“If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,
I would rebuild it:
Green inside of green, ringed round by green.
There’d be nothing but new flowers anymore.
Absolute Christmas.”
Donald Revell’s poem of never-ending green, the “furnace of” an emerald eye, is titled “Death.”
I had always thought of black as the color of death, and of green as occupying the opposite end of the metaphor spectrum: the ephemeral lime green of incipient spring flower petals before alchemy renders them in magenta; crocus leaves’ broad, flat matte green, thirstily reaching through fall debris in search of stormy April skies; winter’s verdant evergreen perfume. Jim’s color. My own mint green eyes, encircled in teal-tinged steel blue, gifted me by my father before the furnace took him, too.
Green eyes open, studying the horizon, crying in the rain, not heavy-lidded in pain or closed in death.
In Revell’s poem, green eyes are not windows to one person’s soul, but the soul itself–a collective being of its own, holding the dead and the living, children never born to murdered children who did not grow old enough to bring them into this world.
Here closed eyes offer infinite sight.
One flower’s dismantling makes perpetual flowering possible.
I had something else entirely in mind when I arrived on my own blog in the wee hours of this morning to find a season’s worth of recent posts inexplicably wiped off the face of the internet.
They hadn’t just disappeared into the ether, but all previous drafts (but for one weak early one) had evaporated, never to be reconstituted. I have no idea how that happened; it’s never happened to me before.
I couldn’t truly rewrite a post any more than I could recreate a quilt, or ever fully repair my bruised heart. The only things I can replay in vivid photographic detail are technicolor memories of human connections. Some of them are glorious, some quotidian, some so terrible thy hover beyond the limits of language. As we grieve we shift the balance among them.
It’s impossible to entirely rebuild something that emanates from your heart and mind, to which dimension and nuance is added by revisiting and reevaluating. Even something as simple as a blog post.
Were I to even have the heart to try, I think I would re-write tightly and tentatively. I might wonder if the words now were as apt as I thought, whether even the experiences I wrote about were, after all, what they seemed when I first wrote it.
A college classmate wrote “The Blind Side,” which I only just realized has an extended title: “Evolution of a Game.”
I’ll get back to that.
“The play is now 3.5 seconds old,” he writes, describing an infamous football game that resulted in a grisly on-camera injury. “Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see. Now it — and he — is at the mercy of what he can’t see.”
Anyone who has experienced reactive depression, or I suppose life itself, will understand the power of momentum that gathers out of your sight before you find yourself with the wind knocked out of you.
“Surprise me,” I or one of the children would say.
“Pleasantly, or unpleasantly?” their father would reply with a twinkle, and the infinitesimal crinkle of a winking eye, though he would never grow old enough to display what would have been gloriously earned laugh lines.
And some of us are far more susceptible to the blindside than others.
It’s been very close to eight years since my husband died.
At about the two-year mark, I met someone who had lost a sibling to cancer at the same young age and very close to the same time. If I’d written about this just four days ago an entirely different story would have been preserved in amber, about the person I considered my best post-widowhood friend through all those years.
As Edward Gorey once wrote, “Yesterday I did not know that today it would be raining.”
But after nearly six years, deep into an exceptionally stressful winter, which anyone who knows me must know swaddles my soul in degrees of icy darkness, I found out–through a single flipping email (terse, yet encompassing abuse of the adverbial form; anyone who knows me is aware that’s going to be poison icing on the cake)–that, at best, things were not as they had seemed. That maybe I was even part of the “evolution of a game.”
Movers could have unfurled the enormous Persian rug in one of two ways.
Once spread out, it fills more square feet than did our entire first apartment as newlywed grad students.
A symmetrical design falls away in layers from a central medallion reminiscent of a quavering diamond, outlined with both gentle waves and angled peaks. The rug is distinctly in my husband Jim’s calm color palette: gentle golds, russets, and moss greens, with a smattering of milky blue. (I find that I gravitate to riots of color, at least when I surface from grief to come up for air.)
Over the years I have, heel-to-toe, paced these never-ending lines while preparing to argue cases, waiting interminably as my customer service calls were “escalated” up the line, and giving and receiving both good and Very Bad news.
After the not inconsiderable task of unfurling the rug in my newest home–now three full cities and one state distant from its original tenure with us–I saw that the movers’ serendipitous choice of where to deposit it has laid bare its deep flaws.
Some might have discarded this rug many moves ago.
Had it faced the other way, its mutilated corner would have been hidden from view underneath the cream-colored couch (which, of far more recent vintage than the rug, bears only a minor flaw: a sprinkling of puppy teeth marks) .
But now the abraded corner has been splayed for all to see, if they are in the habit of periodically looking down to see where they are going.
Patches of hand-knotted wool have entirely worn away; fringe has thinned to weary threads.
The selvage cannot be salvaged.
The manner of injury was inadvertent; the cause was over-watering (of a potted ficus that towered over me).
The venue was a more modern home, the sun-soaked slightly sunken living room, to be exact.
My husband made very few mistakes in his all too short years, especially when it came to living creatures. But boy, did he over-water that plant.
The water, in turn, seeped through drainage holes in its large clay pot, and into a significant swath of the perfect new rug that was then our most expensive purchase in our years of marriage.
We did not actually notice this until we were almost ready to roll the rug up for a move to the old house he loved so much, where his earthly possessions would remain for me to tend to when we moved the next time, and the next.
The damaged portion is now a tattered island moored to the mainland by its underside, where it seems Jim fashioned a large rectangular dressing from carefully cut adhesive strips of silt-colored paper.
Over the years the adhesive hold has become more tenuous; fissures have developed, revealing ragged shallow ridges of scored, carmelized once-sticky paper which poke through the surface like baleen teeth.
