Life, death, the universe...

Tracy K. Smith just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.  She handles such weighty topics as life, death, the universe.  I haven’t read her book, although I will.  I read a review in the New Yorker and came across this:

We are here for what amounts to a few hours,

                                               a day at most.

We feel around making sense of the terrain,

                                               our own new limbs,

Bumping up against a herd of bodies

                                               until one becomes home.

Moments sweep past. The grass bends

                                               then learns again to stand.

It seems so strange to have come across this writer today and this quotation which eloquently describes the fleeting nature of life.  My second cousin died today.  He was 36.  It was an accident: he fell backwards down some stairs.  His wife had to give consent to switch off his life support machine. They had been married just over a year. He’d been on a stag weekend and now he is dead.  The facts are stark laid out in black and white and I write them with a certainty I don’t feel.  How do we make sense of tragedy?  How can I write about it without hyperbole and meaningless emotive language, dragged out from my vocabulary as acceptable words for grief?  

As my mum told me what had happened, my mind took me to a very sharp memory, a mind-picture with an incredible sensory texture: my sister must have been three or four and our cousin must have been no more than ten.  She is on his knee and her blonde hair is plaited tightly in French pleats; she’s wearing a black and white summer dress.  Her arms are thrown around him and she’s aiming for a kiss.  She is smiling a wicked smile, eyes closed and his smile is spontaneous as he clutches her, eyes closed.  They’re sitting on an old reclining garden chair, which is covered in a big, yellow, floral fabric.  I remember how it smelled: like sunshine and musty patience.  It lived in the shed and didn’t get out much in Scotland, but if it did, we’d all fight over it; it was so comfortable.  He’s wearing a V-neck blue jumper and jeans, and he is so, so young, unburdened, happy in the moment.

Their family was so much a part of ours as we grew up, despite our differences in age.  His mum was my mum’s best friend.  She passed away last Summer after having developed cancer of the brain.  It was quick, but so very painful.  She was of ages with my mum and her daughter had a daughter about the time I had my first son.  My second son is asleep tonight wrapped in a blanket she gave us when our first son was born.  I think of her often.  She would come to my parents’ house with her husband (who is such a generous man) every New Year and would sing, “She Moves Through the Fair” with her faint Irish brogue touching each familiar syllable. When she died, I wrote a poem for her because I wanted to capture what I remembered before it was too far away, and also, I wanted to, somehow, give a shape to my grief, if that’s even possible.  I took words and images from, “She Moves Through the Fair” and saw the fair as a metaphor for life, which we visit, as Tracy K Smith so eloquently says, “for what amounts to a few hours.”

“…a joy forever…”

Obsidian eyes, hair pitch, with the sureness of calligraphy ink,

She goes to the fair, feet embraced by the bite of spring dew.

Merchants with myriad wares, watch as she lingers

By a mandolin player picking notes of the folk song;

Her voice, mellifluous, she sings the tune, habitually,

as sure as one year leads in to another.

She moves through the fair enveloped in melody,

Eyes sharp, assured with flaming zeal,

And unravels a hand, as if that hand,

Were proffered with earnestness as vast as the Irish Sea;

This great man makes a star a constellation:

Discord, harmony; spring, summer. 

Close your eyes, you’ll hear that voice again,

Ageless as light.  Her feet make no din as the swan migrates,

Volant in to the wintry mists,

Her footsteps an enduring memory to generations,

A thing of beauty, a joy forever,

That does not pass into nothingness.

I sent this poem to her husband in a card because I couldn’t bring myself to write empty condolences.  Metaphor is the only way to get close to the abstract and to emotion and feeling that defy concrete terms. 

Her husband, who is lost without her, was on that stag do, too.  He was there when my cousin died and I just don’t know how a broken soul can withstand losing two people so suddenly and within a year of each other.  Can the grass really bend and then ”[learn] again to stand”?