Solace

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is “solace”. This post turned out to be longer than I expected. If you don’t feel like reading to the end but like poetry, there are two poems near the end. They are in italics, making them easy to find if you just scroll down.

The beauty of the earth can be solace.

Where do I seek solace?

My answer to that has to be another question: “Solace from what?” Is it some small matter of neglect or careless words blown out of proportion by my injured feelings? In that case comfort food, even a single piece of chocolate, might be solace enough.

For the great griefs, though, such as the loss of a loved one, I have no single answer.

My mother telephoned one early morning in 1962 and, in a shaking voice, told us that, only a moment before, my father had died suddenly, shockingly, unexpectedly, and that she didn’t know what to do next. Otto and I started immediately to her aid. Otto drove with his left hand and with his other hand he held my hand tightly as the realization swept over me that my beloved father was dead. Otto was, as he always had been and still is, my first source of solace. But then came other sources of comfort: the gathering of shocked and sympathetic friends and family - Mother’s sister Emma, Daddy’s brother Bob, Daddy’s colleagues, Mother’s club friends. Then there was the fragrance of the bouquets that began arriving, the aching beauty of a sunny day in November, the poignant stories shared - even jokes told to leaven the sadness with laughter.

The sharpness of that first grief lessened but did not go away. I moved on to another source of solace: my writing. Sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse, what I write is like a dilution of grief that turns it into a sorrow, a nostalgia, that never disappears but which can dissolve into the music of Mozart or the vastness of the night sky.

I wrote this poem a few years after my father’s death as a part of a long prose memory of him called Sam’s Ranch:

The Osage Orange Box
for my father, Allen Sterling, 1892-1962

Osage Orange is a woody elm-like tree
whose broad leaves line a porch-lined summer street
of Lawrence, Kansas, where my father grew.
It’s heart wood, golden when it’s freshly hewn,
reacts to light and turns dark love-green.

The lathe-turned box with neatly fitted top
is almost black with age. I find it where
it lies among my father’s things, relics
of a lifetime lived, already half forgotten
at bottoms of trunks, at backs of drawers and shelves.

On the base “A.S.” is whittled, dark on dark,
initials only legible to fingers
as interruptions in the swirl, the whorl
of blade mark guided by the spinning lathe.
The tightly-fitted top twists grudgingly.

The inner surface of the box itself
is olive green except its very floor
on which a photo image is clearly limned.

Light gold, dark olive, the boy - my father - smiles
with Kodak exactitude, sun-exposed
through snapshot negative to new-cut wood,
teen-aged huntsman holding his new rifle
possessively with studied nonchalance.

With care I press the fitted lid in place.
How photo-sensitive is Osage orange?
How many minutes, hours, days, would fade
my father’s likeness to an even green?
I dare not risk this further loss of him.

Encysted in a tomb of his own making
he stays forever young while darkness lasts.

Another death occurred a year later on November 22, 1963, that of President Kennedy. I felt it as a personal grief, somehow linked to my father’s death, and I wrote a whole flurry of poems as my first line of defense against it, once again turning to my writing as solace. I’ll quote only one of them here:

Intransigence

Take this hideous razored grief
so sharp in every part,
its spines all tipped with poison
and pointed at your heart.

Muffle it with music,
rub it down with prayer,
thrust it out and close the door,
pretend it isn’t there.

Watch closely, though, for treachery
when handling it tomorrow;
a grief is very hard to tame
into a decent sorrow.

May your sorrows be few!