August 15th

Today is the 2^nd anniversary of Peggy’s death. She lived 104 days after her 100^th birthday. And she lives still in these rooms and in my heart. I’m looking out the same windows. Her ashes are in the soil of the tree bending toward me. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, for Dylan Thomas, was the same force of nature Peggy radiated. 

Even as our life became more circumscribed in the final years her imagination soared. She lived on a transcendent plane while somehow keeping her feet on the ground. 

She is also in these walls covered with 14 bookcases. Voices from poets, philosophers, novelists and artists are in constant conversation with her. Peggy had no resistance for gathering small objet d’art. They take their place on the shelves in front of the books. Each has her signature.

The energy Peggy embodied charged my air. Now more than ever we all need those affirmations. I often find myself carrying her spirited way of being; at least I feel her addition. I am slowly becoming fluent in her language of gratitude. I didn’t used to talk to myself.

Peggy wrote nine books of poetry and three novels. Well over one hundred poems were published in literary magazines. Here are some choice lines lifted from her poetry book, Ever After, written under her Peggy Aylsworth name, available from Amazon.

What goes unnoticed cheats the soul.

That kiss did complicate your life ..................a magnificent complication (my words)

From this window larger than the years / you bring me lakes, calm as grass and shade / the insistence of green.

I live within the boundaries of all I cannot know. Years are their own illusion. / No trace is left by the flight of the cardinal.

This altar love, attends, holds.....Our constancy delivers an homage / that needs no vows.

We are met and something in us rearranges our geography.

We swell, our bodies hot, reminding how the bread will rise / the sky allowed to weep.

She hears a voice of shrieking gulls that shiver her to thoughts of water she barely understands / What lies below/ a cold stone in her hand.

If I could understand the weight of loss, / I’d know why man reads goose bones for the weather of his soul.

I want his heart cupped in my hand / a tending to unfold the noon-bloom he forgot. / I want the long night city to renew his morning. (For Robert Walser)

On aisle seven a baby offers me his blessing. / Patient, I wait in line for the second coming. 

There are limitless explanations for what we do. None of them quite true.

To consider the matter of generosity /  you might begin with the laundress / who revealed God to the monk in his virgin bed.

A perfect fit I told the salesman. / I went outside / The new shoes shined like your first hello.