possibilities center communication and the mind.

A poem, too, offers the reader the chance to wrestle with reality. To fight the logic of a poem is akin to swimming against a rip tide: you’ll wear yourself out and drown in frustration. It’s better to let the poem pull you where she will before trying to make “sense” of the experience; being in the poem is its own kind of sense.

How can what I’ve learned about reading a poem help me accept the new reality of my dad’s dementia? How can this help me write a poem about this reality?

There are holes in the story, that much I know. If I were writing in a different form, say an essay like this one, I would reach out to the other person who was there— I searched for him online, and he’s still alive and (miraculously) still faculty in a graduate writing program—but I think doing that would be a violation of the feelings the poem follows. And so, in faithfulness to this reality, I believe I will finish this poem without conducting additional research.

My experience with the Amethyst and the joy of remembering with a friend already illustrates the limits of a solitary approach: it privileges individual memory and might even perpetuate unhelpful thought patterns if the story is one that I’ve made central to some fixed narrative about who I am as a person (as if that could be narrowed). So often, I remember the past in community and with people who can confirm or challenge the way I remember things. I guess I mean that I’m ambivalent about this approach, and that a second poem will likely emerge that invites the people I know have also heard (and lived) this story to offer their collective memory to the poem.

And so, after a preamble that both ebbs and flows, I offer this first draft of a poem to you now. May it balm whatever needs relief and stoke whatever needs fuel. For my dad, the storyteller, from your poet daughter.

Storyteller

Dad, remember that time you went to Estes Park with your friend?
No. Have I been?
A story I’ve heard a hundred times, that I couldn’t
Imagine not being told.
Now lives outside of its teller.
He was a young man, and for a long time, too— my dad.
He and Danny G———, the writer, made much mischief for themselves
And nearly broke my poor grandpa’s squishy heart:
Once, they were jailed in Mexico for selling a car (a car?).
They had to pass pesos through the bars for food, delivered through an alley window.
Someone paid someone else and they brought a lemon,
Which confused my dad until he was on the 
Floor of a tiny airplane flying low between
Haphazardly drawn lines and
With nothing but a lemon to 
Protect him.
But Estes Park, yes, that was the time— it
Was him and Danny again, though probably not again but before the lemon—
The lemon could only be the end of a story:
Sour with relief.
Where is he now? Dad’s friend Danny. His 
novel is wedged between this and that 
in my south-facing study, but my dad doesn’t want to call him and can’t remember how to read. Something about a chasm of before getting filled with afters. His friendship long since displaced by other love. The wind blows an enormous oak and countless, but also 
very real and countable Cedars in that direction.
Estes Park is where my dad and his friend drove from Southern Iowa on 
A lark. Where
After they stuffed themselves with Salsbury steaks in the lodge restaurant they discovered, although I don’t think discovered is 
Accurate, but it’s not my inaccuracy to assert, and the story wants to be 
Told as it was to me over all of my near half-century among the oaks bearing witness,
So they discovered they had no money 
to pay for what they had already taken.
So again or before they were in a kind of prison, but where the meal preceded its price and there was no lemon.
And rather than running (which maybe they did) 
and rather than working (which could also be true),
Danny sat down at the piano and played in satisfaction of their satiety.
What did he play what did he play oh what did he play? My mind turns the story over and over, 
But I can’t find the path back to anything but the tension
Between the discovery and the remedy.
Perhaps I hadn’t listened closely enough
Counting on that story—
The way only a child can— to never not be
Retold after dinner: who will tell it 
Now that it’s been lost?
Did all of that really happen?
My dad smiled, eyes wide and watery like distant stars, not remembering,
But enjoying being remembered to just the same.

My dad has always loved cats. (1979 & 2026)

reading + recommending

• Related to this time in my life, I’ve been reading a lot of little gems about dementia, memory, and aging. Barbara Karnes has created some sweetly instructive booklets that I recommend.

• I’m reading Solito: A Memoir, by Javier Zamora, and it is a beautiful heartbreaker. Poets find a way to poem regardless of genre, and I am here for it.

• Last month I read Audition, by Katie Kitamura, and LOVED it. If you are someone who doesn’t want a book closing every door for you, you might like it, too.

Opportunities for Practice

• I’m reconfiguring how to share practices in this online space. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Live? Pre-recorded? Yoga movement? Meditation? Writing? Please share your thoughts. 💜

• Portland yogis, I teach on Fridays at noon at Yoga Refuge. Would love to see you there.

Love to all+++

kelly

SPRING hath sprung