The Elongated A-Ha.

Poets lie a lot, so I’ve 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 Peggy’s 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 Gershwin’s 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.