New Worlds

Jodhpur, India, Rajasthan

One of my children has coaxed me to parts of the world I never otherwise would have occupied. Even her father’s spirit of adventure and powers of persuasion had their limits, and I would happily have stayed home in New England if he had lived to be able to visit the countries to which her studies took her.

My new world , thanks to my daughter, has included desert adventures, peeking through stone windows from ancient forts on three continents, a pink city and a blue one, and paired pigeons atop a golden fort.

I spent a nearly sleepless sojourn with her in this planet’s oldest continuously inhabited city. There, I watched the sun rise into sopping August air over the Ganges, which had flooded the ghats–along with the first floor of the building we occupied. With her, I’ve circumnavigated an active volcano and an entire country, and bobbed in a blue lagoon under lime ribbons of northern light.

Bal Samand Lake Palace, Jodhpur, Bhojpur-Pervanchal

My early morning adventures have included a stint approximating a wedding photographer at the aptly named Peacock fountain in Jodhpur. At the Bal Samand Lake Palace, I snapped photos of a dazzling peacock and pea-hen. I have no doubt they would have answered to Romeo and Juliet, had I spoken their language.

Varanasi, Bhojpur-Pervanchal

I had never seen some of the glorious color combinations we found everywhere we looked. Silky brandied ruby water buffaloes against pure purple. Marigold and neon pink seeming to leap above neighboring baby blue. Vivid scarlet-beaked lemon-lime canaries glancing down from the world’s tallest minarets at Qutb Minar in Delhi.

I often have thought about parents’ roles in sheperding young children. But it is my children who have taught me, and taken me out into the greater world, time and time again.

Their father would be delighted.

Daybreak and morning in New Delhi

Carved on Air

“You understand, I shall not/ If I survive you care/ To raise a headstone for/ You I have carved on air.” ~Donald Davie

Twelve years today.

There is no stone marker for my husband, who is present in every lovely seen thing. Nor is there any such marker for my father, whose ashes touched down by the academic building where he truly lived, but whose energy inhabits the subatomic universe.

Growing green and light, as a perished child gently exhorted her deeply grieving mother in The Poisonwood Bible, is the only marker my husband needs.

(c) Jim Glennon, March 2008

For a college centenary celebration, Veronica Forrest-Thompson wrote “The Hypen,” an ode to a shorthand notation that reflects both the infinite and constricted space of human time. The poem itself has now been with us mortals longer than my husband was.

Forrest-Thompson observed that hyphens’ wee lightly floating dash is used both to link and “to divide/ for etymological or other purpose.”

My husband entered this world on a December day in Maryland, and left it on March 22, in New Hampshire, but you will find neither date bracketing a carved hyphen.

His physical memorial is something that would delight him: a high school bench dedicated “In Musical Memory of Dr. Jim Glennon.”  No dates need be applied. Music, after all, boundlessly reanimates and rejuvenates whatever surrounds it. Once released into our world, it never leaves us, and we are incapable of letting it go.

3-22-11

Three. Nearly half shorn from “8,”

but endless half-infinity left behind

Twos side-by-side: two daughters, two sons

Ones, freestanding and conjoined

Towering twins imprinted on air

and rendered in light

We look up still

Perpetual Spring

Spring ordinarily is death’s antithesis, as surely as it is winter’s.

At the end of our family’s harshest winter, my dying husband’s heart improbably would not let go of us. It refused to take its last beats until, at least by the calendar, winter had at last elided into the season of growing green that he had always tended to.

Just four days later, the snow had melted entirely away. That afternoon, in a sun-soaked Spring service at her school, one of our daughters read “A Man,” written by poet Louis Untermeyer after his father’s death: “I thought of you…. / And it was like a great wind blowing / Over confused and poisonous places. / It was like sterile spaces / Crowded with birds and grasses, soaked clear through / With sunlight, quiet and vast and clean. / And it was forests growing, / And it was black things turning green.”

One of her brothers read Amy Gerstler’s “In Perpetual Spring,” which ends with an expression of “the faith that for every hurt / there is a leaf to cure it.”  

Spring was my husband’s season–although all seasons were, in their way and his. He would rotate his birdfeeders’ weekly specials to accommodate anticipated guests, and make sure our porch was off limits to humans when robins began building their nests in a favorite corner of the 1805 ornamental molding atop its pillars.

The fruit trees he had planted would begin to bloom. His vegetables and fruits would soon make their way into the world. Armored khaki orbs of quince would drink in April showers and grow so heavy that they bowed the thick branches which hosted them. At their greatest girth, they often settled together on the ground, still attached at their stems to their sturdy trees. They congregated there like meditating buddhas, to be sniffed at by our perplexed beagles. Sour bruised blue-black grapes and fuzzed raspberries and peaches would cluster.

In true winter I would survey once colorful leaves entombed under ice, and headless bush branches and empty trees and abandoned robins’ nests. I would be certain none of them could be brought to life again, to bear peaches and sour apples and cartoonishly colorful hydrangea and rhododendrons. But in Spring they somehow still do.

Even that Spring.

Since that singular March day twelve years ago, true Spring arrives for me not on the designated calendar date, but whenever I spot the first fully-bloomed flower. In New England, that has invariably been a crocus.

I picture it gingerly poking its way through richly layered leaves glossy with melting snow, as if doubting whether it truly is time to be visible and vulnerable. But once it peeks out above the dense autumn detritus, its lavender or buttered white soup-ladle petals relax, and it theatrically basks in the sun. A Fantasia character come to life, for as long as the light lasts.

Spring came a few days early this year.

The Long and Gliding Road

The road most taken in my photographic ouvre is more of a zig-zag over land and sand towards water.

I sink in soggy soil and crunch through panes of glassy frozen water. I watch plovers pause for sunrise and Kingfishers surveying sunset. Gulls gather for the sun’s debut before skimming atop rolling saltwater as they ascend to glide above the retreating waves.

I look up and down by degrees. I rotate, snapping photos in a panoramic arch. I ignore a riot of color on the horizon when I am smitten by an unusual rock or glistening algae underfoot.

I shoot into blinding sunlight and muted mammatus skies. I collect green and every other color. New England snow and molten dunes. Working lobster boats surrounded by vacuum-sealed pleasure craft hoisted from harbors and set aside for the season.

But the subject is always the same: my absent better half.

The departed, poet Robinson Jeffers wrote in “Inscription for a Gravestone,” “have a hand in the sunrises/ And the glow of this grass.

My lenses and I always chase signs of you, imprinted on both what I and others can see and what only I can see, as you “wander in the air. . . and flow in the ocean” that touches shores I have walked to from home and far more distant places. Where  green is ringed round by green. The Dublin beach from which a seashell of your ashes swirled into surf and feathered gray became liquid blue. 

Sometimes, instead of receiving and recording visible or audible signs from denizens of worlds we–technically–do not share, metaphorical flight proceeds in the other direction. Pablo Neruda both received and dispatched messages over the exceedingly thin space between here and not-here. Alive and alone on shore, in his poem, “If You Forget Me” :

everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

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