The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Whichever Way the Moon by Mary Ann Honaker

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Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

At age seven or eight when my grandmother died,
I was in gym class, in the center of the vaulted gym,
perhaps in the middle of Duck Duck Goose,

when, as if clouds had descended for a storm,
or as if a soaking rain had drenched me, suddenly,
the great clanging bell of grief rang within me.

I was confused—Why should I, a child
playing a game, be sad?—and the answer
came from a chamber of knowing within me

that until that moment had been shut:
Your grandmother has died. I cast
about the room, half expecting to see her

standing in a corner beyond the white lines
of the basketball court, or smiling from the stage
used for the kindergarten play.

My father was concerned when, picking me up
from ballet class that evening, I did not react
to his terrible news, news that I already knew.

*

In one episode of Forensic Files,
a young woman is murdered
during her drive home at night.

At home, although there was as yet
no reason for concern, her father
stood up from his recliner, gathered

his keys, drove the dark roads
in search of her, because, in his words,
he heard her cry out to his soul.

*

Likewise, on the night my dog,
alone in the dark of the vet clinic,
in his cage, with his fathomless eyes

and tiny IV, realized he was leaving
this earth, I was awoken by
his soul’s shout, and for a moment

considered driving to the clinic,
and how to break down the heavy doors
of the clinic: they were locked,

what was I to do? Then a calm fell,
an emptiness, a silence. When I awoke
the next morning, no one had to explain

the wailing of my mother,
the pile of tissues on the table
beside her.

*

Scientists say that for years
after a tree has been cut down
the nearby trees continue

to send via the great network
of their roots, food
to the felled tree’s stump.

*

So are all of us connected
by roots and threads of some
ethereal substance,

by a deep knowing, one
to another to another until
like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

we are all known to one another,
are kin, our cores vibrating
in unison, an intricate web

of the finest, thinnest cords,
that some call Humanity,
some call Love, some call God.