It’s December. There’s a mystery to the season. As Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “Mysteries, Yes”: “Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.”
My kitchen window faces south and by mid-afternoon, the room is infused with gold light. A fading maroon chrysanthemum potted in gray alabaster on the outdoor deck and trees stark against a vividly blue sky is an inspiring tableau. I’m unsure what I will write, but somehow it always returns to him. Last night I had another dream. The dreams are often so similar that I wonder if when I wake in the morning he hasn’t come back, not to haunt me but to let me know that, sorry, death is not a place you can follow me. He remains shrouded in the shadows or a darkened room in the dreams. The dreams make me feel as if in some way he is angry with me, or he doesn’t want me to think that he ever loved me, or that he is a stranger to me now.
I suppose a Jungian therapist would interpret this as that in some way my subconscious is to blame. After all, there was a time when I wanted to flee out beyond the moonlight and never return to the disease, to this house, to the miasma of death and decaying dreams.
The next morning he’s gone and I’m alone. Something awaits, something just for me. As Mary Oliver writes: … “People come from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.”
The writing, the opening of the laptop on the kitchen table, letting the words take shape even though I’m not sure where they’re taking me, therein lies mystery and comfort. Last week, I met two long-time writing friends when we read this Oliver poem together. One friend I hadn’t seen in almost seven years. Imagine that! Yet, writing forged a bond—if just for one afternoon—that brought us together in the “comfort of a poem”, the memoir moment of a life transition that takes shapes from something as simple as a writing prompt, the belief that there is no shame in anything we write that is true, and that nonjudgemental freedom lifts our spirits.
The memory returns to another house, a childhood bedroom where I read poetry and wrote stories. A brown secretary desk with brass knobs from my grandmother’s house in Germantown with nooks and crannies for pens, little spiral notebooks, and a tiny vase with silk flowers graced my room and offered its own magic and the blank page invited wonderment and possibility. I wrote love stories at that desk. He came to her then in a dream, two souls forever entwined out of the serendipity of mystery.
“How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.”
I know he will come again in the darkness and I will feel rejected, even abandoned, yet I also know I will wake to a morning light to remember that once he loved me. It wasn’t a dream. It was real. It was my life. His and mine. And for that, Mary Oliver was right: “Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.”
