Out another door — a meditation on a dream

My body left the hospital for a coffin and a grave.

You crossed the threshold back to life

and left by another door.

You carried a vase for flowers

opalescent blue and elegant,

empty save for a little water.

It puzzled you there were no flowers,

but consider what is in that vase:

My tears are there.

You bear my tears.

They are for you.

I was afraid of too much happiness,

but you were my container in life.

You held my sorrows.

Now you are carrying the tears I shed

while I was dying,  missing you:

Not a nice miss, not this one.

And now, what should you do

in this parking lot on the bare pavement

outside the institutional doors?

Just add your tears to mine.

Let us weep together the many colours of love and loss:

The blue, pink, white and yellow,

a play of colours,

waiting for roses.

And when the tears dry,

go to my grave,

gather my dust,

and treasure it.

Lorna Harris July 27, 2012

Thanks to the workshop led by poet Cathy Smith Bowers at the annual Haden Institute Dream Conference, I learned a new form for poetry - the pantoum. The pantoum, a series of repetitive quatrains was first written in Malaysia in the fifteenth-century. This is my first attempt; I haven't quite decided on the title:

The black mandala holds the answer

I am wandering around in the darkness.

There is nothing but black to be seen.

I don’t feel I’m in danger of falling.

I just don’t know where I am.

It is black so there’s nothing to see.

I walk slowly but without groping.

I just don’t know where I am.

Then I think, why on earth don’t I call you?

I walk slowly but without groping;

I don’t need my hands to shield me.

Then I think why on earth don’t I call you?

We’re still friendly – it’s silly not to.

I don’t need my hands to guide me.

I am safe here though all is black.

We’re still friendly – there’s no reason not to.

I should call you; we talked just a while back.

I am safe? Where all is black,

Without land marks or buildings or roads,

I must call you. We haven’t talked for some time.

Then slowly I start to realize, “It’s not me, it’s him.”

There are no landmarks or buildings or roads, but

Is dirt ploughed up all around me?

Then slowly I start to realize, “It’s not me, it’s him.”

And now on the cusp of awaking, I just want to go back to sleep.

But is dirt ploughed up all around me?

There’s a sense of not much being there.

Now on the cusp of awaking, I just want to get back to sleep.

But a new fact slips into my dream.

There’s a sense of not much being there –

Just the blackness and overturned earth –

When this new fact is put to me:

You can’t call him because he is dead.

***

So, I’m not in danger of falling,

I just don’t know where I am.

Doing Jigsaws on April 28

I sit on a dining room chair,

 softened by a plump cushion,

 while I do jigsaw puzzles on the lap top.

I am thus distracted,

but soon I see the world before my eyes

break into pieces:

Grain elevators, farmers’ fields, the house across the street,

the forsythia bush in the garden,

 all fracture away.

I should get outdoors:  

maybe take the dandelions to pieces in the front lawn.

But it does nothing but rain: the grey clouds themselves  are breaking in pieces.

The sky falls onto the pavement and drains away.

Still I can choose how big my  fractures are:

Cut in two? That would be you and me,

but we are severed irretrievably,

thereby giving the lie to that simplicity.

Maybe 20?  When – too young to be anything but stupid – we took

different forks on the same road and thought we could join up later.

Or why not 176? Yes, much more challenging:  

your timelessness

broken into the days I have lived

since you ceased to be.

And I think how odd it is … life smashed into death just like that…

But unlike that puzzle, which defies remaking,

 Any jigsaw on the computer will do.

For I am slow, patient and persistent

The fragments will  jump together  eventually.

The picture will reform.

But, except in my dreams, you and I don’t jump together.

When I awaken, you are gone, and

I am fat with grief and broken in pieces.

L. Harris May 2, 2011

Poem: Blue and pining

The March wind scours this labyrinth.

Behind it, a few pine trees

sway rigidly against the blue sky.

Often when you walk a labyrinth, someone else is there with you,

but on this one,  I am by myself.

Well, not completely so:

For I follow rows of stones  – smooth and hard like the tops of skulls –

I take them for markers of the dead –

one dead soul after another and after another

making a path of grief.

