Limbo

Photo from Wikimedia

You caught it in a glass jar
to study it awhile
in your kitchen, before turning it loose
outdoors.

I didn’t study it. You did. You said.
I didn’t exhaust myself with it. You did.
I didn’t name it “Limbo.” Or read Sylvia Plath to it, half the night. You did.

“Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice
as is your image in my eye; dry frost
glazes the window of my hurt; what solace
can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste
grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?”

Winter landscape, with rocks, Sylvia Plath

Seasons come. Creatures live. Seasons go. Creatures die.
You think poetry is all that different?
You think two pairs of eyes, two hearts, tied together, can never age?
How could that be? Still life, with Keats?

            Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
            Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
            She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
            For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

To poets (say, like Keats) beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
You know on earth, and all you need to know.

What truth and beauty is there in what eyes,
if they could never touch me again?
If we lose this, imagine my last season.

There once was a young man, and a young woman,
too long ago for me to have known them,
who were deeply in love with each other.
Planning their wedding when she died, suddenly.
He couldn’t stand to think of her alone in the ground,
so he gave up his career, and became a lowly caretaker,
at the cemetery where she lay buried.

“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

“Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas

And then, on every day, for over 60 years, he brought fresh flowers,
or evergreen boughs in the wintertime, to her gravesite.
Till the day he lay dying.
When a white butterfly flew in the window of his humble caretaker’s house,
rested on his pillow, and with his last breath, flew off.
Back to the grave he had decorated for 60 years.
And then disappeared.
Some say the butterfly was the soul of his young bride-to-be,
concerned for him. Waiting for him. Returned to him.
To be with him, forever.

And thus the sting of Death doth pass to Love.
And thus one man does love the pilgrim soul in you.
And the table that you set for the world. And the creatures that you love.
And those who remember what I write remember me best. And my home.