Gatherings and spillings for the future

All who loved and honoured Norman Morrissey were sad today three years ago to learn of his crossing, at 3:13 on that Sunday morning.

Today, three years ago, it happened, and I no longer have words for it. (The words are all gathered in Greater Matter A Journey of Poems to Death and Beyond)

May I honour the past, in order to let the future be.

The sun and the avocet

Before he rose today, the sun asked the avocet -
"What have you found during your foragings this dawn?"
The avocet looked around her and, surprised that the sun showed an interest in her, reflected for a moment.
"Mr Sun," she then replied obligingly, "I have found that essentially nothing has changed. I mean, everything is the same as yesterday, and yesterday was the same as the day before."
The sun made no reply. He was busy working on a particularly delicate pale purple, whereby he wanted to announce himself to the hills on the opposite horizon.
Mistaking the sun's momentary silence for a gentle invitation to be-think herself, the avocet added, "Of course, this morning is the same, but it is also different from all others. Low tide is particularly low today, and so the parts of the lagoon where I am foraging are particularly tight with fish. The skin of the water is rippling with them, and many have been jumping, as if they had not enough space at this moment."

The sun had completed the creation of the desired pale purple.
"Ah," he said, "I like that you are so observant of others. I shall touch the water's surface now, to give it a little colour. It may help those mullet feel that their home is just a little more expansive until the high tide frees them."
He directed the light of his eye into the sky, which obediently threw a rosy spread upon the water.

"What else," he then asked the avocet, "have you discovered?"
"I hope I can satisfy your curiosity," the avocet replied a little nervously. "I will say that I have had quite a dawn of wise morsels. I must have felt this test coming."
"I am not testing you," the sun corrected the bird, "I am curious about what happens before I arrive."

"That does put a different slant on it, thank you, Mr Sun," said the avocet, humbled by the sun's frankness, and moved by the Great Light's desire to talk to her, an insignificant little wader. She paused for a moment on her long, thin legs, before continuing.
"Ok, Mr Sun, I will dredge up my deeper thoughts."
She hesitated, but then took courage. "Today I confess I thought about death," she declared quietly. "Or, not really death. I thought ... I mean, I found that when something dies," she said slowly, "it gives the time it used while living back into the world."

She paused again, not used to talking this much, and also somewhat a-wonder at the wisdoms her questioner was fetching out of her delicately up-turned beak. Then she added,
"I find this each time I eat a hermit crab. As soon as I swallow one, it fills my stomach with time that belonged to it, but which now belongs to me to find the next one."

"Very good, very good," chuckled the sun, as the colours on the lagoon became golden.
The avocet could not help but walk on her stilty legs straight into the stream of gold, because it lay directly in her path. She briefly felt herself disappear completely. It was as if she were being eaten by the light.

'Perhaps this is a bit like what the hermit crabs experience,' she said to herself, 'when they disappear in my warm body.'
But she did not tell this to the sun, who was by now a free ball in the sky, great and silent and beyond the possibility of any further communion.

'I'll save that wise morsel,' thought the avocet. 'Who knows, I may need it in the future?'

- Silke Heiss, 4th April 2020

Image of avocet: African Bird Club

2 years today

Fireside talk: a beautiful new world

Relaxing by the hearth before a lovely blaze, my friend says, 

"If you say you have a book of poems I must read, I'll tell you straight away that I won't. I mean, why should I?"
"Well," I reply, "my book tells a story in poems. It's a story of love and death."
Now he looks interested.
"It's about losing," I continue, "the person dearest to you and the way grief takes you on an adventure of becoming a whole new self."
"Ok," he nods, "that's something I can relate to easier than just a bunch of poems - because now it's got real meaning."
"The book has eight parts," I tell him. "The first part is the story of Norman's and my love, our closeness. But he was sick from when we first met - I never knew him not sick. So I've chosen poems that show my awareness that I might lose him. And how Love said: don't worry - sickness and death don't frighten me.

"Then the second part is the crisis of Norman's last months, his physical deterioration, our ups and downs, wild hopes for miracles, despairs, and ultimately the healing of soul, which death wants, before it can happen.

"The third part is the time that immediately followed his death. Where his voice still rang as if from his actual voice box - loud and strong and clear. And my vulnerability - as if I too was newly disembodied in the ether with him. I've been told that's like when the Xhosa people put white on their faces.

"The fourth part - now I'm having to start dealing with worldly stuff - the estate, and so on. But it's a psychically treacherous balancing act all widowed or bereaved people would know.

"The fifth part - now I'm getting on, a bit better with everything, but I don't recognise myself. I'm changed. The dead are with me. Not just Norman. My world and their world overlap. My sense of time is far more fluid.

"Then I have a kind of breakdown. It felt at the time like a shamanic initiation. Many spirits visited the house. I went through pantomimes of experience. Sometimes it felt as if I were walking through the stars. That's the story the poems share in the sixth part.

