E. M. Forster’s famous epigraph “Only Connect!” comes to mind as I write this blog, hoping to somehow connect the visceral relief I feel finally having our beloved pug, Pikachu, home with the final poem written for The Adulterer’s Notebook. I guess a point of comparison between the two is the recognition of the mutability of our daily lives, and once we experience even a slight shift in the foundation, it is as if we can never return wholly, completely, to the place we inhabited prior to that shift. The connections that Forster demanded are what allow us to make sense of, to find meaning in, the forever changing landscape of our lives, of our world–a world that we, in some ways, can no more control than we can control the changing of the seasons or the shifting of the winds. Perhaps no greater proof of this is the immeasurable collective grief of our country caught in the aftermath of yet another unspeakable act. I have read that the 26.2 miles of the Boston Marathon were connected to the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School…and so a celebration connects–with an intended ameliorative effect– to a tragedy, only to have that connection metamorphose into a connection of a different sort entirely…Perhaps our truest point of connection is the commonality of our place on the precipice…our pets, our children, our spouses, our loves, our desires, and our losses are what exist, somewhat bewilderingly, over the edge…
Story
This is what we want, love,
For the story to be different:
For example, we wake
To an impossible grey—
What happened to the bright sun,
To summer’s insistence on quiet acquiescence—
Spruce, oak, poplar, and pine
All stayed dumb in their greenness
As light shot through their branches like a sudden
Fluorescent bulb—
By early November, the staggered
White peel
Of the birch’s bark
Drew its lines among the evergreen.
We made love every night
For a week, as if separately,
Longing…
And so our story mimics the larger world–
The slow drift of what is
Almost certainly
The final maple leaf
Takes place in the cool brown
Of our yard. We know that what the brilliant
reds and yellows revealed
was loss:
Only death can follow.