Poets among us

I've been posting a lot about music lately. I think it's because music is helping carry me through the day, keeping me in my chair in my office (which my daughter calls a castle) doing what I'm supposed to be doing while my flowers are blooming and my daughter is going down a slide in the sun across town.

On my lunch break, when the breeze is just strong enough to lift my hair off of my collar, it's really REALLY difficult to walk back into the building when I'd much rather turn around and bust my daughter and husband out of their routines and head south. I started sailing as a 4-year-old. Wind was always something that picked me up and carried me somewhere. Now, it's just a reminder of all that stands still.

Jason Mraz has this beautiful phrase in You & I Both when he sings,
"See I'm all about them words
Over numbers, unencumbered numbered words
Hundreds of pages, pages, pages forwards
More words then I had ever heard and I feel so alive"

I love those lyrics. I love words. I need words like other people need sleep.

I turn to music, often, because it's a way to have poetry in the day while doing something else you have to do. Ingrid Michaelson's music is, in my mind, great poetry and has me thinking about so many things.

She writes in her so-beautiful-i-can't-listen-to-it-without-crying song, Breakable:

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts.
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

You fasten my seatbelt because it is the law.
In your two ton death trap I finally saw.
A piece of love in your face that bathed me in regret.
Then you drove me to places I'll never forget.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

I have listened to this song so many times and it always surprises me about how many different images come to me each time.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?

I think about it all the time Ingrid. I think about how breakable we all are in a literal sense when I look over medical records and accident reports and photographs of injuries, coroner reports and witness statements about losses. Splintered wood. Singed property. Shattered lives. Unrecoverable damages. Everyone's losses. The purpose of torts (which is a word for broken) is to put people back together again, as best as possible, to the way they were before the break. But it never ever can. It's like trying to reconstruct a wave before it breaks at the shoreline. The lawsuit is almost never about the cracking bones. It's about the sense of broken spirit. Of feeling disrespected. That the frame you have built up for yourself has been shattered.

When I drive to work, past certain intersections which I know are prone to accidents, I see the names of former clients on street signs. I hear their words. There's a stretch of highway in a rural area that curves. I spent months reconstructing the events before the impact. It has been several years, but I can still drive past the scene, no longer blackened with tire marks and burned grass and pinpoint every detail. It "resumes play" like a DVD exactly where I left off and the words from each witness in the chain who treated the driver whisper out of the blades of grass.

And then there's how breakable all of us are, boys and girls, men and women on the inside. I catch a lot of shit for being too sensitive. I don't really know how else to be. I sense someone else's vulnerability and I don't know how to pretend that I don't see it.

I cleaned out my basement last night. I have many of my grandmother's things that no one wanted when she died. Mostly scraps of fabric and newspaper clippings. In the boxes, there are 1 inch squares that I recognize as pieces that later became my curtains, her dress, my dollhouse bedspread, her table cloth, a quilt she made for my future child. Looking through the box of small parts of her, I find it so so so so so so hard to let go of a single scrap. She has died all over again and I am left in pieces trying to make something of them: these scraps of her past and my future.

My daughter, who is named for a poet, asked me what I do at work.* That's just it. I try to put pieces together that were never meant to be put together and make something we can all live with until something else tears at the seams. I am so thankful for music to hold on to while I try.

Here's Ingrid singing Breakable:



**To hell with Bee Movie telling my child that her mommy is a blood sucking mosquito. I'm sure Jerry Seinfeld is glad to have his attorney keep his wife out of copyright infringement trouble. I could rant about that for 6 pages, but this is not a ranting blog.