Yogi[1] Says
The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace.
I’m making tea in the corporate kitchen and Fox is droning
on low in the lobby. Fox is always droning on low in the lobby.
The chyron reads:
WHAT IS THE STATUS
OF THE AMERICAN DREAM?
and all I can see is Robert Redford dead in the pool
at the end of the movie. The C-suite keep saying there is
nothing to worry about since no one is cutting defense.
In other words, we are safe. Whatever that means. It means
I can go back to my Excel spreadsheet
while the executives wahwah to the Board
behind closed doors. I never jumped from an airplane,
so I can’t talk critical missions, but I can
talk automated building systems. At least a little.
Bottom line?
Everything is automated, even the soulmate
drawing I ordered on Instagram
_____
when I needed to know — what — again,
that my love loved me not?
It looked nothing
like him,
and I paid too much —
_____
“It’s all too much,” said the woman at the séance. It was my first. Hers too.
She kept thumbing the edge of her daughter’s funeral home prayer card
like a worry stone. Noelani. That was her daughter’s name. “Noelani”
means “heavenly mist” in Hawaiian. How remarkable, is what I kept thinking,
to be named after your Fate. As if her mother had known. I remembered, then,
what the Ascension masters teach about soul contracts and Fate,
how we choose it, this life and our own suffering.
Something about the lessons we’re supposed to learn,
which is the consolation: we know what we’re getting into.
I wanted to tell her this, but it sounded so stupid and flimsy and really,
what did it change? Instead, I kept repeating, “She is so beautiful.”
Noelani was, my God, an angel, with her pink-tipped tumbling waves
of hair dyed for breast cancer awareness the same month
she died, not of cancer, but of (from?) a pill.
_____
She just her mother said she
just went to sleep.
Everyone thought she was
sleeping.
Oh, forgiveness
is an act of consciousness in honey lavender,
_____
the color of the blooming tree the spring I found my love.
At last — a place to set it all down. You know. Life, grief,
the never-ending what-nextness of things. That tree was a goddamn
hallelujah in the blue, all big hair and shameless petals.
I fell in love with its Yes. “It’s so beautiful,” said my love.
Not, “You are so beautiful.”
_____
There are two entries on Noelani’s online tribute wall: She is a beautiful Angel now, M writes, may she shine down her love for all. Another M writes, Noe was sunshine when she walked into a room. There is no obituary, but I find an iCare post on Facebook with her photo in an album titled, “Faces of Addiction/Lost to Overdose.”
_____
We all brought our weird. I brought a bracelet I braided with my own grief
and another dead love’s hair. “There’s not a moment day or night he is not
thinking of you,” said the medium, and in that moment, I felt it, I really did,
his love, but the answer is always the same. You cannot raise the dead
even if you can talk to them. They’re too busy cooking in the cosmic kitchen
and doing who knows what else in soul time while our stories
play like Days of Our Lives —
LIKE SANDS THROUGH THE HOURGLASS —
They tune in, they tune out. Meanwhile, here on earth,
our grief is simple. We negotiate the remains. We keep what we can:
my bracelet. Noelani’s ponytail, whose softness surprised me.
“Is it too morbid?” her mother asked me. Is love?
_____
I WANT STABILITY
my love said — all the beautiful petals for himself.
I can’t blame him, so I’m learning to forgive
him. But the question persists:
What if this is (was) it?
_____
Note to self: You are worthy of being loved.
That is literally what your name means, Amanda.
I put the Yogi tab in my journal:
ove is the ultimate law of life.
_____
Thus, after months contemplating my not-enoughness
in front of another tree roped with knots of bark, I am also learning
the point is to keep going, like the girl who fell miles from the sky
after lightning struck her plane.[2] I imagine her buckled in her row seat,
the bench twirling to the earth like a single-winged seed.
She woke in a tree, pulled herself from the wreck and started walking.
She was seventeen and had lost her mother, but she kept going.
For ten days, she kept going until she was discovered hunched
in the corner of a riverside shack —
barely alive but still alive because that’s what survival is:
equal parts luck and tragedy. The point is to keep going, in any direction.
Take shelter where you can. Enter it with grace.
[1] Yogi tea tabs contain inspirational messages. They’re a little like fortune cookies. Italicized inspirational phrases in this poem are all Yogi.
[2] Juliane Koepcke was famously the sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 wreck in Peru in December, 1971.
