Memorial Day / The Cusp of Sleep
Memorial Day
We go walking quite early this morning, my friend and I, the day promising unusual heat and humidity for Memorial Day. We walk along the edge of the two-lane highway, already busy with cars heading to the nearby ocean beaches, families happily anticipating a day of surf and sand.
faint sounds
of a marching band—
long ago parades
The dead squirrel is still on the sidewalk, its remains transformed by a week of weather to a mat of fur on the macadam, so dried out that even flies are no longer interested.
Then we come upon a baby opossum, newly killed, no sign of blood or impact on its perfect body, its snout a shining point of light, its fur stirring in the faint breeze, each silver shaft glistening. We swerve around it, she to the left, I to the right, as if it were a boulder in the stream of our passing.
What to do, I wonder. How can I just leave it there, nose aimed toward whatever afterlife opossums journey toward. And where is its mother? Is she searching for it in the tangled snarl along the banks of the Great Egg Harbor River?
in these photos
our hands shape wet sand—
how many castles?
But we continue on to the local deli, buy iced coffees, then turn toward home, choosing a different route in the rising heat—the ball field where we dodge droppings of Canada geese on the clover-blossomed grass.
I write this for you, husband, remembering that today would have been both your father’s birthday and our thirtieth anniversary. Today, we two would have walked out together, honoring the dead, affirming the living.
You might have stooped to look more closely at the possum, perhaps probed the roadside weeds to find a stick or two, then raised its corpse to toss it over the low and crumbling concrete wall of the bridge into the river, its arcing reflection joining those of gulls that circled above the sluggish black water, its body startling a turtle sunning itself on a mud flat.
You might have done that while I watched your still strong arms begin to sweat in the morning sun.
blooming deep
beneath the boundary hedge—
white violets
The Cusp of Sleep
antique hourglass—
sand still trickling through
the brittle neck
Some nights, my late husband could close his eyes and see a kaleidoscope of images flying by behind his eyelids. He’d narrate this movie to me, its colors swirling so fast he almost couldn’t keep up with them as they flowed into one another like spilled paint. Or he’d describe strange places he’d never been, in this life anyway, as they bloomed, brief and luminous, before fading like ghosts as others rushed in to replace them.
I couldn’t do that, though I tried. I saw whatever I conjured up, in those moments on the cusp of sleep, in my mind’s eye—an evocative name for whatever in our brain does that thing.
A year before he died, he decided to use computer graphics to reproduce one persistent image he felt he had to capture, labored over it several days and nights until he’d gotten it just right—then, happy with what he’d achieved, printed it on heavy photo paper and carried it downtown to the art store to be framed in plain black metal. He brought it home to hang above his desk.
exploring red
the child finger-paints
on butcher paper
Against a black background of deep space, floated an oval galaxy of blue, green, aqua, rose and rust—reminiscent of those photos from the edge of the known universe—and centering this egg, a black spider-like creature stretched eight segmented legs and curling antennae in perfect geometric relation to the transparent oval of its thorax, which gathered a cloud of light from its brilliant galactic web.
After he died, I wondered whether that spider had spun its web to try to catch and kill the hungry tumor in the center of his chest—an alien that some months later carried him out there among the stars. Or whether that spider was the tumor.
I still have his creation, couldn’t give it away to the thrift store, or toss it into the dumpster that caught so much of what I got rid of before my move to a much smaller space. Here, I’ve buried it face-down on a shelf in my bedroom closet. I don’t need to see it to remember that oval riddle, that egg-shaped web whose strands of light reach out each night to haunt me in the dark.
lunar eclipse—
winter constellations brighten
in this shadow