Feature
by Norman Levine
Poets lie
a lot, so Ive read somewhere. Not the monstrous, malignant deceit
of Republicans but more like benign fabrications. So when a poet says
she writes at midnight over a bottle of wine she really writes at noon
over a glass of milk
The fabrications, in Peggys hands, are wondrous imaginings, visions
of incandescence and poems to sing the sun down.
Peggy is not heeding Dylan Thomas villanelle to rage against the
dying of the light. She is going gentle aligned with what she has always
held in affirmation. She is now under hospice care. Matters are perhaps
not as dire as that word suggests but
Her breath is intermittently short even as she invites the unknown, the
vividly unseen. She looks out the window, sees orchards and hears clarinets.
Recently she has been marveling at the plumage of tropical birds as if
Fauve painters adorned her inscape
She is the poet who lies in order to tell the truth, tangentially. She
shares her prodigious imagination. As life meanders she might perceive
a pattern or hear a rhythm in its randomness
Love and beauty are the operative words. There is love in her reception
of care, in enduring friendships and in her gratitude for these years.
Peggy finds what is overlooked. Stumps and pods. An ashtray. A pitcher.
Decaled edge of a paper. The magnificent moment of coming into consciousness.
Perceiving life as collage. Disparate objects or acts creating sparks
and joining them. How we are stumbling our way along as pilgrims passing
through
The end of the journey might be the beginning of Gershwins Rhapsody,
seeds scattering, the grace of a branch, the flow of a gown in a Japanese
print, the neck of a swan before dawn, or an elongated a-ha.
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