Friday, June 22, 2007

The World is Full of Fair Unfinished Things

After my son Rainer died – he was all of six weeks old – we hung the yellow and white knit cap he wore on the mirror of our dresser. He could not regulate his body temperature (among other things) so he needed a cap to help keep his head warm.

It sounds pitifully sentimental in hindsight, but throughout the day or night I would pick up the cap and breathe in the smell of his head and hair – that wonderful baby smell. You hold on however you can, eh?

Eventually the scent faded.

Here is a poem from a book-length collection of sonnets, Mimma Bella, by Eugene Lee Hamilton, on losing his child.

Lo, through the open window of the room
That was her nursery, a small bright spark
Comes wandering in, as falls the summer dark,
And with a measured flight explores the gloom.

As if it sought, among the things that loom
Vague in the dusk, for some familiar mark,
And like a light on some wee unseen bark,
It tacks in search of who knows what or whom.

I know 'tis but a fire-fly; yet its flight,
So straight, so measured, round the empty bed,
Might be a little soul's that night sets free;

And as it nears, I feel my heart grow tight
With something like a superstitious dread,
And watch it breathless, lest it should be she.


I, too, would be breathless before the spark. Godamn those empty rooms.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Intense memory and poem.

Anonymous said...

This one really got to me, Keith. We took a box home from the hospital full of the things James wore. The smallness, above all, consumes me. I haven't opened it in over a year.

I spent the day in various lectures, pondering the place of the deeply personal lyric in modern poetry - how to make the personal universal by making it unique. More and more, I get the feedback that the subject may be too large to convey in a single piece, and more and more I see that time and distance not only help my heart, but my perspective and my ability to write about the unwriteable.

I don't know how much it helps you to know there is another soul out there grappling with similar issues, but I certainly am glad when you share, however poignant, and glad to know you.

Anonymous said...

Not pitifully sentimental at all.

Thank you for this.

Keith said...

Talia, Greg, Robert: thanks for your comments. I always feel a little odd putting such content up and it helps to have it received with such kindness.

P.S., Robert ... the smallness that consumes. Right on.

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