November 7
I am looking at this curious photograph of a 94-year old great-grandmother holding an eleven pound premature baby who spent the first four months of his life in the hospital & who still requires quarantine due to the fragility of his lungs. & though I know the child’s parents, he is a stranger to me, as is the frail old woman. & her eyes regard the child with a tenderness that seems to speak in years, while his own fawn over distances making shapes & conjuring the world into the familiar. What life will he lead? & then, towards its end, palsied, fragile all over again, what child will he hold in his shaking hands? & where, I wonder, always, where does that living go, that meaning that seems to call from us with such blazing intensity? All of these days fugitive & irretrievable, & then as we age our fingers seem to clutch tighter those things that intimate our own mortality. A child’s eye full of vitality. The wild countenance of a threatened moose bucking its forelegs at a passing truck. A sunrise in which the trees articulate the horizon in labyrinthine silhouetted line. & the curious thing of it is to know in earnest that the entire enterprise is nothing short of miraculous, even while we have no idea why. I will die one day & my body will be put to flame & I will cease to be.
I think often of the graveyard just past the farm in Salem, with its slumbering tombstones swallowed in their various angles of disrepair by the wild, untended blades of grass & prairie weeds. The engraving on some of them is so weather-worn that even in running your finger across the illegible scroll, nothing sensible returns to the faculty of reason. As if the name were written in chalk. & then others have crumbled into several pieces, or have fallen flat & been covered by creeping lichens & moss. & the swelling ground is unkept. You hear the swish-swish of the willows, the soft thud of the occasional black walnut on the dark soil, where it, too, will burgeon with rain & desiccate under the sun & find no purchase in that forgotten place. You want to hear more, sense more, feel some ghost at your side, but there it is, instead, the natural silence of forgetfulness.
The farm is instructive in that regard. Those battered frames of the old cars half-buried by now in an ancient dirt, leaves wind-drifted in heaving wet piles on the seats, the wiring splaying out & rusted, the windows long since shattered. Or the out-buildings all sagging & struggling yet to stand, & within their doors nothing to shelter over but stray two-by-fours & stale rags & hardened dog shit & leaves, always leaves. Or the obsolesced farm equipment scattered about, as if abandoned suddenly & without further consideration, mid-plow, mid-augur. Even the old Massy Ferguson, with its white pillow on the red seat rain-bloated & tired, that corduroy blue heart quilted on so many years ago faded & denimed with sun & neglect.
& yet for all of that, it is the life of the place that recalls itself, even in the consideration of what has irrevocably passed from it. If I think on grandfather’s funeral, I recall standing around the burn bin with my uncle & my brothers. Or I think of getting bleary-eyed drunk with my cousins, raising our cans of beer in salute not with the feckless abandon of our youth, but with the reverence due the occasion. I think of my dad’s crowsfeet, my brother in thick glasses, my quidnuk aunts in a tempest around the house while yet it stood. & all of that life, all of that meaning, takes on precisely the same pallor as its recognition of what is past. How striking the sympathies between past-grief & the cherishing of the present, between loss & fullness. I can find myself overwhelmed with love for my life, for its cast of characters past & present, & that gratitude can pierce my chest & feel identical to that sweet melancholy that recollection affords us. We grieve, when we do, out of love, I suppose, which makes a fair amount of sense. & then when we love, we recognize inherent in it always a pending grief, maybe, a looming farewell. One that spells out the years & awaits what cannot be avoided. & our grief & our love both some swift monument, some demarcation that substantiates us, however briefly, before we, too, absent the world that we clutched all the while so tightly to our breast.
Which is to say that the context of our lives likely holds neither coherence nor design nor lingering comfort, but what we carry along in our own remembrance & haunted continuum does, insofar as these elemental congruities reveal themselves whether or not we would conjure them. & they do, they seem to, with astonishing frequency. My heart can ache for things I did or didn’t do twenty years ago & I can find that ache twinned in looking past the window today. Not that I want to file both under the same category, but that ache can recall itself beyond our rational faculties, & then of a sudden, when I thought I was just standing with my forehead to the cold pane of glass looking over the tundra suddenly I am also holding a handful of grey stones, readying myself to cast them through the glass of some old jalopy while acres away my grandfolks sit inside by the too-warm fire.
I think often of the graveyard just past the farm in Salem, with its slumbering tombstones swallowed in their various angles of disrepair by the wild, untended blades of grass & prairie weeds. The engraving on some of them is so weather-worn that even in running your finger across the illegible scroll, nothing sensible returns to the faculty of reason. As if the name were written in chalk. & then others have crumbled into several pieces, or have fallen flat & been covered by creeping lichens & moss. & the swelling ground is unkept. You hear the swish-swish of the willows, the soft thud of the occasional black walnut on the dark soil, where it, too, will burgeon with rain & desiccate under the sun & find no purchase in that forgotten place. You want to hear more, sense more, feel some ghost at your side, but there it is, instead, the natural silence of forgetfulness.
The farm is instructive in that regard. Those battered frames of the old cars half-buried by now in an ancient dirt, leaves wind-drifted in heaving wet piles on the seats, the wiring splaying out & rusted, the windows long since shattered. Or the out-buildings all sagging & struggling yet to stand, & within their doors nothing to shelter over but stray two-by-fours & stale rags & hardened dog shit & leaves, always leaves. Or the obsolesced farm equipment scattered about, as if abandoned suddenly & without further consideration, mid-plow, mid-augur. Even the old Massy Ferguson, with its white pillow on the red seat rain-bloated & tired, that corduroy blue heart quilted on so many years ago faded & denimed with sun & neglect.
& yet for all of that, it is the life of the place that recalls itself, even in the consideration of what has irrevocably passed from it. If I think on grandfather’s funeral, I recall standing around the burn bin with my uncle & my brothers. Or I think of getting bleary-eyed drunk with my cousins, raising our cans of beer in salute not with the feckless abandon of our youth, but with the reverence due the occasion. I think of my dad’s crowsfeet, my brother in thick glasses, my quidnuk aunts in a tempest around the house while yet it stood. & all of that life, all of that meaning, takes on precisely the same pallor as its recognition of what is past. How striking the sympathies between past-grief & the cherishing of the present, between loss & fullness. I can find myself overwhelmed with love for my life, for its cast of characters past & present, & that gratitude can pierce my chest & feel identical to that sweet melancholy that recollection affords us. We grieve, when we do, out of love, I suppose, which makes a fair amount of sense. & then when we love, we recognize inherent in it always a pending grief, maybe, a looming farewell. One that spells out the years & awaits what cannot be avoided. & our grief & our love both some swift monument, some demarcation that substantiates us, however briefly, before we, too, absent the world that we clutched all the while so tightly to our breast.
Which is to say that the context of our lives likely holds neither coherence nor design nor lingering comfort, but what we carry along in our own remembrance & haunted continuum does, insofar as these elemental congruities reveal themselves whether or not we would conjure them. & they do, they seem to, with astonishing frequency. My heart can ache for things I did or didn’t do twenty years ago & I can find that ache twinned in looking past the window today. Not that I want to file both under the same category, but that ache can recall itself beyond our rational faculties, & then of a sudden, when I thought I was just standing with my forehead to the cold pane of glass looking over the tundra suddenly I am also holding a handful of grey stones, readying myself to cast them through the glass of some old jalopy while acres away my grandfolks sit inside by the too-warm fire.
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