"this little piece of earth"

Found via a link borrowed with extravagant ease from Susan T. Landry for the sheer wonder and beauty of the poem.  From James Lineberger.

Goshen

 We don't talk about it but her garden
 began as a healing device
 and perhaps a form of meditation as well,
 for at the most basic level, she's much like her mother,
 a pill junkie herself, who has always
 had a love for plants, and passed that on to T., along
 with all the rest of it, the anxiety, the hunger,
 the embittered need to fight things out on her own,
 but this little piece of earth that T. has laid claim to was already
 a garden of sorts before she took hold of it
 and started digging big holes two and three feet deep into which
 she pours the potting soil to cushion her
 tiny-root darlings who have no need for such extravagant comforts,
 or the fertilizer, either, from Lowe's,
 which she mixes up by the bucket, some fancy green stuff
 that killed off
 half the annuals the first time she applied it because she
 poured it over the flowers and leaves, not
 the soil, shocking them to death with the sudden
 ferocity of their commingling,
 an act her mama would laugh at were she not so senile now
 so into her "dementia" as the doctors are prone
 to describe it, that she can no longer dial 911, let alone place
 a call to T., who has been forbidden to talk to her
 anyway by the younger sister, K., who got herself appointed POA
 and controls all of mama's funds, dribbling it out
 to T. in niggardly amounts while she spends outrageous sums
 (T. grumbles) on herself and her husband
 and their lazy married daughters,
 thoughts which trouble T. less and less, however, as she digs up
 and discards the Iris bulbs
 my mother sent down here from her New Jersey backyard
 before she died, hoping
 to leave something behind, she said, for she knew about
 the Alzheimer's already, knew she wouldn't
 outlive her second husband after all, and wanted, nay,
 prayed for, some corner where her soul might linger in peace,
 but they never bloomed, those Irises,
 God knows why, coming back stubbornly every year,
 only to leaf out, sans flowers,
 sans any overt reason for their being save this: save
 the spirt that dwelt within,
 that grew up on her own mother's hardscrabble farm
 where every flap and fragment of everything
 was saved, used, cooked, or disemboweled, and none of it
 abandoned ever, including the feathers,
 but now, in the name of beauty, of art, of that mysterious will
 to carry on, T. has shoveled
 up the miserable transplanted bulbs and tossed them in the wheelbarrow
 along with the red dirt and crabgrass, working even, get this,
 by flashlight, arms in the wet hole
 up to her elbows as she digs anew,
 unanointed shepherd to her Zinnias and Petunias and Persian Shields,
 but as close to God as the dust, the wind, the broken wings
 of his cherubim.

James Lineberger

There are places I remember: Memoir

I believe our paths are illuminated, our loneliness diminished by learning more about the lives of others.  The ways in which they see themselves, inhabit their experiences help push open some of the doors to self-awareness.  What we learn, through their sharing or exploring our own histories may not be what we sought.  Truth can be a world-class ass kicker.

At their just-launched site, Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie, Susan T. Landry and Melissa Shook present a Cineramic look at memoir, all the angles, from self-portraits, interviews, discussion of books, submissions. 

Here is an excerpt of Melissa Shook's interview with Patt Blue regarding Patt's memoir, LIVING ON A DREAM: A MARRIAGE TALE:

MS: When I read the interviews that you made with your mother in Living on a Dream: A Marriage Tale, I thought of the hundreds of thousands of women, over many centuries, on different continents, those who have lived in similar bondage through the edicts of their cultures and religions, through lack of education and opportunities. I imagine that many were as lonely as your mother, but also that others fit into more cohesive societies in which women shared companionably in their rather confined lives.
Certainly we now know how many women don’t leave abusive situations, even though the rage, physical and sexual abuse, alcoholism or gambling addiction that their children are witnessing will affect them for the rest of their lives.
On one level, I’m actually envious that your mother told you such details, difficult as they must have been to listen to, of her life with your father. I’ve always had the sense that something difficult happened between my parents before my mother died, but I never learned any details to help me understand what tensions they had. 
On a different level, I was applauding you for the bravery of recording those interviews, but wanting to scream, “Get the hell out of there, now. Save yourself.”
PB: I was on a quest for truth. I wanted to know why a woman stays with the abuser. I hoped to transcend the personal darkness of the past by creating a book. As a photographer I was just doing what I loved to do. I was looking for my next project and was seeing with new eyes where I wanted to go by combining writing and photography. I saw my own family story as an important American tragic drama of universal proportions. I also thought emotional abuse was just as devastating and destructive as physical abuse but wasn’t talked about much so I wanted to bring awareness to it.
Knowing the sordid details changed me. Doing the work had emotional consequences that were certainly not anticipated. I had not considered that writing about my family trauma might not be the catalyst that everyone assumes it will be. The personal memoir is a Pandora’s box; it was for me. Suddenly I was faced with the hard cold unforgiving facts and not my made-up stories or fragmented memories. It had to come, but whether to make it public remains a question each memoirist has to reckon with.

At the site you will find recommended memoirs, favorite bookstores and suggestions for self-publishing.  Participating in "Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie" has been facilitated with a Submissions form.   This is a place to learn through absorption, a pool in which we may dunk ourselves and emerge to find ordinary life more complex but possibly less baffling than it once seemed.   Susan, Melissa, their interviews and contributors subtly reveal the infinite ways in which we are knitted together, in differences and similarities.  This is a place of wisdom, exemplified,  as Susan states it, by "...writing about true things in a true way."