10 years
on poetry and love and grief — so many mothers sighing
11:48pm, January 23, 2026
Ten Years
I’m watching the Oscar-nominated documentary film, Come See me in the Good Light.
Friday nights have certainly meant different things to me over the last 30 or so years.
Andrea Gibson’s life. Colorado’s poet laureate. The bastard Big C took them from this plane.
If I think of the afterlife or spirits, the skepticism goes away when I see Andrea and Meg in this film.
There are 48 minutes left. I already waited this long to watch this.
I will finish it.
But I can’t handle the end right now. No endings. Just ticky-tacky inboxes to process the cruft.
Christ! I am trying to watch a video on YouTube of them performing the poem “Good Light” and I want to throw my phone through the window because another Liberty Mutual ad is slowing me down. (And Doug).
But the ads are just noise. I’ve already crammed through at least 10 of those today.
I’m not going to finish either thing tonight. But I will finish.
On my time.
I was lucky enough to see them perform live and helped make a couple of those shows happen behind the scenes or I just helped out by donating some promo to the mailing list to tell everyone else to go. I wasn’t obliged to do that in any way, more that I was compelled to.
What is that, really, then? A form of gospel?
I guess my attempt to break format and lay tribute with poetry has now devolved to the dreaded prose, the caption, “the post”…
A post with heavy weight. The weight that appears as soft and light as tissue paper but takes the pure heart of a thunder god to lift it half an inch.
If I finish the movie tonight it will be a miracle. But miracles fucking happen, alright.
(It’s not miracle night).
In hours we will be surrounded and surrounding ourselves with love.
Remembering my mother. Our mother. Wife. Nanny. Now Great Nanny. Together. In family.
An impossible thing. 10 years gone. “A thing like that!”
Who can I go to now to feel better no matter what is forming this sharp square-shaped lump in my throat? I guess I must now go to the amber cloud mist of love.
I don’t know spirits or cemeteries or skeleton keys or crypts or flowers or urns.
I do remember how my body felt the night it happened, returning from the hospital, barely able to breathe, gasping and choking as the bus barreled down Washington Street to the bottom of a hill making my stomach instantly behind my lungs and then snapped hard below my feet as I dinged and asked, nay, begged for the white and yellow monster to buck me off and spit me out. I scarcely made it across my street, eight doors down, and up a flight of stairs to the bed crawl.
What do I actually know about fucking anything? I do know love. Or I think I do.
I feel Andrea’s love as real as I feel my mother’s love. And that has to account for something today (of all days).
Recounting the uncountable ways my mother loved me and showed me love and protected me and supported me and my art and my brain, nestled inside this thick skull, is unknowable and incalculable and equally improbable as it is impossible.
Andrea was only months older than me when they died. Megan Falley continues with messages to Andrea’s fans from Substack.
It’s grief. It’s love. They were just a month from 50. 49 years of taking the impossible and improbable and uncomfortable and choreographing a dance of life with language and guts.
Stardust.
The poet and philosopher’s sword is firmly in the granite.
Why are these people not still here? For a touch, for a hug, for a shared meal, for a voice to travel from a microphone to the amplifier to the tweeters to the mind?
Why is my cluster of stardust allowed to clomp on through and make mistakes and complain about my teeth pain?
I’d like to imagine the conversation these two would have together. Or are having together. And why are Neal Adams and Joe Kubert also there? Strange bedfellows, for certain—though she talked to them naturally as a peer, an older fellow artist, when she came to the con with me in those final years.
There is a cat on my lap. I don’t know if he (or one of them) brought this little feathery fish friend (aquamarine and orange, 3 boisterous feathers demanding attention). Or Stacey dropped it off for him before heading to bed (tomorrow is the coldest day and she hates the cold).
I start to weep. Cat leaves. So much for them sensing you feeling bad. He probably got up when I turned the light on for this cover photo. Selfish me. Striking again. At my darkest.
Colorado poet laureates. Woman who raised me. Her dog Tally. Our cat. Their dogs.
grief is love is god is cat is memory is love is poetry is gone is here is always is chatter is nothing is everything
is love.
is always.
is love.
1993 was the year I entered college and majored in spoken word. Not exactly but not sure what else you would call what I did over 5 years at a 4 year state art school.
The Sandman #52 would be the cover date for Andrea’s birthday month.
This poem below was also published in 1993. I use it, as one uses art, and I used it 10 years ago.
Separation
BY W. S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
This bastard poet had the nerve to die in 2019 in a place called ‘Haiku’. On a fucking pineapple plantation trying to save the rainforest with poems.
Unbelievable hubris. Maybe I’ll die on my own island I’ve named Iambic Pentameter (USVI).
As if you could heal a heart or flesh or an uncaring world with a stanza and flourish of an Underwood carriage return.
Robyn was obsessed with stenciling pineapples around the border of our dining room but I don’t think she ever got to go to Hawaii.
“My Son, My Son” my favorite greeting, stitched with that color.
What sorcery is a poem?—how does it do that—how does it produce a 4K rendering of emotion in someone else’s head? Just words can do that? Patently absurd, that.
Rest well.
Tomorrow, all you have to do from this day to eternity is just love.
