“At midnight tears
Run into your ears.”
― Louise Bogan
I feel as if we have just entered a new era, an era of midnight tears, an era that defies belief and sleep. Maybe that’s why I keep looking backwards instead of forward, reading books that pay tribute to times and loved ones who have passed, books like Denise Duhamel’s Pink Lady. Gary Young’s American Analects, Beth Gylis’s After My Father, Dustin Brookshire’s anthology, When I Was Straight, a Tribute to Maureen Seaton, which I will discuss tomorrow.
Last night I read Pink Lady, Denise Duhamel’s heart-wrenching book about her mother’s last year and found myself weeping unconsolably. And when I fell asleep, I dreamt I was talking to my own mother who was seated in her favorite flowered chair, looking like her younger self, but then I realized she wasn’t there. Is this a common dream of loved ones who have passed?
In the dream I keep losing my mother—
the nursing home hallways are crowded,
and when I look at the wheelchair I’m pushing,
it’s empty. I turn around and press through,
afraid she’s slipped out. I go to the main desk
where an orderly tells me he thinks
he saw her in Room 104, so I hurry there
to find my mother, young again,
sitting upright, biting into a pear.
When I wake, I go to my dream dictionary—
eating the pear indicates success.
But nothing about the significance of 104.
A quick Google search brings me
to an “Angel Number” site, which tells me”
Your angel is close to you now,
looking for ways she can assist.
I’ve always been a fan of Gary Young’s prose poetry. His short untitled poems can frame a moment or capture an insight in a way that lingers in the mind for days. In his most recent collection, American Analects, Young magically weaves together poems about his friends and family, the Japanese painter Buson, and his mentor, the painter, Gene Holton to create a meditation on art, aging, and loss. I was particularly taken with the poems about Gene Holton.
Gene said, a love affair in old age is what the world is all about. Everything is more expanded—you find yourself surprised to have feeling that you didn’t have the day before, and you discover new ones every day. He said, when Elizabeth died, the vacancy was overwhelming; I couldn’t recognize the world. Things are very still here, he said. The stillness of impossibility is one thing, but this stillness is everywhere. He said, lately there’s been a change: Elizabeth is becoming a reference point rather than a reality, and her absence is oppressive, unbearable. I have her pans, her hat, but I want Elizabeth back.
Gene kept painting after Elizabeth died, but said, I've lost my audience. He said, at least I haven't lost interest in the conversation with the work, but there's no reason for doing it, and who's doing it is unknown to me.
Then I want to mention Beth Gylys’s chapbook, After My Father, a Book of Odes. Glyys, who is known for her mastery of the villanelle, is almost a mistress of the ode. I especially love her “Ode to My Father’s Manhattans.”
Ode to My Father’s Manhattans by Beth Gylys
Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.
Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime,
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.
My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing,
hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.