effigy

sans borders

IV
Not in this chamber only at my birth --
When the long hours of that mysterious night
Were over, and the morning was in sight --
I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth
I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;
And never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light,
Child of all mothers, native of the earth.
So is no warmth for me at any fire
To-day, when the world's fire has burned so low;
I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,
At that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,
And straighten back in weariness, and long
To gather up my little gods and go.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sweeping the Clouds Away

I can't find the wings that the flight attendant (they were stewardesses back then) gave me. My first flight on a jet plane, first trip just me and Daddy. We were going to visit all the family people, grandmas and whatnot who hadn't seen me since the accident. I remember the stewardesses passed food out. I can't tell if I really had peas and mashed potatos and meat, or if only Daddy did, or if neither of us did and my memory's remixing images, and I'm just seeing that plate's particular contents because now it's twenty-five years of TV later. What I do know is that I was little and special and with my daddy so they gave me plastic wings. And I wish I still had them now.

I wish like that about spending time with my grandparents. One of mine died when I was eight because she had cancer. She haunts me. Maybe I'm just a hauntable person. Because I was haunted by her long before she actually died. People can forget that a child is old enough to know that cancer means die. Old enough to know that more than a game of house is ending when Mommy comes in the room and tells Mandy to go home because you can't play anymore today. Old enough to burst into tears immediately upon impact of the news. Old enough to cry yourself to sleep every night and wish you could cry into a pan and fill it up and give it to God like a big spilling-over offering plate and say please please please don't take my grandma off the world because she is going to the devil if you do because she doesn't go to church.

I was haunted by her on sunny green-grass-flanked sidewalks that led the way up to sterilized hospice doors. The days could be gorgeous. I will never know how days can be so gorgeous when someone you love is standing in line to exit DAY forever. Visiting her kept me from some softball games, which was just as well since I was totally uncoordinated and humiliated by softball in those days. I was a child who didn't know the first thing about how to drive, how to have sex, how to divide or multiply, or even how to speak sometimes. But don't try to tell me that a child can't love or that a child can't grieve. Seven is plenty old enough to feel a softball-sized lump in your throat that won't go away no matter how gorgeous the day or how many pans you fill full of tears.

We had relief, I suppose. Elevators we ran to like escape pods to take us down and out of sight of my intubated grandma. In the hospice's rec room, they had orange sherbet and a player piano and books and games. There were never any other kids there. Just me and Josh. On a good day we got several cups of sherbet each. One superb day some people brought us these crocheted roses. I don't know why. Mine was rainbow yarn and J's was purple I think. I kept mine a long time. I think I still have that. Not like the wings I lost. Not like the grandma.

When my grandma died I was sleeping on the couch at my other grandma's house. It was a sort of light brown couch and had dark brown flower stems and leaves or something like that on the upholstery. I don't think I had to have plastic under me, but at least a sheet, just like on a real bed. My cancer grandma's couch was sort of a blue-greenish plaid design with wood trim somewhere near the arms I think. It was squarer than this light brown rounded-off one. Except of course there were months and months before she went into the hospital and then the hospice where my cancer grandma had sheets under her and slept all the time, day and night, on that blue-greenish plaid squarish couch. And there was a round coffee table with lids that folded up so you could put your stuff inside, usually books. Josh and I were sitting at that table when he bit a pickle and cried because it hurt his tooth, broke a filling or hit a cavity or something -- I think on Easter. That coffee table got moved to my non-cancer grandparents' log cabin years later. Or maybe that's another memory mix-up. But who cares about coffee tables or pickle tables or what shape the house. My parents were at the hospice and I was on a stupid round couch when my grandma's life folded up and she went to hell.

Maybe she didn't, I don't know. My parents were with her all those last weeks, and they say sometimes she would sing songs about Jesus that they never knew she'd even heard before. I guess when she was a little girl she went to church sometimes. It was too much to fathom as an eight-year-old how it was that my bright-red-lipsticked beautiful grandma in the coffin was once an eight-year-old too. That she didn't always work in an office and wear a red and white plaid blazer and pop marachino cherries in her mouth like candy and make us our Christmas stockings out of felt and sequins and buy us "surprises" at garage sales and collect ceramic pirate mugs and melt caramel in pots on the stove and spank my daddy with that weird paddle. But the only time I actually got furious was at the funeral when my other grandma had her hands on my shoulders and said it was time to go, and we had to turn away from the casket. It was too soon. Of course she had no way of knowing, but it was just way too soon. How could I have possibly been ready?

Stupid cancer. Stupid useless letters I used to write her -- notebook scraps with crayoned pictures of red men with horns and pitchforks and oddly-spelled pleas to love Jesus so she wouldn't "go to the davel." Stupid pans and sunny days and sheeted couches and soft fake roses and bowls of bloody sour cherries.

She had a thing for all things orange. Tiger lilies were her favorite. They haunt me every June. For twenty years now she's been dead and the lilies leap and blare and cackle like girls who scoot up into the infield whenever it's your turn to bat. You haven't got a chance. The one year I forgot the anniversary of her death was the one year I went shopping and ended up buying a vivid orange top from GAP -- something hawaiianish and clearanced and totally out of character. I got home and laid the purchase on my bed, where it finally occurred to me that of course my grandma had died that day, so of course she had to throw a little orange on the sheets and a little sharpness into my slowly rounding-out life.

I know how to drive now. I visit my family this week. The family that hasn't seen me since the new apartment or the new car or the new job -- we're all having a reunion in honor of my two living grandparents. I can't say my non-cancer grandparents anymore, because it wouldn't be true. Between heart bypass surgery and a double masectomy and chemo and radiation, my other grandma has come far in the past year and a half toward disproving my initially well-supported impression that cancer = automatic death. They live in a cabin in Florida now and are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary -- and they chose to spend it camping out in Indiana with all of us. I'm supposed to be making arrangements for taking a big color-coordinated family portrait while we are together. My immediate clan claimed orange for our color early on.

What are our lives? Just a flash in the pan. And we offer up what's in the pan to God -- not because the contents are so great but because the God is. The God isn't deaf to my please please please cries, whether they are for him to keep someone on the world or to just get on with it and take me off. I am learning mercy. I am learning compassion. And these things too have been on my wish-I-had list. I am learning how to tie a cherry stem in a knot with just my tongue, and one day I just might have to learn how to swallow hard news or tubes with grace. Because not every lump will melt out of your throat soon enough, not even on the sunniest of days. There is room at least for a whistle or a bleat, and who knows but that maybe an old song you knew about Jesus will unfold and wing its way out. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

that gypsy girl

You should visit too. (mutual rain = Romans 1:12)

magic in 1946, magic in 2004

The magic in a poem is always accidental. No poet would labor intensively upon the intricate craft of poetry unless he hoped that, suddenly, the accident of magic would occur. He has to agree with Chesterton that the miraculous thing about miracles is that they do sometimes happen. And the best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.... And there's this to be said, too. Poetry, to a poet, is the most rewarding work in the world. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.... What's more, a poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at an expression of the summit of man's experience on this very peculiar and, in 1946, this apparently hell-bent earth.

~ Dylan Thomas in "On Poetry" (1946), Quite Early One Morning

the happy kind

what is lovely

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbroke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Imzimkolo, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.

~ Alan Paton in Cry, the Beloved Country