On a rainy day in January, my mom and I attend my great aunt’s memorial service. A fan of all things Western (especially John Wayne), and a tight-squeeze hugger, she was my grandfather’s sister and the last of her generation to go at the age of 93. When one person remembers her saying of her husband, “I love the man. That old toot.” I hear her voice as clearly as if she were in the seat next to me, speaking those words in my ear. I smile. Along with the rest of her family and friends scattered throughout the auditorium, I sing hymns, listen as her grandchildren honor her memory, and watch a slideshow of pictures cataloging her life. When the minister has his turn at the front, he surprises me by including, in among the Bible verses, an Aztec Prayer.
It goes like this:
Oh, only for so short a while you
have loaned us to each other,
because we take form in your act of drawing us,
and we take life in your painting us, and we breathe in your singing us.
But only for so short a while have you loaned us to each other.
Because even a drawing cut in obsidian fades,
and the green feathers, the crown feathers, of the Quetzal bird lose their
color,
and even the sounds of the waterfall die out in the dry season.
So, we too, because only for a short while have you loaned us to each other.
The news: everything is bad.
Poets: okay, but what if everything
is bad and we still fall in love with the moon and learn something from the
flowers.
And I think about the power of art. Of falling in love with the moon and learning from the flowers. I think of a few lines from Joy Sullivan’s poem Instructions for Traveling West which say, “Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to something unnameable.” And about how words carry power. (Can’t you see yourself next to that cactus with a whiskey in your hand honoring something? Maybe even in cowboy boots with spurs? Or next to John Wayne?) How images can make memories. How memories can form a life. One year, two years, seventy-one years, ninety-three years of life.
I think about how
I just finished writing a book and how, in the last three weeks, I became nearly
consumed – a moth in a flame – with the work. Coming up for breath, out of the
zapping fire, to the world where I had to make my lunch or go to bed and wished
I didn’t have to. How the beauty of the words, sentence after sentence, paragraph
after paragraph, scene after scene filled me with joy. How writing The End had
been bittersweet because I didn’t want my participation with the story to be over.
And yes, of course, there will be another book to write, another poem to read, but in that moment, in this moment now, this moment that’s been loaned to me, shouldn’t I take notice of how resplendent the Quetzal bird’s feathers are? How the waterfall sounds like a roaring wind? How the etched upon obsidian feels under the touch of my thumb? How the whiskey burns? How the cactus flowers bloom?
Don’t we all want
to be consumed by something?
After we’ve said our goodbyes, my mom and I, to my great aunt and to those who came to say goodbye to her as well, I take the poetry home with me in a pocket of my heart.
The streets let us find our way back to the house and I think about how hard it can be to live in this world. But noticing the poems, the birds, and the fading flowers and feathers helps. For art softens, outlines, records, translates, gives voice, quietens, and displays in all its various forms. So that when the short while is over, when we say goodbye to someone, when we are at the end of a book, a day, or our own life, we can see that love too, is a kind of art.
