Category: Obits

spiders

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits 
READ TIME 0:43-1:22


I watched the juicy spider 
mercilessly murder 
the blimp, sweet bumble bee 
that flew into its messy weave, 
Unsuspecting.

A gardener at heart, 
I know that my spiders are beneficial. 
I need my spiders. 
And I know that what happened between the two of them in the side yard
was perfectly natural. I didn’t intervene.

But then, relatedly or unrelatedly (I admit),
I often dust and worry the spiderwebs away
from the deck and the chairs and the plants. 
And only then do I think about what it took
To spit that stick of a mess. How vital it is to them.

I wonder if the spiders will come and smell me 
while I am swishing their webs away, 
and find, and punish me later in my sheets. 

I think about how, and how many times then,
Now my own web has been dusted away 
by an immediate, natural hand.

And then, rather than feel sorry for my spiders,

I marvel at how quietly, intrinsically, and constantly, they rebuild, 
and I wonder what the fuck is wrong

with me.

Obit 9 (for Everything Not Written in Time)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Lampoon, Obits

Obit 9 (for Everything Not Written in Time)

Years ago when we used to tear shit up even at baby showers, my friends would say, “You have to write this. This is hysterical. This is too much.”

Years later, I did. –Only I wrote about your babies instead, and what began as a howling joke about another friend ended up being a sharp observation about us.

Time has a nice, cruel way.

So when, after all these years of not-writing, I finally start to write–everything starts to get a little bit good. Its voice is coming into its own. Just then the phone rings and I use that same voice to answer the phone (it’s the only one I have, after all) and she says right off: “I’m just saying that if it was my family, I’d ask you to take it down.”

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Obit 7 (for the Robin’s egg)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits

Obit 7 (for the Robin’s egg)

I was mowing the lawn and trying to do it like the golf courses, like I liked. 

I stopped short right by the base of the pear tree because I didn’t want to run over the anomaly. I had fixed the mower enough times to not make this mistake again. 

I released the gas, the motor purred to quiet, and I approached the bright blue ball. It wasn’t a toy; it was a robin’s egg. 

I had never seen one before but I knew what it was when I saw it. There’s no mistaking that most perfectly unbelievable turquoise.

I looked up at the barren pear tree, not yet flowering, a spectacular bony structure against the white winter sky. I saw the nest, visible and vulnerable. 

I got the tall ladder and a pair of sterile gloves from a first aid kit, knowing that the egg would be useless if there was a whiff of humanity on it. 

I placed the egg back in the nest with a sinewy, tall, hopeful reach. 

When I got back down the ladder, I reflected on how much care I’d taken in something no one else would ever see. 

And I knew my 15 year relationship was over. 

I went out the next morning, dragging out the tall ladder again to check on the egg in its nest.

And what can I say?

There were just too many crows in that neighborhood. 

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Obit 6 (for the obits)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits

Obit 6 (for the obits, as they were)

With these obits, I never meant to trick you into poetry.

If anything, that two-time poet laureate of ours Billy Collins tricked you first when he wrote that book called, “The Trouble With Poetry.”

I know that you know that there’s a lack of poetry in our lives. This is as obvious and honest as unfinished wood is prone to splinter.

Without poetry, Nabokov wouldn’t have painted in pointillism the beautiful nuance of disappointment in humanity. Without poetry, Lydia Davis wouldn’t have captured the horror and disgust of a lingering dog fart. Without poetry, we’re just a sequence of mad, missing moments.

But still, I don’t want to trick you into it. I was just trying to impress you. I didn’t mean the poetry to be pretense.

So join us today in celebrating the death of the poetic obit, where the first-person ordinarily yields to the third-person. Today we celebrate the first-person taking charge, despite its always having been the far less trustworthy narrator.

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Obit 5 (for the childhood home)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits

Obit 5 (for the childhood home)

Even before Mother passed, she felt like one of those ghosts that could only go home. 

The house had always been her best friend: close when needed but otherwise far enough away.

