“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.
Sometimes gold is everlasting and sometimes it touches down to earth and then disappears into darkness.
Sunsets lately have featured bursts of blinding gold that quickly dissipate to orange and into black. I often watch them while touching the unending smooth circle of Jim’s gold wedding band.
Jim and I lived in many homes together, from our first 500-square foot Boston apartment to the home where we raised four children and tried mightily to moderate the extremely destructive exuberance of one of our beagles.
Every place we lived was known in marital shorthand as “the nest.”
“Nice nest,” I told him on our first night in the old home he always knew he wanted, looking through the thick glass windows towards an October sunset as it washed over gold maple leaves which wavered in the wind and formed a lace-like overlay on our view of the church across the town green.
Jim grinned.
When our first daughter was born, we took her to a conference in California. While we were there we visited Jim’s cousin Chris (who memorably remarked upon how “well-marbled” our baby was) and his parents, Uncle Donald and Aunt Ruth.
Uncle Donald touched the aforementioned plump pink skin of this beautiful bare-footed newborn as Jim propped her up on his knee in the California sun.
Last January one of my daughters shepherded me through the relatively minor technical work needed to begin this blog, giving me a nicely calendared progression of posts upon which to reflect.
Recently I found on my husband’s computer the 500 digital photographs–among tens of thousands he took–that he rated highest. I studied them to try to discern exactly why these were so special to him. Some were obvious: pictures of all our children, and other family members, and me (I am a very reluctant subject and he cleverly captured the latter from afar, without my noticing); pictures of nature–from an up-close tiny blue newt on our daughter’s shoe to panoramic mountain ranges–from three continents.
Some–like some of the favorite photographs I am posting here–may require a little bit more interpretation. One I took at a farmer’s market after depositing a child at school on a gorgeous late August day; another was taken at a wedding, on a boat in Boston Harbor; another, an observer would be unlikely to know, is of flags waving atop a white picket fence in the aftermath of a murderous shooting spree just up the street from our home last spring. Our little town’s police chief was shot to death, and four other officers grievously wounded. The town’s lone elementary school’s parking lot had become a staging ground for an armed standoff.
Sometimes the story behind a photograph is nothing like you would imagine.
I decided to take yet another cue from Jim and try to wrap up this year on the blog by finding one photograph and post from each month of this blog’s brief but extremely therapeutic (for me) existence: not necessarily technically the best photograph I took that month, or the best-written post, but the ones which have some special meaning to me. I may not even know yet why, but I’ll take a stab at it.
January Sky (c) SMG 2012
January is a close call, because the single poem I would want everyone I know to read, Kindness, is found in another of the month’s first dozen posts (The Other Deepest Thing). But the post to which I return most frequently is The Things He Carried. The title is a take on Tim O’Brien’s novel (with the intriguing narrator of self-consciously dubious reliability), and writing this post about the few small things my husband–who was not tied to material goods in the way most people are–carried to the end truly helped me to think about the ways in which an object without any monetary value can be rendered priceless, imbued with stories, with love and friendship and the fondest of memories.
February 2012 (c) SMG
I had the sense that I wrote nearly constantly in February, although in fact it appears that my roiling winter mind churned out only a few more posts than it had in January. Again I have a close runner-up (Renewing Rituals), but it was closely followed by Coletanea de Death Cab–the post in which I reflected on being alone–but not entirely–during the long drive back from a memorial service in New Jersey. Continue reading “Learning Curve”
I went back in time, through many dozens of posts, after being alerted that one of a post’s links no longer worked. In repairing the link by finding another iteration of the same late-in-life Kurt Vonnegut interview, I could not help but re-read the entire interview.
What can I say? I like to read. Especially when drudgery beckons.
Strangely enough–given a much more recent post–I realized Vonnegut had mentioned Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, and how it “is one of his best and most realistic comedies, but there are some interesting tragic elements.”
I paused at the line in Vonnegut’s interview I once had meant to revisit but long ago forgot: “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.”
Love in the Spaces 