December 2013 – Page 2 – Grace Mattern

December 13, 2013December 13, 2013

Day 5: Pearl Light, Impossible Poems, Silence

Pearl light, empty and cold. Clumps of the off-and-on light snow from the last few days top the browned hydrangea blossoms. The white lying across the fields and caught in hemlock needles bounces the day back up into itself, a bit of brilliance. There won’t be many hours of light today, but at least what there is will be reflecting into the air, hard and dry.

David and I have been talking this morning, about the party we went to last night, a collection of poet friends, each of us quirky with creativity and the struggle to hold the making of poems, defenseless little expressions in such a chaotic world, as a primary focus in the face of enormous demands. Each of us gathered last night have such huge loads to carry – challenging and time-gobbling jobs, or aging family members who require constant attention, or young adult children slipping their tires as they try to get traction in adult lives. It’s a wonder any of us ever write anything.

Our holiday party tradition includes the hostess giving everyone a prompt to write a poem. After eating, we each read our poem – or not, those too overwhelmed to write are easily excused – and we tell ourselves we’ll just listen to each other, it’s not a night for critiquing, it’s a party, not a workshop. But we can’t help ourselves. Reactions to the poems leak out.

“I wish we could let go of feeling we need to comment on the poems,” a new member of the group said to me as we were leaving. This was her first holiday party. “Did you notice the silence after each of us read, as we tried to figure out what to say that wasn’t a critique?”

Mostly I just noticed how much more silence there was after my poem. Or did I imagine that?

The prompt: Traditions Made New. My poem:

The Table

“The table comes first,” the French say
and our table fills, and fills again, golden

oak sliding open on gears, leaves unfolded.
A voice carries from the snowy road, lilt

of the neighbor calling her dog, a woman
who never left her house, who now walks

every day past the pruned apple trees
and boxes of frozen garden. Chairs move

in and out of rooms, go back up on hooks
in the barn. The house has nothing to prove.

December 12, 2013December 13, 2013

Day 4: Create

The morning comes up pink. There’s going to be sun today and already the cast of the day has changed. I anchor myself in what I see, the line of sky against the slopes of the fields to the east, the color behind the bare trees.

David tells me I should engage my visual talents more. My drawing has certainly improved over the last year, as I draw cows and horses and penguins for Emilio. If I look at an object closely, I can draw a reasonable representation of it. Collage work is completely engaging for me – someone else has already done the representational part of the work, I just need to arrange it in ways that remind me of arranging the language in a poem. Two years ago, during one of our many visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, David and I walked through a small show of collage works, and there were two pieces by Anne Ryan, a writer, painter and printmaker who didn’t begin working in the medium of collage until the age of 58. Before her death at 64, she created over 400 works. She was inspired to take up collage work after attending an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters, a German poet and sculptor, as well as collagist. “Since Anne Ryan was a poet, in Schwitters’s collages ‘she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.'”

Why not me? Why do I take out my box of cards and books with images I’ve saved for the possibility of collage, my papers and pens and colored pencils, for a day or two at a time, then pack it all up and put it back on the shelf? I can be inspired too.

Permission to engage in visual expression is all mine. I can create because I want to create, it doesn’t have to be useful. My goodness, in what way is poetry useful? In what way is any creative writing useful? If I can tie working on something to an ambition to get it published, it might get me to the desk more often to work on it, but my focus, my stepping into the flow, is the same once I’m working on anything creative. Without any realistic way to be ambitious about visual art, it gets pushed aside even more than writing. So maybe I’ll start pushing my ambition aside and just create. Drawing a cow for Emilio is enough because he wants to see the cow. Moving a collection of images and ideas out of my head on to paper in the form of a collage or drawing, rather than a poem or essay or story, is a world I may let myself start stepping into more often.

December 10, 2013

Day 3: Finding Light

Last night I went to a Kundalini Yoga class, my first time with that practice. Lots of “fire breath,” quick in and out through the nose, while we held long poses that challenged my muscles’ strength, as much as their stretch. Kundalini is based on the concept of moving the latent energy at the base of the spine up, through the higher chakras, into the brain. During our final sitting pose the teacher said “May our bodies be more open and our minds quieter. May the light in me find the light in each of you.”

Finding light. That’s one of the answers.

Eric and I had a well-established tradition of creating our own holiday cards, using a poem I’d written and an image we often got off the internet, or copied from another card. In early December I would give Eric several poems I’d written in the previous year. Almost always he would easily pick the poem he wanted to use, saying about the others, “these are too dark.”

The year after Eric died I picked a poem from the manuscript of The Truth About Death. I ran it by Adrienne and she thought it was fine. I paired it with a photo Adrienne had taken that fall, of Matt and Sam walking under the tall white pines further down our road, a tunnel of diminished light. The poem references that spot. Perfect.

Except when Sam saw the card, which I’d already printed and had ready to mail, he said, “You can’t use this as a holiday card. The poem is too dark, the photo is dark. There’s a suicide in here.” I knew he was right. I scrapped the cards and started over.

This morning as I ran under those trees in the dimness I thought about that card. I thought about yoga class last night. I thought about getting more energy up into my higher charkas, my crown. I thought about looking for light and as I ran back to the house I noticed frosted grasses along the edge of the road, a hint of sparkle in the thin morning light.

First and Last

Dawn has shifted. This morning wild turkeys
scurry among the tall white pines that shelter
the farm dump, a needled lane lined with tires,
piles of scrap wood, rusted stoves and refrigerators,
a baler. A neighbor shot himself here, in his car.
The turkeys are short ghosts, short soldiers,
upright between long trunks, ruined rectangles
behind them, nothing but frozen road before me.
At dusk another shift, an edge of steel falls
from the sky. I watch it fall, hard and familiar,
comfortable and cold. I can taste the metal.

