This is my third night in my new home. It has been christened with the strains of Great Big Sea, The Dixie Chicks, Coldplay, some traditional Irish music, a cluster of dear friends, two shih tzus who guard me, and memories of my parents in photo frames (and then, as always, in my heart).
One part of unpacking boxes is rediscovering wonderful memories you’d forgotten about….like echoes from your past. At 42, well, there is as much past behind me as there is future in front of me. It’s hard to believe my 20s and 30s have disappeared…as I tend to believe I’m part Hobbit or faery, so there is always the ethereal and Celtic in my blood, something more timeless that walks through dimensions and defies mortality. (It’s the part that allows me to believe in faeries and to listen to the songs of the trees, in shadow or in sun…)
My favourite part of the last two days is the time I’ve spent on my own unpacking boxes of old CDs and books. Each one marks a specific time period in my life. There might be a song that triggers memories of a road trip with a lost love, or a box of cassette tapes I kept from my old CKLU radio show. (I haven’t been brave enough yet to crack those open and listen to them….I was so young.)
One book that called out to me this evening is my friend Liz Zetlin’s collection, The Gourd Poems. It won the Shaunt Basmajian Award in 1999. Liz has always inspired me and is a poetic mentor and inspiration to me. I first met her in the mid to late 1990s, when I volunteered to help fundraise for the League of Canadian Poets. We stayed together at LCP AGM back in Winnipeg in the late 1990s and became friends. We don’t talk as often these days….but I still consider her a dear friend.
The Gourd Poems is a wondrous collection of work. Liz lived in Markdale, a rural area near Owen Sound, Ontario, for years. She had her own “punctuation field,” which she photographed from the air. She has a brilliantly creative mind. These particular poems were borne of the idea to carve single words into gourds. As the gourds grew, so too did the words, stretching out across the surface of the gourds. As Liz writes in her introduction: “Considered the first cultivated plant, perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago, ornamental gourds have an honoured place in human history. Gourds have been used in ceremony and ritual as well as for drinking vessels, bowls, bottles, floats, masks, rattles, drums, birdhouses and art. They have been found in Peruvian excavations dating back 5,000 years and in Egyptian tombs. To the native Hawaiians, gourds were sacred–the heavens were the top of the gourd, the earth the lower half and the celestial bodies were the seeds and pulp.” One day, Liz emailed me and asked for a series of words that resonated in my own life….I chose “daisy” (my favourite flower, so simple and elegant), “deer”, and “song.” I also remember saying something about how I often spoke with my hands. That aspect of myself, too, is ensconced in the poem. From that odd clutch of words, my dear friend wrote the poem titled “Every moment speaks” and dedicated it to me.
I remembered it faintly, but found it again tonight, reading through Liz’s wonderful chapbook. It struck me that so much of that beautiful poem, written about fifteen years ago, speaks to the transition I’m going through these days. I won’t write out all of it here….but I can’t resist sharing a couple of snippets with you all:
Everywhere the memories pass
through the land like ghosts.
Trodden and marked, we keep
reaching back to that ruffled edge,
stumble over its surface, noticing
how time bends and melts under its crust
as everything runs into memory.
That is how it has been this week, leaving behind the last physical remnant of my parents as they were, once alive and vibrant in a house that helped to “grow” me. They supported me as an artistic soul, even when they had no idea of what poetry was about, or how it would work in terms of raising a little girl who loved books, but who was sad and later became very depressed as a young adult. They sheltered me, encouraged me, attended every poetry reading (clapping the loudest), and raised a fairly decent human being and poet. (There are no lessons on how to raise a poet child…and I think they did the best they could, given my moods and fancies….and I thank them for that kindness.) I miss them both so much, every single day.
When people talk of how they dread family dinners or gatherings, I feel unbelievably sad inside and think “oh, how blessed and lucky are you, to still have parents, or to even have one left.” I get angry, hearing them complain about their parents. I think, “who will walk me down the aisle, if I ever get married?” I wonder “who will tell me which ancestor is in the photo, or what story is behind a yellowed letter or sepia toned photo?” Most of all, though, I miss their hugs and the sounds of their voices and laughter. (You’d be amazed at how much you can miss a hug….and all it conveys. You’d also be surprised at how horrid it feels to not be able to remember a loved one’s voice after a time….something that once was so familiar is almost lost to the mists of time…and you feel guilty about that loss of voice.)
The end of Liz’s poem strikes a chord in my heart about how we all need to move forward, without losing touch with our past, or how we imagined it to have been. We always, as humans, gild and glorify memory….perhaps because the reality wasn’t always that Rockwellian. In any case, Liz wrote:
….memory still runs
sweet, covering her tracks
until nothing is visible
but the song in your throat,
how it used to be,
wasn’t really,
could have been,
and tonight is all white
with a calm lasting until dawn
when every moment speaks
with its own hands.
I think tonight, listening to a cooling rain fall after days and days of heavy humidity here in Northern Ontario, that things lift….things like darkness, things like heartbreak and despair, and things like losing parents, loves and friends. After the cooling rain, after the loneliness, there is some promise of better times ahead. There is, at the very least, peace in my heart….even if that heart sometimes feels broken and askew. There is, now, more peace than frantic intensity, more calm than despair, more balance than insanity. For that I am grateful….and I move forward and listen while “every moment speaks” to me with new vibrancy and sacred light.
peace,
k.
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