Im not usually one for posting my own poems in April, but my father would have been 79 years old today. I wrote this after going home to Detroit and realizing that, since he was cremated, there was no headstone or cemetery to visit. It was the first time I understood what monuments mean and why we build them. Happy Birthday old man (who died too young.) At the Agnes Martin Exhibition It wasnt foul weather that chased me in here but a long assault of black limousines, a hearse at the start. Im not superstitious. Truly, I dont know what to do about the grieving. Ive lost my faith in consolation. Consolation but not geometry. Clean lines make good company. Ammons says, The form enables a self becoming, but I say form is a self unbecoming. I say form allows the grieving their grief. Form is my shoulders shouldering up this first autumn after my fathers death. Form is the shape of my grace. I bake pies for their roundness, I stack photographs by size. Every morning I measure coffee in heaping teaspoons and sleep by the circles under my eyes. I soap up one leg and down the other. I write sonnets to save space. So it was faith that brought me to these window-size grids awash in grieving tones. Look -- its my childhood meadow in ecstasy: the canvas that stretches from the shoulder of every Michigan highway in May. Fields of color -- larkspur blue, wild ginger white, the pure pink of partridgeberry. From a distance this saturation is motion, a whole wide meadow blooming. But closer up each canvas is a single petal under the microscope -- the surface magnified so its weave of veins and time matches the weave of veins and time on my hands. Patterns blend. I feel almost regular. Still, the old woman had an awful need to sanctify. She named these pictures after the trees of Eden and desert flowers, fantastic or divine. Actually, there are no flowers figured here, no recognizable forms, just clean lines undoing into petal, color, wash and grid. Yet these canvases all say to me: here is your geometry, your consolation, grace. Make this your sacred place, perfect cemetery. Stay here and be yourself, myself, unbecoming in grief.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 14:17:47 +0000
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