A Poem From My Friend Dorothy

“OVER THE HILL

Is into the ocean,” I write my friend barely sixty.

She’s writing wise stories of the old ones,

the not so old ones, in her mother’s assisted living residence,

not all demented; all one way or another,

challenged. Who isn’t?

Our beautiful bodies and brilliant minds hiding our gnawed hearts, depressed spirits.

“Keep going, kiddo,” one woman told her. “I like how you write.”

The going—what we do till we don’t, one way or another: going crazy, going up, down,

in and out of the cacophony, the empty hallway.

Who? What is it that goes?

Anima—soul—that which listens and remembers,

insists the words be found and written.

(by Dorothy Jardin)

At the end, Dorothy added a few lines from Jack Gilbert's poem, A Walk Blossoming, posted here in its entirety:

The spirit opens as life closes down.
Tries to frame the size of whatever God is.
Finds that dying makes us visible.
Realizes we must get to the loin of that
before time is over. The part of which
we are the wall around. Not the good or evil,
neither death or the afterlife but the importance
of what we contain meanwhile. (He walks along
remembering, biting into beauty,
the heart eating into the naked spirit.)
The body is a major nation, the mind a gift.
Together they define substantiality.
The spirit can know the Lord as a flavour
rather than power. The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.

(By the way, dear readers, Dorothy Jardin's book of poems, Light's River, is available at the Book Loft in Solvang, or here.)