In the weeks since Alison's death, I realize more each day her impact on my life. Not as if I didn't appreciate her or know her impact when she was living but now, instead, I look back and am certain of the threads she wove through me. I have in recent weeks journeyed through what I suppose is known as stages of grief. More importantly though, my desire to make my life what I want it to be, make myself exactly who I want to be, has gained undying momentum. Is this a result of losing Alison in the way I have always known her? In some ways, yes and in other ways no. It's a continuum and nothing ever really ends or begins, just transforms. I've been seeking this change for what I can recall, the past year. The flood in our home, the injury of my back, moving out of the house... (and of course, the list goes on) these all occurred last August, which stands as a marker. I also know I've been reaching towards these moments of now, my whole life.
One of the very best ways I treasured Alison was in her poetic state. She was an avid reader of poetry, one of the few, perhaps if only people in my life (outside of my poetry friends from school, ect...) who valued poetry, who craved poetry, who felt the world could not go on without it.
Years back, my parents and Brian and myself and Alison and her husband Philip travelled to Alison's childhood summer cottage in Tenant's Harbor, Maine. For several days, we wandered the town, ate lobster, visited art galleries, hiked the forest, swam the quarry. The cottage has handwritten poems tacked to the walls of nearly each room. Alison's doing.
I wrote some while I was there and like most poems, the small fragments I jotted down found themselves transformed into something greater than their original meaning. And probably after a hundred or so drafts and 5 years, I wrote the poem now called "Tenant's Harbor." I completed it before Alison died, before I knew she was sick. And I've sent it to so many literary journals hoping for publication only to be rejected again and again. (This is very common and there's little need to dwell on the rejections!)
And then, a few weeks after Alison died "Tenant's Harbor" was accepted. Of all my poems out there, seeking publication, I believe there are no mistakes this poem was selected. It marks my first poem published since becoming a mother which for me, speaks to the very truth of what I stated earlier. My unfaltering need to make my life what I want it to be, a life filled to the brim with poetry.
You can read the poem and hear an audio recording of my reading it (thank you to my dear, 14 yr old friend and tutoring student who recorded it for me!) at http://www.decompmagazine.com/tenantsharbor.htm
I do know my writing is not necessarily at the heart of what Alison's spirit is doing now, though I do believe she, in whatever form she is, will always be a poet herself. And I do know she knows my love for her. And I do know she continues to gift me as she did in her living, not because she is to serve me but because that is who she is, a thread woven though so many of us, subtle, powerful, exacting and lovely.
