Peggy Day

Peggy will be 50 years into her forties on Monday. This will make her ninety by the fiction of the calendar but I've seen nonagenarians and she's no nona.

At one time she had twelve years on me but since we've been together she has taken off a year each birthday and now I'm older. The disparity in our ages has become my challenge to keep up with her imaginative energy.

Every day I bear witness to her creative burst. She is effervescent, writing a poem a day for the past 8 months. There’s nothing to it when you are plugged into the muse, overhearing the music of the realm and noticing the extraordinary ordinary that passes by us mere mortals.

Even as stenosis narrows her spine she shows no shortness of breadth. Her enthusiasm for life takes her to the far reaches beyond all margins. Her collages are visual poems rubbing disparate images together to create sparks.

Her words on paper probe and extend the limits of language. Often I will run into the market to pick up a few items and when I return she has written a poem based on a casual observation in the parking lot, juxtaposed with some remark from the radio drizzled with a dream figure and an old song lyric thrown in. She breathes a rarefied air.

Even more than the making of a poem is the living as a poet. Peggy listens with antenna ears, sees with connectivity and thinks metaphorically, at the ready to transform this into that. No stump goes un-noted, no night sky; even our short walks find her salvaging a mottled leaf or pod.

She can't be in a waiting room for a minute if she doesn't strike up a conversation with another woman, nurse or technician. She'll make a new sister or she'll be Mom to a young person she didn't know ten minutes before.

Four score and ten is a lot of bubble baths, a lot of quiet moments between the exuberance which people don't see much when she might be meditating or journal- writing or filling her common place book, a chronicle of assorted articles, art pieces cut from magazines, ticket stubs, greeting cards etc... I even made the cut with some of my poems.

Three years ago I wrote:

Four score and seven years ago
your mother brought forth
in the continent of her arms
a new notion
conceived in libidity
and dedicated to prepositions
and exclamation points
of which there is no created sequel.


I stand amazed with it all .......her elongation of youth, an ageless presence, a life fully lived, irrepressible in its wonderment. My only wish is for many more May 2nds in our astonishing life together.

Poet As Shaman

When Peggy started feeling light-headed last Sunday we knew it was something more than her usual flights of fancy. True, she had been writing poems with imaginative leaps but this one landed her in bed. 

 

Her blood pressure was a bit high, lying down, and alarmingly low, standing up; a clear case of orthostatic hypotension. Naturally it was a holiday weekend when all emergencies are scripted to happen. 

 

On Tuesday her internist puzzled over the numbers and drew blood. Her cardiac enzyme, tryponin, was significantly elevated and that sent us off to the emergency room. A Cat-scan revealed multiple emboli (never say embolisms) in her lungs and leg. Anti-coagulants did what they do and they are still doing it. After five days in the hospital we are now back in our humble hive. 

Enough about medical matters. What I really want to talk about is how Peggy deals with adversity. She writes……….and by the way, it is therapeutic. 

Some of her finest poetry has been written on gurneys and hospital beds. If poetry is about transformation she has had much to transform. It is said that art is a matter of making order out of chaos. Hers is a reordering of the chaos into something uniquely coherent upon multiple readings. It’s poetry, after all, and resists easy interpretation. 

 I’ve been witness to her process; how she takes pieces of conversation, heard or overheard, a dropped phrase on T.V, an observation out the window, a harmless sentence from a book which ignites a spark that sets off a conflagration, or some image born and sprung from deep in her recesses on no anatomical map. 

 Peggy has found a way of seeing and of saying with her sui generis connectivity. The result is a distillation of experience strung together, both reductive and expansive at the same time. 

All of this happens with I.V. solutions dripping, monitors beeping and oxygen up her nostrils. It animates her even as it is a balm. Maybe most healing is self-healing …with a little help from exogenous material. When the body is dis-eased it begs to be reconstituted. Never underestimate the power of creativity.