Maureen Scott Harris

I look up and I look up.

Each time it's you entering the room.  

It's these long twilights, the kind we had at home across

that field behind the house by the railway tracks where

the clouds flew up at evening.

These books, this music, my life-how could

I have forgotten?

 

I'm trying to surrender despair, that

helplessness.

I'm trying to walk under this umbrella, love, its s

stiff jointed arms, its silken

fabric, its awkward angling

embrace.

I look up and it's surrounded by sky.

 

I've entered the room where the drapes are blowing,

the floor gleams, the furniture is quiet.

This canopy, that desk with the flowers,

my joined arm stiff from writing.

I look up and I look up and-

 

Each time it's you entering the room,

surrounded by sky.

 

My hands are full of words in

the evening distance, space

where wind combs the fields at twilight, clouds

flying up.

 

I'm not begging a subway token in the library

from a woman I've never met before,    

then picking my way across a squelchy field

full of large unidentifiable geese

- or are they seals? - towards

the bus stop. I have not

lost my purse because I stupidly left it

under the table in the fast food place

when I went to order. Nor have I

explained myself patiently to my dead mother

one more time. The radio comes on and

the announcer announces someone's Andalusia.

A violin plays and I'm thinking of

Gerry Shikatani and that special issue of

The Capilano Review called, I think,  

"The Gardens of Andalusia."

I must find it - is it with the books

I packed away, or in a pile on the floor? Why

did I not introduce myself to him when

I had the chance, my head electric

with his talk? When he spoke of

"the way of writing" I found myself

thinking Why that's my way, too. Perhaps

it is that simple.

 

Your letters have kept me company for weeks

but now I feel the wrench of parting, the book

about to end, and so I read more slowly, put

it down, rattle around aimlessly in my study.

Proof of my affection, this delay, in finishing.

 

How alive you are on the page, and how like

a vessel, this large book, containing glimpses

of your life, messy and confused as

a pebble beach. No detail too small, you wrote,

and article by article you share the toucan,

the nervous cats, housekeeping, the heat.

There you are, practicing your "life-long

impersonation of an ordinary woman."*

 

Lit by the filament of poetry, you didn't buckle

under loss but made an art of it - Awful but

cheerful is carved on your gravestone,

your own words, there at your request.

 

Reading your letters I want to write back.

I'd send you this statement "The primary

function of the thorax is respiration" hoping

you'd turn it into a poem - one stanza

perhaps holding the sienna gleam of

a beetle making its slow way across

a wide leaf, rhythm laboured and chancy

as your own asthmatic breathing.

 

 

*Poet James Merrill spoke of Elizabeth Bishop's "instinctive, modest, life-long impersonation of an ordinary woman."