Lament

PRESSED FLOWERS,
NEARLY A CENTURY OLD
ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Funeral Flowers for my Great-Grandmother
Anna Mary Miller Heidemann
(29 December 1862 - 3 January 1923)

Her daughter -- my Grandmother Rovilla Heidemann Lindsey -- has noted who sent each bouquet: "Harry" was my grandmother's brother; "Will Reider" was their first cousin. I don't know about "Miss Ferrell & Post Office Force." Maybe Anna Mary was friends with the P.O. workers, or a volunteer of some kind (?).

We are now living and dying in a season when funerals
must be postponed indefinitely and memorial services
restricted in attendance, yet there are still flowers.
And a friend may always send a poem.

When my mother ~ Rovilla's daughther ~ died last month,
my friend Eve sent this one:
"Here’s one of my favorites from Emily Dickinson.
I read it when my mom died."

76
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses — past the headlands —
Into deep Eternity —

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

My friend Jan sent
Brooding Grief ~ D. H. Lawrence

A yellow leaf from the darkness
Hops like a frog before me.
Why should I start and stand still?

I was watching the woman that bore me
Stretched in the brindled darkness
Of the sick-room, rigid with will
To die: and the quick leaf tore me
Back to this rainy swill
Of leaves and lamps and traffic mingled before me.

My friend Victoria Amador
wrote to say that we are dealing with
"problems in a dark time -- Theodore Roethke, of course":
In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood —
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks — is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is —
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

My friend Nancy wrote:
"I love the poem —
Lament ~ Anne Sexton
— especially 'even the trees know it.'
Whenever someone close to me dies, I am always in shock
that people around me go on with their normal life.
How can they? The world has STOPPED!"

Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it . . .
. . . it's done.
It's all used up.
There's no doubt about the trees
spreading their thin feet into the dry grass.
A Canada goose rides up,
spread out like a gray suede shirt,
honking his nose into the March wind.
In the entryway a cat breathes calmly
into her watery blue fur.
The supper dishes are over and the sun
unaccustomed to anything else
goes all the way down.

Ben sent the lyrics to
Photograph ~ Ed Sheeran

Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes
But it's the only thing that I know
When it gets hard, you know it can get hard sometimes
It is the only thing that makes us feel alive

We keep this love in a photograph
We made these memories for ourselves
Where our eyes are never closing
Hearts are never broken
And time's forever frozen, still

So you can keep me inside the pocket of your ripped jeans
Holding me closer 'til our eyes meet
You won't ever be alone, wait for me to come home

Loving can heal, loving can mend your soul
And it's the only thing that I know, know
I swear it will get easier,
Remember that with every piece of you
Hmm, and it's the only thing to take with us when we die

We keep this love in a photograph
We made these memories for ourselves
Where our eyes are never closing
Our hearts were never broken
And time's forever frozen, still

So you can keep me inside the pocket of your ripped jeans
Holding me closer 'til our eyes meet
You won't ever be alone

And if you hurt me
That's okay baby, only words bleed
Inside these pages you just hold me
And I won't ever let you go
Wait for me to come home
Wait for me to come home
Wait for me to come home
Wait for me to come home

You can fit me inside the necklace
you got when you were sixteen
Next to your heartbeat where I should be
Keep it deep within your soul

And if you hurt me
That's okay baby, only words bleed
Inside these pages you just hold me
And I won't ever let you go

When I'm away, I will remember how you kissed me
Under the lamppost back on Sixth Street
Hearing you whisper through the phone,
Wait for me to come home

And another song from my sister Di:
"I've got the Joy Joy Joy
Down in my heart, down in my heart
I'm so happy, so happy, so very happy . . ."

Nature pics from the last trip Gerry & I took
before the coronavirus travel restrictions.
~ San Luis Obispo, California ~ late February 2020 ~
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, July 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Victoria on the Void

AUTUMNAL OWL
~ ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS ~

My friend Victoria Amador recently suggested that
bleak November was a good time to re-read
one of our favorite poems by one of our favorite poets:

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

By Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)

We had been comparing visits to our local cemeteries. For me, it was the small sad Confederate Cemetery, just down the street from our house, where I love taking a walk. For Victoria, it was Lakewood Cemetery, "the most beautiful in the Twin Cities. There's a bench next to the small lake, and it's perfect for reflecting on purpose and passion, restlessness and recklessness, strength and fragility; feeling rather vapid in a disturbing vacuum. How do you fill The Void?"

How do I do it? Reading, writing, swimming, looking after the grandkids. I just have to a - void that spiral of "Now, why am I doing this?" Oh yeah, that's right, so that they too may grow up strong, thoughtful and contemplative, and one day feel -- and find a way to fill -- The Void. Sigh . . .

As ever, in a dark time, there are the inestimable insights of the great writers and thinkers. Like as we, Ralph Waldo Emerson also faced The Void:

"After thirty, we wake up sad every morning,
excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of our death.”
Isn't it somewhat ennobling, right, to think that Emerson felt the same way, so long ago? And not necessarily from depression or even aging, though perhaps coming of age -- whenever it happens -- might have something to do with it. Emerson mentions the existential sadness kicking in at age thirty, the true end of childhood.

How did Jonathan Swift do it?
"I never wake without finding life more
insignificant than it was the day before."
from his letter to Lord Bolingbroke

How did E. M. Forster do it?
“Two people pulling each other into Salvation
is the only theme I find worthwhile."
~ from his Commonplace Book

Or Robert Frost / Brad McLaughlin?
"We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?"
~from his poem "The Star-splitter"

How does Alithea / Tilda Swinton do it?
"Despite all the whiz-bang, we remain bewildered."
~ from the movie ~
Three Thousand Years of Longing

How about Wendell Berry?
To My Children, Fearing for Them

Terrors are to come. The earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,

loving what I cannot save. Nor,
your eyes turning toward me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.

Petrified Wood, Statuette & Owl (above)
all from my brother Dave's back yard.

Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, December 14th
Between now and then, read

THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com