summer’s eve

The night before the first day of summer I was lying in my bed, listening to Swainson’s thrushes just beyond the house, and reading Michael Ondaatje’s new collection of poetry. I read it a few months ago, when I first bought it, but the night before last, on summer’s eve, the poems spoke to me as the light fell, as the years collected in the white linen curtains, the thrushes’ song, so that I was hearing my life in the lines. A long marriage, memories of rivers, oh, and the loss of animals who’ve shared our houses, our routines.

Take me back where the past can again enter
those early remembered rooms…

I was in my bed, in the same place it’s always been, though we’ve talked of moving it; it’s in place as though anchored by an olive tree, though the ones I am growing are too young yet to anchor a bed, a marriage. I was in my early remembered room, built more than 40 years ago, walls framed on the floor and then carefully lifted into place, nailed down, tied together with long spikes, each of us leaning carefully out of the window openings to see the view. Did we hear the thrushes then? I remember loons down on Sakinaw Lake, a cougar in estrus one cold winter night, tree frogs arriving as soon as the wisteria found our south-facing window. Take me back where the past can again enter.

This morning I walked out on the deck to (literally) smell the roses, the Lark Ascending, the Blanc Double de Coubert, to coax a stem of bougainvillea around the skinny trunk of a Desert King fig. When I came back to the sunroom door, I looked through the window, seeing my bed with its memory of my body, of John’s body, on the aqua sheet, our pillows a mess, our early remembered rooms beyond the glass. This morning the cat came in at 5:30 with his own news of the world. Other cats found the door too, and our bed, and have departed this world.

                                  Will I wear a bell
like yours into the afterlife where language
no longer exists and we gather only linked sounds
like oars from a passing boat…

Will they be there, in that afterlife? Spike, Persi (for persistence), Friday, Lily, Cloudy, Sparky, Mica, here only briefly, Tiger, and Winter, 9 years old, deeply asleep where my flank would be on the bed.

Note: the lines are from “November”, a poem in Michael Ondaatje’s A Year of Last Things.