Hearts heartened

While winnowing our books we came across an old, forgotten Life magazine book compilation ("LIFE and Love: A Book of Embraces") with an inscription that captures so much:

 

October 15th 1998

Rockport, Massachusetts

Dear Sweetheart-

All on your own—a life, a person, a child of God—you are a thing of beauty, a life full of love, all by yourself.  You would be a treasure, standing alone before God, a beloved creature—even if you had no husband, no brothers, no sister, no children to remind you of this fact.

I feel so privileged to have your beauty, your joy, and your love in my life.  To wake to your pretty face, to your sweet smile, to your dear voice—this is the best life a person could ever want.

Sometimes life has seemed so overwhelming to us of late. I know this is part and parcel of our days!  But I would love nothing more than to rid that from you—to provide the refreshment that our Lord intends a husband to lavish on his wife.

Thank God for the unique treasure He has graced my days with—you, my delight, my Allison.

Happy Birthday!  From your hubby,

John

De rerum natura

For Daniel Callahan, 1950 - 2011


 











He'll always be
                arms encircling
a home--protecting (like hale
Ipswich griffins) truest treasure:
his sweetheart, then babies soon teens
now men and women, wee grandchildren.
He'll always be
                a heart enfolding
kith and kin--verities in a winsome
smile through a cascade of days, a kingfisher fanfare:
brimming with laughter, the kindest
chatter, the honest grasp.
He'll always be
                eyes enabling
a glance to that gentle goodness
in a harbor town--windswept past
salt marshes and middens,
beyond cracked sidewalks:
the comfort of table talk, meals, music.
He'll always be
                a man loving
life, nimbly shouldering kindnesses
through even the drabbest days.

Tall

Clear-eyed girl you were, deemed too
tall—talking to the old anthropologist
(later—unhinged—she’s beautiful
he’d creak) that summer afternoon,
radiant, your yellow ribbon
windblown—his shillelagh tapped
across the dappled granite pavers.

Astride a cascade of longing
and tethered in trust we’d danced
together nights before, anchored
in love. But that day (just perhaps)
some prescient windward flow
of breeze and heaven kept
blowing us together and (unrelenting
as love) enlivened us that day, now.

Later that year we’d marry, then hop
into the Coronet (you still in your wedding
dress) to tell our love to him bedside
as he lay dying. In sickness and health,
through sweet and sour, a girl’s clear-eyed
constancy still persists and nourishes: the love
we’ve shared—once fumbling at words, waistbands
wedding prayers—rises tall, thriving with mercy.

--14 February 2011

Reverie from a forgotten manilla folder

Notes.

OK--I finally want to write this down.

It's a thing that every parent feels I think. It's something not easily captured with words. But we've all felt it—maybe the same way you sense a quick changing of shadows in a sunlit room, with sun & wind & clouds & swaying branches outside the windows. You can't explain what happened—somewhat startled that something has shifted—did someone just walk by?—a deer?—was it outside? Oh of course: just a shadow shifting. That's how this is—you breathe it in, deep, you close your eyes as you hug your child, that fine head of hair against your cheek. You keep your eyes closed & wish you had the words for it all, for the quick bittersweet heartache & thrill that just passed—the quick shift of the heart.

I just want to pull it all in, I’ve felt it with each of my kids: the smell of the hair, the smallness of form, the promise of her life, the thrill of his days now. He’s in my arms now, I lay on my back amid the strewn toys. She's asleep in my arms, the nightly news show drones on as l enfold her and sense again the whirl of days. The small fears, the tiny cries, the high chatter of pure delight in life—you want to save this, secure it, bottle it, keep it in a safe place somehow, safer than synapsed memory, too soon grown dim. You hear “they grow like weeds”—one on the way to France, to college, to businesses, to factories, to apartments and dorms and homes far from this home, to lives beyond this life. You want that. You want growth and life, and weep should it he denied you or others. Who should want to fawn over a seedling and deny that growth, that full stature, that fullness of life? And so I’ve kept my eyes as chroniclers, my hands the surveyors of blessing, with touch & kiss & loving words to document the sparkle in those eyes, their tears & laughter through these days and nights together. And I want to vouchsafe these records as praises to a God of love, to keep safe & remembered forever, now and far beyond the coursing of blood, the pulsing of my heart, the refraction of light in my eyes.

--Summer, 2001

Nuptial

For Duyen Phan Lovell, on her birthday 27 August 2008,
remembering her beloved mother

Your first year together

a few short days ago--

my son's eyes mirror

the deep, arresting

joy in your eyes,

his beloved. Your heart

beats for joy, God's

joy that pulses true

and full, now into our family.

A year has passed--you first

breezed to this shore,

then off to another--then (unexpectedly

as a wave crashing early) too soon

to another--heartsick, homeward. Praise

to God for you, for your own

mother's heart, your own father's song,

your own voice, laughing, confident,

trembling with joy. Praise.

Winnowing

For Allison, my heart

Maybe it's all so simple after all. A heart hungering,
a giving up, our yearnings enfolded in a world of mercies unseen.
Rainswept we once dashed beneath the maple canopy, lips kissed--
your breath later pulsing against my neck in the dark. One flesh, so long ago
alone, then together, twinned but one--one heart always, now rich with years.

Loving you is so joyous, deep, a true thrill at heart--a mystery no
language can ever ever capture--always faltering with each scrawled runic framing:
I only live to love you true by giving up, repeating the pledge
so long ago banding us: I will love you with an everlasting love.
(Once my darling it circumscribed our joyous nuptial whirl amid jeweler jaunts.
Now uncomplicated as emptying, it encircles the one brimming passion of our hearts.)

--15 October 2008

Itinerary

Not so long ago we two met--so far flung
from our first homes and our first hearts,
rose-bowl boy and dust-bowl girl spun round
in all new splendors, salt marsh grass, moonlit surf—
we kissed and loved forever. We lay that night on granite,
Squam Rock high above beach plum, salt spray—our talk rising
like your lips when we kissed. We sang out our songs full-throated
that night--our love cascaded: lullabies, mother’s milk, whispering hush--
school bus mornings, college loans. Together we two
have loved forever together for years now—hospital halls, the roses
of the nursing home in toddler's hands, memorials, Wisconsin nights,
the roustabout churn of the Mississippi, humid Houston table talk,
Oklahoma bloodlines. We’ve known true heaven in glimpses:
the Los Angeles coliseum, an OKC youth group, a West Gloucester sanctuary,
our Rockport seaside—God’s love there kissed us forever. Your arms are my solace-
I will love you forever, fully and forever enfolded together in God’s arms.

--May 16, 2007