I cherish this poem about my grandmother, written by one of her students
Sketches of Neva
I remember her curled into the hand of a chair like a still life in the bright pink turtleneck with the pink blossoms and the green leaves fanned behind her. The shiny white-gray cap of hair— and then gesturing and laughing and stirring the still life like a fish breaking a reflection on a lake.
She went chanting e.e. cummings in the hallway at 8:25 before class, giving us the faces called flowers and the dancing mountains and darling, giving everything away because keeping is nothing and darkness.
"I know what it is to be old and striving after the unreachable,” she said, risking the big failures, going out too far. “The beauty, the glory is the not knowing until you try and the persistence.”
She touches living passionately.
“Entropy is the law of the universe,” she said, "Everything runs down, none of us can get out of this alive, we are doomed.” I give her the words of writer James E. Gunn:
“Life itself is impossible…but men exist by reversing entropy." Perhaps she cannot see the road's end because she walks it backwards.
She refuses to believe in Hemingway's Nada, wanting to use the darkness, to travel into the darkness, not really afraid. Nada is not right: something must wait in the blackness.
“We move down into the well of individuality," she said,
"to, finally, the wellspring or stream of universality.”
Mother of my spirit, she has sometimes touched my sword, too, and transformed it into a cross.
She welcomes, greets every single one into that home of a million memories…
I see her wanting to take the tumbleweeds into her home for chandeliers…
I see her wrapped in hot pink, turquoise, and purple…
remember her with lilacs and daffodils…I see her
inebriated with air.
I recall her conversation that is sometimes poetry and how she shows me little scenes like the "rocks upholstered in green" that I would somehow miss.
I see her like the “loveliest of trees" whom I shall see in every spring like "the cherry hung with snow”…
I see her ready to dance like Zorba, no matter the outcome.
I remember our chipmunk waiting for us on the white boulder
and I hold the light, shared, heart-true laugh.
Comments