Red Letter Poem #249

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #249

 

 

 

Brief Candle

for Linda Segal-Crawley


I’d like to walk you back to orioles

gorging on spring catkins

under the willow’s sweep.

I’d like to sit with you on the Great Lawn.

Puck and the fairies bless the palace,

the same amphitheater where

Lady MacBeth could not remove the spot.

So beautiful and so terrible, both—

you whispered your last night,

when I leaned in close, still hopeful.



I’d like to be the idiot in the field

who doesn’t know the guitar

has no strings, and plays the song

of a soft-bodied fly,

trapped in amber.

You’ve freed yourself

from your body, from the hospital room

where they spun your blood

into fine particles, no space

between sunrise, and fall of breath.



––Jennifer Markell



At first glance, it’s an unlikely pairing: spring. . .and elegy. But it’s a juxtaposition with a long literary tradition. For every sunny Wordsworth trumpeting: “It was an April morning: fresh and clear/ The Rivulet, delighting in its strength. . .,” you have a sullen Eliot intoning: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out the of the dead land. . ..” It is not only the literal regeneration of the landscape that conjures, in most minds, hope and possibility; it’s the ubiquitous snare of pop song patter and rom-com uplift that seems determined to weld the season to beauty and love, banishing colder thoughts. But when you’ve suffered a deep loss, April is a kind of repudiation of our most innocent expectations: yes, from winter’s gray clutches, the daffodils erupt again––but meanwhile, the dead remain adamantly dead, and dare you to even consider entertaining thoughts of joy. Yet here––at the start of April and National Poetry Month––Jennifer Markell attempts to do just that in this poignant tribute to her beloved aunt, Linda Segal-Crawley: actor, playwright, charismatic role model. On a quiet spring day like the ones we’ve been experiencing this week, her aunt succumbed to multiple myeloma––and the seasonal narrative was forever altered in the poet’s mind. But the creation of a memory poem offers the heart and mind a third option: between celebration and despair, there is the mercurial possibility of creation–– or should I say recreation––of our unfolding now.



Jennifer’s poem begins with a marvelously lyrical phrase that’s emblematic of this life/death intersection: “orioles/ gorging on spring catkins/ under the willow’s sweep.” To me, this wishful ‘walking back’ she describes feels more observed than remembered, a present experience of an old ache. There we are, caught up in the action: sitting with her aunt on the Great Lawn enjoying Shakespeare in the Park in the heart of Manhattan. And I’d be surprised if you, too, weren’t remembering how thrilling it was when some older family member or friend took you under their wing and introduced you to a world beyond your horizon. With the lightest touch, the poet teases out possibilities; one moment, we’re imagining the delightful reverie of a “Midsummer’s Night,” and the next we’re in the windswept Scottish Highlands where Macbeth will meet his fate. The dictates of time and space are subordinate to the mood propelling us. We’re stilled by her aunt’s somber observation––So beautiful and so terrible, both—but the poem allows that feeling to slowly morph into a kind of freedom, an escape from the hospital ward, untethered to the body’s suffering. As Shakespeare’s “brief candle” gutters, we land somewhere “between sunrise, and fall of breath.” This speaker’s life is now permanently imbued with the past (or elements of it,) even while she is contemplating what new possibility is being uncovered at the tip of her pen.



Jennifer’s first poetry collection, Samsara, (from Turning Point) was named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2015. Her second book, Singing at High Altitude, was published by Main Street Rag, and it deepened her vision concerning the interaction between the personal and the global. It came as no surprise to learn that Jennifer works as a psychotherapist with a special interest in the therapeutic uses of writing––because, to me, her poetry always seems in the process of inventing new spaces for the self to inhabit. Like a balance scale, leaden grief weighs heavily in the left pan, sometimes threatening to overwhelm the present moment. But the poet adds one more nearly-weightless page to the right and––for a moment, an hour, a great stretch of hours––a kind of balance returns. We readers can sometimes borrow a poem like this to help offset our own emotional balancing act. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay who challenged “Spring” to account for itself: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?/ Beauty is not enough.” Perhaps. But if we are willing to cherish our grief as well as our joy, both confirm how deeply we love this life. There is a momentum created by our hunger for beauty; it may just convey us to the place we’ve been needing to go.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com