December 9, 2013

Day 2: Two Weeks to the Turn II

Dark when I wake. Darkness wrapping the house and yard, blackness a soft touch on my shoulders. The new clock, all white, with feathers for hands, points from its small circle base, a straight, bright line on the wall: 6:00 a.m. No light on the horizon yet, the first light the embers in the wood stove that I pump to orange with the bellows. The kindling pops up in flame, then a log. I sit in front of the glow and the darkness sits around me.

Anne P. commented on my blog last night. The new you. Comprised of the past, but not consumed by it. Surrounded by happiness, it shines through you. As the darkness recedes, crests, retreats once more. Left on the shore with a new wholeness. Life, surfing the waves.

David and his brother and I drove to the coast on Saturday, old people going for a drive, because David’s brother’s back and hip are too sore to walk much. That’s life surfing the waves, getting to the pulse of tide however we could. Little Harbor was brimming, tide as high as I’ve seen it. Driving north, after a loop around Rye Harbor, we passed a stretch of marsh, grass golden between the pools of hard blue water chopped up by a cold wind, a striking contrast.

Beauty is so often about how one visual bumps up against what is next to it. “No one travels to see flat land,” someone once said to me and it seems true. People travel to see mountains and cities. Or great expanses of water, which are flat but fluid, the contrast between firm ground and a sloshing medium, all movement, wash and warble, come and go, in and out. A shore where we find ourselves, before, after, now.

When the light comes it’s gray.

December 8, 2013

A New Look and A Return

A number of writer friends have been admonishing me for well over a year to change my photo on this blog. Yes, it was an okay photo for my book, because after all The Truth About Death is just that and why wouldn’t I look grim on the back cover? But this blog is about all of life, not just the sad passages, and surely I could find a better photo of who I am as a whole self. One friend snapped some shots of me with her mini iPad the last time our writing group was gathered, figuring anything was better than what I had.

So I took that as motivation to get some real head shots done. Which turned out to be easy when shortly after the iPad photo session I met a colleague of Adrienne’s, a talented photographer who was happy to snap a bunch of shots when I met her. So thank you, Michelle Frantino, for the new look.

I’ve been admonishing myself about updating the overall look of the blog. I’ve recently been redecorating my house, taking down paintings and prints and photographs I hung decades ago and putting up new pieces of art. I’ve replaced light fixtures, rearranged furniture, and greatly reduced the cluttery stuff that accumulates on counters and sills and shelves like the dust all those tchotchkes collect. My blog needs the same kind of attention, a bit of which I’ve started. (Like the house redecorating, this is a process, not a once-and-done task.)

But one thing I’m repeating. I’ve already written about my project last year of writing 300 – 400 words every day for the two weeks leading up to the winter solstice. I’m doing it again, Two Weeks to the Turn II. This year I’m going to put up at least some of each day’s writing on this blog, every day. In the midst of the gathering darkness, and the frenzy of celebrating designed to push back against that very darkness, I’m going to find at least some time every day to focus on writing and try to find something worthwhile to share. Here is a tiny bit from today, and it’s not even original. It’s what one of my writer friends suggested was my real topic when I read a selection from last year’s Two Weeks to the Turn at our last group meeting.

The question is, how do David and I make happiness in the face of all the loss and heartache that brought us together?

I’ll be working on some answers.

December 2, 2013December 2, 2013

Celebrate

David and I didn’t make it above tree line in November, and rather than regret that I’m celebrating all the months this year we did manage to hike and reach a peak or a view, our time in woods and wilderness.

But mostly I’m thinking about what we did in November instead of hiking, because it’s been a month with many reasons for celebration. We spent a lot of time with family and friends, while finishing house projects in preparation for a big holiday weekend, full of even more family and friends. On Thanksgiving, all four of our children were together for the first time, and after the big, and very fun, groups of visiting family left on Friday, we had an evening with the six of us and Matt and Emilio. “First time eva,” as Adrienne posted on Facebook. “What up now?”

Equally sweet was another big event we’ve been planning in secret — a marriage celebration. On Thanksgiving night, after lighting the Hanukkah candles, David and I surprised everyone gathered in our living room by finally having a wedding. We were married 18 months ago and we didn’t tell anyone for almost a year (the reasons for this are too complicated for a blog post), except for Emilio. We told him two weeks before our appointment with the Rabbi, who married us. Emilio was four months old at the time and we were pretty sure he could keep our secret.

So we never had a wedding and some of the people closest to us (especially my sister Chris) really wanted us to and we’d always planned to have a public ceremony of commitment, even before we were sure that would be a legal marriage, so we decided, why not here and now?

After a day of feasting and celebrating Thanksgivukkah, David and I spoke our vows to each other, in front of many of those closest to us. And then we had cake and champagne, bounty on bounty.

David began by saying, We have Chris to thank for encouraging us to create this surprise and celebrate our marriage now. We wanted all of our family to be here, especially our children and here they are, the first time they have all been together in one place at the same time. So, rapere ad tempus in gloria. Seize the glorious moment. In the best of worlds everyone would be here, all the family and friends we would want as witness. It’s rarely the best of worlds, always the world as it is, and this is it.

I followed. And this is the moment we’ve chosen to declare our commitment to each other publicly. When we first told our children we were married, almost a year afterwards, Melia told us she wouldn’t consider us really married until we stood in front of people and said vows to each other. Chris has been urging us to celebrate our marriage sooner rather than later, and when we realized today we would have our four children gathered together, and so many of the family we love, we decided to celebrate today. It’s a day of thanks and awareness of all there is to be grateful for, and David and I are so very grateful for what we have between us every day, it’s seems perfectly fitting to declare out marriage vows to each other today, with all of you as our witnesses. To have a wedding.

So we did.