Roasting Potatoes {a poem}

While I roast potatoes for dinner
let me tell you something --
I'm having trouble shaking the sadness
that settled on me again,
it comes and goes, this old friend,
like darkness in the Simon & Garfunkel song.
I notice the impulse to diminish it,
as if acknowledging it will somehow make it
leave sooner. The fear, of course, is that naming
things makes them real, but they are real anyway,
so we might as well be on a first-name basis
is how I see it.

So far, sadness has never stayed for good.
When I was a small child, a woman I loved
wrote me a letter -- I can still picture her handwriting
telling me to accept the sadness,
then it would get easier.

Even before that, years earlier, I wrote my first book.
It was in kindergarten.
Actually, I don't think I wrote the book at all,
but I did have a title:
Bad Days for Jennifer.

What was the reason for my bad days
and does it even matter?

We can always pluck something --
from our childhood, from the papers,
from thin air when the feeling is as intangible
as a gust of wind taking down some branches
just to show it was there.

Now, I want to say I invite it in, all Rumi-like,
but that's at least a partial lie.
I want to board the windows shut,
but then we'd be trapped inside together
since the sadness is attached to me,
sloshing around like a loose organ
no wood or nail can keep away.

Or is it grief, and what's the difference,
and to start parsing words feelings like some other
kind of grievance, one that won't let the heart
just feel, one that tries to think its way
out of this mess instead of giving it a minute,
asking what it needs, listening
in case the answer is clearer than you ever expected.

Seven minutes till it's time
to check the potatoes, so I pause and check
on my sadness instead. Still there, a golden brown.
Now the dog has picked up on its scent,
her little face appears between my legs
with concern. You ok, ma?
Yes, baby. I'm ok.
Just sad.
No reason, lots of reasons.

It will pass, even if it never leaves\
Naming it does not make it worse,
we've known each other a long time,
don't worry.