The rug’s measurements are the same, but it is off kilter. Perfect symmetry is a thing of the past. It’s as if only this portion of the rug has aged–badly, in the way too severe a shock robs a body of its power to entirely heal.
Even in the dark, this damage would make itself known by the gentle crinkling sound the paper dressing still makes when a foot or paw treads even lightly upon it.
I have left the rug that way, not simply because it is far too weighty for me to move. It is right at my home’s threshold; if you enter and simply glance down you will see it, cross over its threadbare glory, and perhaps contemplate its story.
It was pristine when it came to us. Jim purchased it after careful appraisal, and with some consternation about the price–more than we had paid for any car we’d purchased, and four times the entire semester’s cash he’d carried as a college freshman–in the dog days of August. Our first baby was in my arms and a welcome breeze came in.
For awhile the rug was the only furnishing in our living room. In the only shaded corner was a large stone fireplace where we posed our perfect baby boy in the tiny Santa suit his Aunt Liz gave him before he was born.
A year later, I sat on it in a room still bereft of furniture , and baby Sam gently patted the belly under which his brother dwelt.
After we had next moved, by then with three preschoolers, we returned to the empty house for one last visit. Our smiling sons sat on the two low wooden steps into the living room, where our seated toddler daughter’s image was reflected in the gleaming wood floor.
I have noticed, only in retrospect, that once we became parents Jim became more of a caretaker to all living, growing things. He brought the ficus home shortly after we brought home our firstborn, and surrounded our homes with bird feeders which he carefully maintained. Over the years he planted and maintained flowers and bushes and trees and grew berries and vegetables he readily sacrificed to wildlife visitors, rather than safeguarding in a way that might endanger critters emerging from surrounding woods. He even enlisted and supervised less complex organisms, tapping maple syrup, tending to sourdough bread starter, and brewing beer.
He maintained bird feeder cities, tending more meticulously to their culinary sensibilities than I ever was capable of when attempting to sate our humans and beagles.
Perhaps it is needless to say I am not such a fan of perfection. Maybe it’s just a chicken and egg proposition, as I have never been close to that mark.
I now have another, far smaller rug that appears to be perfectly symmetrical. I acquired this magic Mughal carpet in Uttar Pradesh, where one of my daughters and I saw such rugs being hand-made. Unlike the damaged rug at my home’s threshold, its asymmetry is well hidden but complete: due to the arrangement of its warp and weft, from one side it is deep sapphire, and from the other a steel blue-gray.
Little in life satisfies the human impulse to see and seek beauty in perfect symmetry. And among what is worth holding on to, few things are unscarred.
A date announced itself on this summer’s calendar, swooping in to mark what is known in our household as an anniversary “of significance.”
Such milestones ordinarily are divisible by five, and are of extra note if divisible by ten.
If Jim were here I’m fairly sure that for this wedding anniversary he would have spirited us away to some outdoor place where we could behold birds and summer flora. Chances are high that an ocean would have been involved. He would have done all the planning, certain to minimize travel and avoid tiny modes of transportation: I always viewed as suspicious the smaller ratios of protective steel girding to numbers of passengers.
If he were here I still would be profoundly afraid of flying, so he likely would have kept us close–perhaps winding up the coast of Maine to Bar Harbor. If so, he undoubtedly would have been at the wheel.
In the steady comforting voice that still greets me on two of our children’s telephone messages, he would be reassuring me about my cataclysmic geopolitical fears and my worries about our children, each one of whom has now graduated and set out into this dazzling world without him.
He would have securely packed up what I think of as the “real” camera equipment to photograph what we saw, carefully waiting for images to take shape. He would carry home these preserved pixels, refine them, and catalogue them; he would pare them dispassionately and keep only what was worth keeping, then tag them and star them so he would know where to find them.
I, on the other hand, would have merrily clicked away on my wee camera’s “Auto” setting until the battery, memory card, and/or shutter plum wore out. I would have been photographing him and other people instead of landscapes and seascapes. (I haven’t quite finished psychoanalyzing my change of subject matter yet.)
But instead…..
“In dark New Hampshire where his widow wakes.”
Widow “wakes”–not “awakes” or “awakens.” A far cry from “rises.” It’s not simply alliteration. If I am in any way typical of what happens once those wedding vows have been lived out, I remain mired in the moebius of my spouse’s last moments: now that I have occupied the marriage alone for years, my senses often revert to an echo of a wake (though we did not have one), by his side as he and I were then, as if both of us had stopped aging at the end of his life. Our almost-anniversary preserved in amber.
Poet Donald Hall recently passed away. He had first lost his far younger wife, poet Jane Kenyon, and written of the osmosis that continues in a marriage that endures after a spouse’s loss: “In the months and years after her death, Jane’s voice and mine rose as one, spiralling together the images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the singular absence of flesh.”
In his case he found that some of his wife’s poetic voice had slipped into his, the rhythms and soul of her writing transforming his own poems, making them into the best artifacts of both.
Before another summer wedding, I met someone who voiced the sentiment that a spouse’s death signifies the death of a marriage as well. I turned to a friend who was herself at the wobbly state of raw widowhood that rendered it necessary gently to physically pry her from her house and into a world of suddenly conspicuous couplehood. We simultaneously shook our heads with the loudest silent “No” we could muster: “Dead wrong.”
At the ceremony one of the bride’s friends would read the same passage from 1 Corinthians 13 that the bride’s mother had read at Jim’s and my wedding: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
Love endures all things, even death. If love never ends, the marriage does not die with either or both of us.
For better, for worse.
So I suppose my view of the marriage I still celebrate boils down to a cross between Corinthians and a Canadian singing group.
When one spouse departs this world, he or she doesn’t leave the marriage, but does leave behind, for whatever we earthbound spouses make of them, both the best and worst parts of lonely.
Love in the Spaces 