There was no debate about the childhood home that would go to her brother, even though the home had been the only stable thing in all her life, all 40 years (stability not being a trait passed along by the gene pool).

The house was eccentric. Mother had covered the walls, both inside and out with something between frescoes and tromp l’oilel.

She went over one bright Tuesday morning with a handheld circular saw. 

She started in the dining room, where Mother had painted three villas (one for each of them) along the longest wall. Hers was the villa at the top of the hill, two black and white cats along the stacked stone walls. 

She went into the sitting room, where the drawn cathedral windows on the opposite wall mimicked those from Mother’s apartment in Italy. She cut those out, too. 

She went into Mother’s bathroom, painstakingly cutting around the tile, removing the pastoral. 

She went into the kitchen, removed the alla prima. 

She stacked each piece of drywall in the back of the truck, fabric between each. And then she returned to the guest bathroom, where her brother lay slumped, crumpled in the bathtub, and the saw started to sing again.

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Obit 4 (for those who keep stars on hand)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits

Obit 4 (for those who keep stars on hand)

She was six when she learned about Orion’s Belt. The constellation matched the three equidistant freckles on her left hand, the only real reason it was of interest. She knew she was part of something larger, and that was enough to know.

The constellation is easy to see in Winter’s sky almost anywhere, and it always shows around the time of the Epiphany.

The three stars are technically blue giants or super blue giants, meaning that they will still be recognizable long after other constellations will have distorted into new configurations.

She had read somewhere, could not forget the idea that you only ever die the last time someone says your name.

Winter again, in the suburban driveway of her childhood home, but far, far from childhood. Surrounded by moving boxes from two different storage units, two different cities, two different relationships (and more bad decisions than that), she scans the night sky and finds Orion’s belt again. 

From her ex’s backyard on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, she had also seen the stars, then an admonishment. The stars were were with her still later, enduring a lonely, polar winter on Long Island, too. They were there the entire winter in Rome, too, hung every night above the Vatican no earlier than 9.

She mistrusted the lines on a map, was daughter to many philosophies, and spent a lot of time marveling at how well-tailored to its humans the scale of the earth was, even its winds and rains.

She was born in Summer but waited for Winter.

Join us in celebrating all those who keep stars on hand as a rejoinder to the giant question-mark of the universe, a reminder of the origin of the iron in our blood.

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Obit 3 (for the Artist)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits

Obit 3 (for the Artist)

“…Had all the qualifications of an Artist. She had it.”

Fundamentally, we all have the “It.” She had it in spades, too, but couldn’t figure out the right place or the right time, except as it passed and passed and kept right on passing in that annoying, quantum way.

The inability to connect (to the people, to the point) gave her the time and space to build the steely, internal infrastructure that became both the framework for a body of work and the beam from which the Artist was later found hanging.

Join us any day in singing the unsung despite having voices that became small. Allow our voices to crack with uncertainty, regret, and plain old sadness as we sing them up to the skies.

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Obit 2 (for the View from Here)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Obits

Obit 2 (for the View from Here)

She wanted to always see the sky, the stars. The sea was fine, too, but too scary go inside.

The sky was something she was always inside. The moon was something always inside her. Whether the visible space was just a patch or swath, the sky be healthy in any of its moods.

She wanted her loved ones to look up and to know that it’s certainly going to change tomorrow but it’s always going to be there.

Join us any day in celebrating the most vast empty (the sky, the self) as it takes on the azure of others.

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Obit 1

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Obits

She was an occasional regular.

The men she loved have the gardens to prove it, and the women she loved no longer live in the country. Or they became men.

She was a woman who always wished that her mother would just say.

She had written only one truly great metaphor. It was:

“Innocence is a dandelion, lost to the breath of time.”

Too bad she wrote this metaphor at 14.

She never divorced because she never married, but when she left she knew she had to leave the cats behind in order to get out.

There will be some furniture left over. Don’t panic.

Join us any day in celebrating life, as it is, motivated by deadlines and seasons.

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