Between the stones, the path is lined with wood chips

slowly rotting: springy but still stiff with cold.

It’s like walking on frosted flakes.

Here and there, they have blown over the stones.

Hands jammed into my pockets against the cold,

I stop to uncover the rocks with the toe of my shoe,

stubbing until  the shiny surfaces re-appear.

I pause too at the tight constricting corners – this labyrinth is narrower than others.

The long sweeping arcs send me to the centre then away, as usual,

but, at the centre, where you expect the rose,

there is a just a circle,

empty

save for a big rock

slightly off-centre –

a red heart-shaped rock, ventricles down,

unmoving, solid and dead.

So is this the heart of the matter?

Is this a sacred heart?

Will the stones cry out?

Is there no shudder but the wind?

Six months have now gone by since my life’s heart stopped.

I follow grief’s labyrinth,

hoping every day  

that I have reached the centre and can return,

leaving my  cold stone heart behind once and for all.

But I look back and, of course, am turned

to a pillar of salt – too many tears.

L. Harris April 10, 2011

Poem: Trying to understand trapdoors

My spells of grief are not as frequent now,

 for the season has changed,

 and winter has come.

October seems so long ago

It’s almost odd to think of you alive.  

Yet  there you are in my dream

In the hustle-bustle of dead souls:

Very professional – wearing your topcoat –

All business-like in a crowd – heading off somewhere.

You don’t see me standing behind the glass wall. 

Having watched you go,

 I turn and waken and think maybe my grief

has gone at last with you

 into the city of the dead.

But then, once more, without warning,

the trap door opens beneath my feet:

Just before I fall

 into the oblivion of grief,

 I recall that suddenness

of everything disappearing.

And I wonder

Is this how you died?

The heart-wrenching pain,

The hard fall – knowing this time it was not going to end well,

 As you dropped in the void.

[December 19, 2010    Lorna Harris]

Off to get some spring bulbs

With apologies to Bulwer-Lytton, it's a dark and gloomy morning. However, it is not as cold as yesterday, and the wind has died down. I have just finished re-reading Wuthering Heights so there seemed to be a bit of pathetic fallacy going on: certainly the poplar trees in the back yard were endlessly sussing.  Wuthering seems a bit too strong a word for the pastoral village I live in. And Heathcliff is definitely not a spring bulb sort of guy.  Malignant grief contorted him ...well anyway, I will try for a better grief...and perhaps plant snow drops as a memorial.
I am heading out to get my spring bulbs today and not leave it so late that  I have a poor selection and must plant in a snow shower.  No tulips because the squirrels eat them as a delicacy.  I want the very early bulbs (winter aconite, grape hyacinths, crocuses, and the snow drops I already mentioned) to fill up the bare spots under the bushes in the garden. Planting them in the fragrant humid earth and then months later, after the iron-hard winter, seeing them  actually come up are one of my life's pleasures. 
I have planted grocery-store, forced daffodils once they have finished blooming, and after a year or so they revert to their natural growing rhythm and start to multiply. I am full in agreement with Wordsworth: everyone should have a host of golden daffodils.

Poem: Breaking News

Not all unidentified flying objects
come from outer space.

The one I saw was in my mind’s eye,

hovering just over my right temple:

there … yes, up there …  just to the right.

A long shape:

red on one end and black on the other,

threatening  fire and darkness.

It was your name –
first name was the red, last name was the black.

I couldn’t see you or imagine you – just your name without words.

Just red and black.

And though it said nothing, it was a loud shape.

After a few days, I realized such objects don’t exist.
After a few days, I remembered where I was

when I heard you'd died: 
in the office chair, by the computer,

Then  a voice saying,

 “ Oh … oh … I think she’d like to talk to you.”

I turned.

It was the black phone handed to me –
from above  to the right, and
the searing words I had to ask to hear twice:

“Your first name (red)

Your last name (black)

died yesterday and

I thought you might not know.”

Lorna Harris  (October 19, 2010)