to come across such a wondrous patch. Luscious clumps of daffodils. It feels like a planned memorial. Few other wonders blooming at this time. Sacred. Like a meal shared with a stranger. Like a stranger being touched by one of your poems. Wondrous, indeed. Hopeful, too.
WINTER TAKES HER
ReplyDeleteToday I walk the earth with K. no longer walking upon it too. Strange feelings, after knowing someone for 41 years, not to realize a phone call or email or postcard or letter, or most wonderfully, a visit--all our usual means to be in touch-- are now invalid.
What a wonderful teacher she was, to so many of us. She would bounce into the classroom at SFSU, full of excuses for being late, mounds of papers and chapbooks and surprises toppling along after her. We would laugh and rejoin and then get down to listening, for her voice was clear and deep and sincere and trying to impart the wisdom of her practice, her deep devotion to language, to its shifts and nuance and power.
We were not encouraged to socialize exactly, but I did not feel discouraged to try anyway. Living in the same city at the same time, we had some chances to share tea or a reading or even rarely a holiday. Once a friend was visiting me from Vermont and we were invited to a Christmas do at her house where she lived with her young son whom I had met and gotten along with, our mutual love of cats an instant bond. My friend from Vermont and I arrived with bottles of cheer and were treated to K's special bourbon bon bons, which we consumed eagerly and greedily with the resulting intoxication and blood sugar elevation. We were all in some kind of funk as I recall, mostly from broken relationships and holiday angst, but her son entertained us with an imitation of pop star dancing and we ate and laughed and commiserated. It was one of the last times I saw my friend B. from Vermont who died in a car which was hit by a boulder from an overpass on Father's Day one spring. These pieces of us, torn away by time and circumstance, are consecrated in memories so silly, so dear, so locked in their own vault of a certain period of our lives.