#SOL 16: The Unbanked River

House By the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

                                   Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

I.

It isn't only the absence that makes the holidays so difficult. It's how memories free flow like a river unbanked. Earlier my son rushed in to tell me he was testing the speed of a new router. Armed with an iPad he plopped down on the sofa and I took a second to study him in that unguarded moment. And as I looked, I glimpsed the toddler who approached most days with a similar curiosity.

Daddy? 

Umm. 

I fixed the wall good. 

What wall?    

The one by the steps. I fix it.  

Okay, good.                   

We  had just moved into a newly built home and as we got setttled that first night Devon was nonstop chatter about fixing a wall. We were so tired and excited and we told him how good that was that he fixed the wall and he smiled with a pride I can still recall. After we had put him to sleep, Rob would discover that our then three-year-old had used green and yellow markers to draw all over the stairwell wall. Those were Devon's Bob the Builder days and he was always fixing something. Even now 14 years later, there is a faint staining that remains.

Subtle.
Heart wrenching.

We always meant to repaint, but never found time or money to do so. And now, well now, those slight stains are reminders. What remains is of course of greater interest after a loved one has passed. How different might our lives have been had we known the little time Rob would have here on earth--would have with our son? Better, I imagine to not know such things.


II.

These days I rewrite so many private memories with the new knowledge of how much time Rob had left. 13 years after Devon fixed the wall, 13 years almost to the day, I would answer the house phone early one morning and then pass it to Rob who would learn he had cancer. Nothing would ever be the same again. And yet, nothing ever is.

There is a clarity that sorrow births that reshapes meaning. It's like at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town when Emily returns from the dead to glimpse a lived day.

I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back...up the    hill...to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.          

Looks left and then out past audience and then to the right 

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good- by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 

And it is this knowledge of the present where we stand and so often look beyond that cuts us. We feel that sharp edge of that understanding borne from failing to notice. It is the seemingly unimportant and ordinary moments of living that best define us--that we miss the most. And when we realize that we have failed to love these moments as we lived, we share Emily's regrets. We share her pain until we forget again.

And we will forget.


III.

Life rushes on and our losses that feel so profound are hardly specks in the cosmos.  I marvel these days at the fierce pulsing of life. A river unbanked.


IV. 

The Stage Manager closes the Wilder's play by noting:

There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk...or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

And perhaps it is this straining that disrupts the sweet ebb and flow of the river. Perhaps it is this straining that reveals the mindlessness that lulls us to forget the necessary unbanking a river will claim, must claim. 

Memory is so fleeting and we forget the rush and spill of water beyond the pathways we have made. We forget how this alters the shape and look of the landscape we carry within.

The river finds what is has always been regardless of the many banks we have built to tame it.


V.

Grief gives us a new geography and a new lexicon of utterances and sighs that allow us to see and hear differently. The unbanked river transforms the familiar. There we hardly know the water--the once steady ebb and flow is now difficult to discern. We have waded far and buoyed by constraints and by absences, we feel a new meter beating through us, rising up. We will give it its way as we must.

When I look back, when I recall the nearly-30 years with Rob, what I see mostly is that we loved fearlessly. 

#SOL16: Longing

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings,
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. 

      -- Led Zeppelin

I.

Lately, the birds gathered by the front door seem mostly crazed. New neighbors, who moved in the day after Rob died, cut down two old growth trees--home to any number of birds. Now they who are without a home are trying to make something new.

Most days, birds swoop in and out of the yard, gather on wires that criss-cross the street, and land on and alight from branches of the hemlocks that line our front yard, while others--far more audacious--gather on the front stoop, refusing to leave regardless of who approaches. My friend, Christine, insists that one bird, the one who does not leave, is some spirit of Rob.

The light leaves later each day. And all around me life pulses. Most days I notice. I watch.


II.

Tonight the wind came out of the west with a sudden fierceness and tree limbs broke and fell landing with a loud enough crash to startle both of my brothers and me. A few minutes later, a rainbow briefly appeared in the southern sky and on the back deck, Jack pointed to a small piece of blue shell. Above it the nest remains, empty now.

Sometimes, I think we all are seeking what we might call home. It is all so temporary though.


III.

Each day, I listen for Rob as I walk--noting with a certain curiosity the sudden whistle of the wind, the drone of a distant leaf blower, the call of birds and neighbors as I walk by.

Each night I look for my husband as if he might be playing a bit of hide and seek alongside the clouds that obscure and reveal the moon.


Like Whitman, I know Rob stops somewhere waiting for me.


IV.

This is how it is.
For now.

Longing (Tuscany, 2009. M.A. Reilly)

Beyond Hammonton

BY STEPHEN DUNN

Night is longing, longing, longing,
beyond all endurance. 
—Henry Miller 

The back roads I’ve traveled late   

at night, alone, a little drunk,   

wishing I were someone

on whom nothing is lost,

are the roads by day I take

to the car wash in Hammonton   

or to Blue Anchor’s

lawnmower repair shop

when the self-propel mechanism goes.

Fascinating how the lamplight   

that’s beckoned

from solitary windows

gives way to white shutters

and occasionally a woman

in her yard, bending over

something conspicuously in bloom.

So much then is duty, duty, duty,   

and so much

with the sun visor tilted

and destination known

can be endured.

But at night . . . no, even at night   

so much can be endured.

I’ve known only one man   

who left the road,

followed an intriguing light   

to its source.

He told me

that he knocked many times   

before it became clear to him   

he must break down the door.

Stephen Dunn, “Beyond Hammonton” New and Selected Poems (1974-1994). Copyright © 1994 by Stephen Dunn