Story is Our Wailing Wall

Robin Williams died and I can't take in that truth. I've been thinking about all the stuff of life that people can't talk about. 

There are shards of my life that I can't talk about it.

There are things that happened in my past that I cannot even utter. Still. After I'd already grown impatient with myself.

Times when I've been little more than raked earth, half returned to the ash I came from. When I looked with eyes blind to the wonder all around me, but saw it anyway. 

There are things beyond language. I know this because I've been there.

This is where story plays its most fantastic role. It's where we all go to find ourselves tucked between the words. Story is our 

dear diary, 

ebenezer,

wailing wall.

I've done real soul-baring in my writing, but not in a way that would be easy for the reader to locate. Not theme, or subject matter. Not plot. My soul shards are tucked between the words, present, but hidden from plain view. This is the way it must be for me. Every writer is different. For some, it must be front and centre, painful as that is. Why? Because it must.

For me, I must tuck it away. Will that change? Maybe. I don't pursue it, instead I let it pursue me. A writer never travels to the place she intended to go.

I'm good at the road I never wanted to walk. Sometimes I didn't get my way because my dreams were too small. Sometimes . . . well. Here's a poem I wrote a while ago.

With Thanks to Bill Holm

by Bonnie Grove

Words lined up in particular form

bring the mirror to your face,

except

it isn't your reflection as much as it is

the face you thought you'd already forgotten.

I've been taken up by my hapless collar and

pulled through the rake of divorce;

tendons separating from bone.

Bone and marrow finely defined.

Later, I leapt

foolish footing from a cliff's edge I hadn't

noticed, or pretended not to see. I didn't think, only

felt the fall and blessed its decent. The

ragged bits of me weightless in the movement;

fantom limbs.

I forgot

the sensible thing, the priority of self

preservation and gave it up

for a guy with blue eyes, his hapless collar tented at the

back. His raked form lovely to my missing eyes.

All these years

for the sake of the heat of the hand in the middle of the night.

The one that has been there for years. Will be.

             The heat that could melt a stone. 

Tender writer, all raw-souled and roiling, how do you put yourself in your work? Are you front and centre? Tucked between the words? A shadow falling across the page, or a charge of light illuminating the ink?