Peeling back another veil

 

 

Rain falling here in the mountains, soft  cold rain. The Great Dane went out for his  ramble around the  garden and  came back in bristling and  shaking himself. I clipped my small dogs’ thick coats with a  sharp pair of nail scissors and they look like a bad  shaggy dog story. Les bichons, the  tiny lapdogs, the little  darlings clumsily  hacked by their  well-meaning mother.

 

Waiting for  live updates on the hurricane  headed across the At;antic — a friend in Hoboken writes to say she has a generator, torches, batteries,  bottled water and  cans of soup, a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. There are worse ways to sit out a storm.

 

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”

 

I was perhaps 17 when I first borrowed a copy of Anna Karenina from the library and read it — it gave me a  feeling of  delayed pleasure to know I  should read this book again and again in years to come and that I would understand more and more as I matured and  was able to  understand more. I still feel that way, so much more to  be understood.

Pushing through days of anxiety and flatness, a mild but unpleasant depression, The Housemate still coughing and feverish. Neither of us is sleeping well and  I wake at night and watch  luminous moonlight  slip across the  bedroom walls and floor. I grit my teeth and carry on baking (tarte tatin  attempt number 329 and still not crisp enough on the bottom;  apple and pear crumble with cinnamon; ginger snaps  that lost their snap too soon; salted butter caramels (nearly burned down the kitchen). And writing, always writing. And  watering seedlings.

 

We don’t  do much for Halloween in this corner of the world — perhaps to pause on a damp spring morning and to notice a faint thinning between the worlds, a metaphor for life, death and the return, a time to remember  dead friends and loved ones, a time to look at  rose petals falling and  wonder about our own mortality. Shiver a little  staring out at the African veld while thinking of old Europe and a  memory of haunting. Annie Finch’s Samhain, for a Celtic  Halloween:

 

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

 

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

 

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

 

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother’s mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

 

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

“Carry me.” She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

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