The Anniversary Of...

Today is the first anniversary of Peggy leaving us. She preferred me to say she died. I cannot. Not yet.

She is both gone and still present in the drawers, on the shelves and most of all as a resident of my inner life.  I hear her laughter and her words singing off the page.

I have just completed a manuscript about Peggy comprising eight-six poems and prose pieces which I wrote about her over the past forty years. In the process of digging, I came across many references to special moments out of which our private language was born; tears and laughter in a slow dance.

What we created together was a living artform sprung organically from the center of our beings. I see that more clearly now with the distance of these months. What seemed like normal oxygen then, was a more rarefied air of our own exhalations.  

I don’t grieve in the conventional way. I extend her being by trying to live as we did with spirit and soul. I’ll have what she’s having. What she had was not only an irrepressible appetite for life but a deep harbor as a place of reception. A white horse in the library of a manor house is an image which embodied two of her essential passions, Beauty and Art.   

David Brooks wrote about two value systems of a different order. There is what the poet G. M. Hopkins called, the achieve of, or the résumé of one’s life and then there are qualities for a eulogy. For Peggy there was a merging, no separation. Her poems were the nectar of her fruition as a person. Same exuberance. Same reaching out from the conjunction of head and heart. She saw life as a pulsing metaphor which gave each experience another dimension. Her consciousness, creativity and enthusiasms flowed as a single stream.

The above-mentioned book soon to become available will be titled, Forty Years of Yes. Peggy met each day with affirmations, even a reverence. She said yes to stumps and pods, yes to wherever she was standing and yes to the overwhelm of our love.  Yes, even to that word, Death, so I’ll yield to her wishes but this is not to say she is unalive.