The lovely picture above is a digital artwork/photo by Walter W. Smith, and part of dVerse Poets Pub Poetics prompt, hosted by Sheila Moore today. It was the inspiration for my draft poem below.
The Other Shore, From Various Angles
When my first dog died,
by freak accident,
I didn’t know how to reach her.
I sent letters finally
through the “D” volume of
my Junior Britannica, as if its bright red
spine bound a path to
another shore, as if my dog
could read there.
Sometime later, when
my grandma died, after
a fall and a day’s hard suffering,
I found her in dreams. She would sit
before me in the eyelid of a school bus where
I’d see again the kindness of
her profile, soft chin
sloping to unjudgmental neck. I would
be desperate to speak to her, but
would avert face, tears, certain they
were markers that this was not, in fact,
her bus, and would banish her
once more.
The ashes of her daughter, Val–at least
a portion–we started sifting
into the sea by palmfuls.
The ash of bone
is so much heavier than the ash of tree
that one expects it to sink instantly. But
these did not sink, floating instead, as
a second briny foam,
till I, now adult, now mother,
felt pushed to step out far, to throw
out hard, the thick flesh of my thighs prickling with
deep salt cold, so that the powdered grey scud
could not wash back, but would be carried
out to sea and sparkling surface.
I don’t know why
this seemed so important–
except that hers was a life that had grown painful
at the end, painful
for a very long time, and already she
had been marked by hurt brain, hurt
body, someone who had never truly known
her own sufficiency–and I somehow did not want
those ashes straggling back to this,
our landlocked shore, to be stepped upon or
through, caught idly,
cast back.
(All rights reserved. The below is an old watercolor of mine, which actually depicts my grandmother on that dream bus.)
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