TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Midlife is a strange season. I find myself both embracing the changes to my life and also grieving a little. Some doors are closing as others open. My kids are almost grown. I’m nearing the end of a long and much-loved era.

I can’t reject the fact that things change. Loss is inevitable, but so is growth. There is a natural order to things that we only partially understand. So, despite the fact that loss and change are inevitable, they can feel wrong and hard to reconcile. It’s exactly this feeling of wrongness that shows me how much I loved what I am losing, what I am leaving behind.

I had to look up the title of today’s poem to learn its meaning. One definition of the word “climacteric” is connected to the idea of climacteric years, which the ancient Greeks considered as set turning points in our lives.

A contemporary, medical “climacteric” is the period of life in which fertility declines and ends. It includes peri-menopause, menopause and post-menopause. An era on the timeline, set by a person’s body. Something ancient, contemporary, inevitable and, at times, hard to reconcile.

Climacteric
by Kelly Gray

Of course your grief is alive. It has shoes,
it walks next to you. Hands you a cigarette,
wipes the mascara from your cheekbone.
Hello grief. Hello Sally.
Does anyone name their child Sally anymore?
There once was a train that pulled the dead 
through the mountains. The bells rung,
the black face of the bird ate meat from your hands.
That’s the type of grief. The one with the platinum wig
and blue eyeshadow. The green grief of lichen streaks 
down the trees to the yellow patches of snow.
The north side of grief is you undressed.
Put your boots on in the south.
Your grief is the life cycle of a fish.
Brought in on the hook.
Cooked on the fire. 
Served on the plate. 
We only sell chipped enamel here.
You stopped using tampons two years ago.
A hot tub can kill you. Try collecting blood
your whole life with only cotton and paper.
Now it’s retreating. Blood just in the heart.
Your grief is being born.
Episiotomies are so 1990s. How we tore like cloth.
The grief is crowning with its pointed head.
The skull will fuse. Touch the soft spot of grief.
Your grief smells like a motel room.
Your grief is a blindfolded man in his twenties
tied to a chair with his head bowed
and mouth gagged. Grief is that you forgot 
what happened next. Someone hung stars in your room.
Someone fed the animals, gave them beds of hay.
The first dog death makes the rest of the dogs hard to enjoy.
Everyone has a place in the scandal.
Did you see the way the earth turned red?
Grief is what you do on the side of the road
when no one is watching.
Did you see how the phone rang 
when no one in the house wanted to touch it?
That call in the middle of the night. 
A thousand dying owls. The griefly way the rats rejoiced.
Grief is the wolf waltzing with the girl 
before she shanks the soft side of his belly.
Forget your boots. Put on your good shoes.

“Climacteric” by Kelly Gray. Originally published in ZYZZYVA. Used by permission of the poet.