Diane Kendig

Still Singing Everything Diane Kendig

In response to Joy Harjo

Oh, Joy, we have been too long on the road with radio, Spotify, Sirius—seriously! The moneyed music, not much attuned to tunes, it’s true, for planting, for growing, for harvesting. But children still sing how row by row gonna make our garden grow and band kids on buses still sing a hundred bottles of beer: there’s our getting drunk song.

My father sang everything he knew all day from his days when his family of thirteen got kicked off the farm to the streets of Massillon and Canton, the one about roses he was chosen to sing as a teen, then all the army songs, and everything in the metal case of seventy-eights: lyrics or no: we all wah-wahed The Basin Street Blues. He sent us to camp, where we learned a round about loving rolling hills and daffodils, taught it to him when we came home.

His last two long days of shouting in pain with no relief since hospice wasn’t around on weekends, he finally slipped into silence for two more days and nights, when I sang everything to him, especially the one about coming to the garden alone the first night. The second night, I made friends with the silence without him. No other has ever known.

Finally Getting Emily Dickinson

Diane Kendig

Setting out this morning to light my lamp, but switching it on low to read, and at that, number 511, I see she and I share the same— what? the critics say anxiety, I say the same— abeyance, or stay—a statement against not knowing, or, as she was known for, no hoping. I look up “ghost bees” from line 19, find they flit for real and not just for metaphor. These days, they’re sighted only in Arizona or around it, not in Massachusetts, making me wonder if in other days, Plath’s dad, the old bee-man studied them. So I sit here, astounded, having respected not loving Dickinson, and I am loving her, go on to read 883, turn up the lamp to type or, as she says, stimulate a wick, and if my circumference shines not nearly as wide as the two Bay state girls’, still I sit in their circle and write.

Diane Kendig’s latest book is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library weblog, Read + Write. Her website is dianekendig.com .