This week I’ve been thinking about illness and health.
I guess there’s something about my age that makes my awareness of it keener than its been before.
Maybe because I’ve got my own higglety-pigglety little cricks and creaks these days.
Maybe because my parents are older and my grandparents are gone.
Maybe because my children are vigorous, tall, rosy and robust — and I cannot fathom what life would be like if it were otherwise.
Health is one of those things that I used to take for granted and now I’m busy taking tinctures and doling out vitamins and knocking on wood every chance I get.
So this morning I found myself with Jane Kenyon, a poet I go to for beauty and comfort and emotional resonance over and over and over again. Every so often I post about Books I Wish I’d Written, and I mean it as a form of flattery rather than greed or jealousy. There is a lot of poetry I wish I’d written, but Jane Kenyon’s is pretty high up on the stack.
There is a poignancy to nearly every word she ever wrote —
whether describing love or long grass, shopping or melancholy.
There is a specificity that’s exquisite and yet, a simplicity that’s intimate and almost relaxed.
There is an honesty that is both brutal and tender.
The surface story of Kenyon’s life looked charmed.
She lived as a poet on a farm in New Hampshire with the love of her life, another poet.
Is that the writer’s dream, or what?
But illness haunted Kenyon like a needy dog.
She saw her husband through numerous rounds in the ring with cancer.
She suffered an often crippling depression.
And in the end, she died in her 40’s of leukemia.
I remember when she did. I’d plucked my copy of The New Yorker out of the mailbox and begun to read, from back to front, and kept encountering poems by Kenyon. I was delighted. Until I got to the very first one that included a note of her passing. That my reading had been elegiac I had no idea…
Kenyon wrote about all of this — about being a worried wife, about depression, about dying.
She is how I’m thinking about illness and health and happiness today.
Happiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
Read the rest of the poem here…
Great minds think alike! I was just reading this poem the other day. I hear you loud and clear about the health and aging thing. How blessed you are to have two girls to keep you young!
Don’t I know it!
“And how can you not forgive?” Exactly. Sometimes, I WANT to hate happiness and hope, but it won’t let me. I keep letting it back in after it’s run off and left me. Now, I just keep the door propped open.
Right — I think that’s the lesson learned. Leave it propped. Even on the dark days…
Donald Hall is inside the back cover of the December issue of The Writer.
“That Hall outlived his wife is one of his recurring literary themes. Of his grief, Hall once said, ‘I tell you, far from wanting to hide from it, I wanted to scream it.'”
Thank goodness for Happiness. It WILL come back!
Mary Lee
A Year of Reading
I know. Phew, right?
“There is an honesty that is both brutal and tender.” You said it. Thanks for this. -cloudscome
Thanks for reading!
Beautiful poem, Liz. Thanks for sharing it–I’ve never read any of hers (or heard of her, to tell the truth).
I hear ya on the health stuff. I liked it better when I could be on autopilot about all of it. But when compare the days when you feel fantastic–strong, healthy, energetic, happy–to the days when you feel like crap, it really gives you incentive to keep on top of the health stuff.
Onward!
Onward is right. And Robin, go pick up some of her books. Her poetry is so beautiful. Really.
TadMack says:
Ohh, that’s so wonderful.
May happiness sneak up on everyone like this.
Re: TadMack says:
Yes! Including you!!!
Life is amazing, and it is sad when people don’t recognize the beauty in the tiniest of things. I wish everyone good health and happiness…
I never heard of Jane Kenyon and am so glad to read this lovely poem.
I’m going to send you and Robin both to the same shelf in the bookstore. She has so many lovely, lovely poems you should read…