I often think of the past. It's not because I'm an Indiana Jones geek. It's because I'm a poet, and most poets I know are haunted by ghosts--people and places and events that have left strong imprints on our psyches. I think the holidays especially are a time when the veil between the physical world and whatever exists beyond is much thinner. Almost transparent. My atheist friends would probably tell me that it's an acute awareness of mortality.
However it's labeled, December is rife with shades from the past.
Billy Collins does some archeology . . .
Digging
by: Billy Collins
It seems whenever I dig in the woods
on the slope behind this house
I unearth some object from the past—
a shard of crockery or a bottle with its stopper missing,
sometimes a piece of metal, maybe handled
by the dairy farmer who built this house
over a century and a half ago
as civil war waged unabated to the south.
So it’s never a surprise
when the shovel-tip hits a rusted bolt,
or a glass knob from a drawer—
little hands waving from the past.
And today, it’s a buried toy,
a little car with a dent in the roof
and enough flecks of paint to tell it was blue.
Shrouded in a towel, the body of our cat
lies nearby on the ground where I settled her
in the mottled light of the summer trees,
and I still have to widen the hole
and deepen it for her by at least another foot,
but not before I stop for a moment
with the once-blue car idling in my palm,
to imagine the boy who grew up here
and to see that two of the crusted wheels still spin.
This Collins poem is certainly a reminder of death in a lot of ways--returning to the dust and mud from which all sprang. It's also full of apparitions: the dairy farmer, the Civil War, the boy who owned the toy car, and the cat awaiting burial.
I'm pretty tired tonight. I spent the morning playing music for church services. Then I did some grocery shopping and took my son to buy good cologne. (Yes, he's at that age when teenagers become aware of bodily smells.) When I got home, I cooked dinner and folded laundry.
That might not sound like I accomplished much today, but it's all I could manage. Small, easily-completed tasks. I'm trying to practice some selfcare. The very idea of trying to do much else overwhelms me. I had so much hope and joy before November 5, and now I call it a victory if I toast a piece of bread and butter it.
And I've been thinking a lot about my ghosts of Christmases past, as well. They've been with me quite a bit today. Even as I sit on my couch typing this post, I can still feel them reading every word on my laptop screen. When I'm done, I plan on rewatching a documentary about the life of Flannery O'Connor. Because, in a weird way, it lifts my spirits a little--this gravely ill Southern writer who never let her life circumstances slow down her creativity.
Flannery once said, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful." She suffered from lupus for 12 years before finally succumbing to it at the age of 39. In that time, she became one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. I believe that she saw her affliction as grace. It gave her the freedom to write her strange, violent, God-haunted fictions.
I'm not sure I have O'Connor's faith to accept my current struggles as grace. It sure didn't feel like grace when I was weeping uncontrollably about an hour ago. Yet, here I am, finishing the last few sentences of this grief-haunted blog post.
I can't really bring myself to contemplate tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. For right now, I can only face the next moment. That's pretty much all that anybody can do. And it's enough.
Here's another Billy Collins poem that made Saint Marty laugh tonight:
Looking for a Friend in a Crowd of
Arriving Passengers: A Sonnet
by: Billy Collins
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
John Whalen.
And another reminder for myself and anyone else who needs it . . .
