Jean Nordhaus

Would it surprise you to learn that years beyond your longest winter you still get letters from your bank, your old philanthropies, cold flakes drifting through the mail-slot with your name? Though it's been a long time since your face interrupted the light in my door-frame, and the last tremblings of your voice have drained from my telephone wire, from the lists of the likely, your name is not missing. It circles in the shadow-world of the machines, a wind-blown ghost. For generosity will be exalted, and good credit outlasts death. Caribbean cruises, recipes, low-interest loans. For you who asked so much of life, who lived acutely even in duress, the brimming world awaits your signature. Cancer and heart disease are still counting on you for a cure. B'nai Brith numbers you among the blessed. They miss you. They want you back.

from the cliff's edge, kicking her feet in panic and despair as the circle of light contracts and blackness takes the screen. And that is how we leave her, hanging—though we know she will be rescued, only to descend into fresh harm, the story flowing on, disaster and reprieve—systole, diastole—split rhythm of a heart that hungers only to go on. So why is this like my mother, caged in a railed bed, each breath, a fresh installment in a tortured tale of capture and release? Nine days she dangled, stubborn, over the abyss, the soft clay crumbling beneath her fingertips, until she dropped with a little bird cry of surprise into the swift river below. Here metaphor collapses, for there was no love to rescue her, no small boat waiting with a net to fish her out, although the water carried her, and it was April when we buried her among the weeping cherries and the waving flags and in the final fade, a heron breasted the far junipers to gain the tremulous air and swim away.

I was always leaving, I was about to get up and go, I was on my way, not sure where. Somewhere else. Not here. Nothing here was good enough. It would be better there, where I was going. Not sure how or why. The dome I cowered under would be raised, and I would be released into my true life. I would meet there the ones I was destined to meet. They would make an opening for me among the flutes and boulders, and I would be taken up. That this might be a form of death did not occur to me. I only know that something held me back, a doubt, a debt, a face I could not leave behind. When the door fell open, I did not go through.

How I loved those spiky suns, rooted stubborn as childhood in the grass, tough as the farmer’s big-headed children—the mats of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe. How sturdy they were and how slowly they turned themselves into galaxies, domes of ghost stars barely visible by day, pale cerebrums clinging to life on tough green stems.   Like you. Like you, in the end.   If you were here, I’d pluck this trembling globe to show how beautiful a thing can be a breath will tear away.