Last week, my 92 year-old grandmother passed away in the States. In my rush to grab a last-minute flight to go to the funeral, I packed a black skirt and top, my running shoes and one writing notebook. One! Just when I was finding it hard to live/work with only five!
On the flight, I wrote a poem for my grandmother’s service:
Graves Avenue
In memory of Hazel Langdon Page
(1917 – 2010)
the light and the dark of it
that house
we’d enter through the buttery-bright kitchen
where first thing he’d lift the dome
to check for chocolate cake
the voodoo doll
hung on a nail across from the cookie jar
its little brown body wound in threads
of yellow and red
the warm wood
of the long family table where we’d sit
in the company of chickadees and robins
beefy as quarterbacks and, feathery tailed
acrobats, those damn squirrels
the sun on your sandwich
the light tapered arc of a spider plant
then the armchair where you’d tuck up
your legs and lean in toward her
at her end of the sofa
the one cushion worn to a slope
crochet needles joined in tablets
of little sweater fronts and backs
and down the hall, a gallery
of high school photos
and things came from cold closets
photo albums, the Ouija board for contacting
the dead I confess now I would guide
one eye open
loose ends of stories of Indian blood
trailing through our veins
and fortune tellers
ferris wheels
she liked my story of a palm reader
who told me what I already knew
you have a large family, I can see here, like a net
or a spider web
some little lines broken
What I think of spider webs today
is simply, how mysterious, how strong
As I was writing the first draft, I did think momentarily that I was writing in the wrong notebook. The one I had brought was supposed to be for my Tate Modern course. Stuck on the plane with no choice, I felt a slight giddiness at my rule breaking (I know, I’m kind of a geek….) and then I thought it was a good lesson in reality, making do and, in a way something like thrift, all things my grandmother, and most of her generation, would have applauded.
Our writing ends up in different notebooks for different reasons, controlled by how methodical, anxious, sloppy or rushed we might be at the time. Academic work aside, the creative work will land where it lands and I think I’ll stay clear of controlling it as much as I originally wanted to. I think I’ll work on letting go.
Karen McCarthy was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
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