"The seventh part is specifically about embodied love. When the body of your beloved disappears, it's such a massive physical loss, massive. Because the soul IS the body, in each incarnation. I was content to mummify my heart: I had had the ultimate and wanted no other. But God had other plans for me. Love continued to flow into my life, making sure my heart would stay open, vulnerable, alive. So, new love poems appeared to testify to these greenings even on the ashes of my husband. Those poems make up the seventh part.

"And then, the eighth and final part is my ultimate tribute to Norman: I, who have only ever been the poet's wife, rather than a poet in my own right, am led by the creative process of grieving into a new becoming. I see the facts of my blood are the facts of Norman's blood - we are poets and I can and must stand now on the strength of all I've suffered and learned.

"That's the story of Greater Matter: A Journey of Poems to Death and Beyond."

"This is awesome," says my friend, "because the poems will make more sense to me now when I read the book, and there must be other people out there, that will relate to these different stages that you've gone through, and appreciate the poems."

" I hope so. Because the poems tell the story of a soul-journey, and also how death doesn't part you from a loved one, it expands you."

"Gosh, looking at poetry for the first time in my life has really opened up a beautiful new world for me, and I've even now started writing my own poems."

Epigraph for Greater Matter - a hitherto unpublished poem by Norman Morrissey

Future

You say

you've finally found

where you must die

– here, with me

or in the aura of my own passing.

That is a future indeed.

– Norman Morrissey, 6^th July 2010

Covenantal selves (another hitherto unpublished poem by Norman Morrissey)

Not long ago I found a poem by Norman, which I remember him drafting back in 2012, over a weekend during which he spoke about almost nothing else (the way I remember it, anyway) - namely, ...

... but I actually don't wish to take the words out of his mouth.

Nowhere else have I seen the concept of 'Ubuntu' - we are what we are, because of others - explicated more exactly or more beautifully than in this poem, which he entitled Covenantal selves.

Click on http://eccapoets.blogspot.com/ and scroll down just a little to read this extraordinary, hitherto unpublished poem.

Please do be generous with your feedback, either on the Ecca blog, or here.

... getting there slowly ...

I am very grateful to the kind people who are offering their precious time to read the third draft critically. I look forward to their feedback. 

Otherwise, mulling. Not sure this poem should be in or out ... if in, WHERE? Questions of rhythm, sound echoes, and of course the story step-stepping poem by poem through it all.

  

PS. Totally tangential mull. Why PanMacMillan didn't take on The Griffin Elegy is a puzzle to me. I guess there are simply too many writers and too many stories and too many poems, all of them obviously far more appealing and more saleable than my stuff. Ah well. We soldier on. True to self and all that. I can see I'm going to have to home-birth all my books. What a business. I've experience birthing a human, but a heffalump? Not to rush it. Be tortoise.

Epigraphs from the first hard copy

The first hard copy will, I hope, allow me the necessary detachment for a decent self-edit ...

The 'greater matter' quip derives from an sms exchange; Norman's poem is one of the first Table Love poems.

Elegy for Norman

Elegy in 7 parts

for Norman (3.10.1949 - 23.7.2017)

1. Still watching a movie

This evening a year ago

we danced you to the end 

of love

and over

to a future you articulated

fully conscious, there for all

that was taking place within you,

about you, with and without us.

No script, no score - we improvisors both

couraged our conversation

by effort of will, of yes,

of grace, here we are -

at THIS juncture.

You knew it better than I

- I who was still lost in impossible wishings,

fantasies -

you turned

and put your teeth I'd cleaned

back in

for sleep.

I noticed, but did not heed

the meaning.

You saw the morning

from a different vantage.

But right now a year ago

we are still watching a movie.

2. Only the Poet's Wife

And when you said 

we must go together

as we thought had been ordained

I chose - replied, No,

the Poet's Wife will die with you,

but not the all of me -

I've much to do!

You nodded. Okay, that sounds fair,

you said, completely satisfied.

3. Legacy

The poet's wife is dead.

Her tokens part of your cremation,

her intimacies gone.

Her poems like yours

a legacy of sorts, a gathering

another must complete.

Who is that other?

Not one who with the poet's wife

would ever compete.

4. For fire

There's a freedom

manned by none

- that fragrance of an honesty,

that chopped fresh wood exuberance 

of being sundered to be used

for

fire.

5. Elemental

You don't want to be my darling,

you don't want to be my Love

- now all you want is

breath beyond lungs

stirring trees and oceans

with gleeful megalomania!

6. Clarify

Death did not part

so much as clarify

the parts we be

- you and I.

7. Pregnant

What happy memories I carry

into the future

I'm pregnant with.

Some words to my readers ...

Filmmaker Riccardo Magnanini asked me some months back to say a few things about my book to my readers, so I did, spontaneously. Riccardo recorded my words at Fort Mitchell near the peak of Tor Doone above Hogsback. You are welcome to view our probings.