A Work of Mourning

An elegy.

I wrote this after teaching Romeo and Juliet for maybe the 20th time in my career. Sometimes the teacher learns more than the students.

Scarlet Virginia creeper hugs the trunks of oaks
Whose green has paled in the fading September sun,
Which makes the trunks look bloody, as if the skin were torn
Away, leaving nerves and muscle exposed to air
And to the variegated wildness of the god.

The dream: I am walking along the meridian of Telegraph Road and see a long one-story, tunnel-like house on fire. I walk in at one end. All around me are souls walking toward the door I just entered, grey souls that notice me not but pass along like a slow-moving current. At the opposite end of the building I see a luminous girl dressed in white, a head taller than the weary souls. It’s Lisa. When I draw near she smiles at me and I hear her voice in my head asking me if I have any questions. But I’m just happy to see her. Finally, feeling an obligation to ask a question, I say, “What’s the difference between Christ and Krishna?” She laughs and I wake up. (24 October 1981)

Lisa and I had known each since childhood, when, still a soprano, I was assigned a spot next to her in the school choir. She was my guardian even then and would cover my mouth with her hand when I forgot to stop singing, which made us both giggle and the teacher scowl. We worked at a restaurant together in high school, but then I changed schools and we didn’t see each other very often. At a party a year later, we immediately fell in love. She was eighteen. I was seventeen. When she introduced me to her parents, her smiling mother greeted me with, “So you must be Superman?” Within a year, Lisa would be dead from suicide. I was not allowed to attend the funeral—her father blamed me for her death—but my mother went. When she returned home afterwards she was the most bereft I’ve ever seen her. She said this girl, this pretty girl with hair the color of ripe wheat and eyes of cerulean, was unrecognizable save for the beautiful hands placed on her breast in the gesture of surrender and repose.

“The language of the poets must be learned directly and very precisely like the language of souls.” ~ Gaston Bachelard

For all of my marriage I have associated
My wife with Juliet as played by Olivia
Hussey in the great film by Franco Zeffirelli. 
I’ve taught the play and shown the film now for many years,
The tragedy still moving me as it did in youth.
But now I realize this has been an ongoing 
Work of mourning, as my psyche still contends with the
Tragic death of Lisa over forty years ago.
Indeed, at university I wrote a paper 
On the chemical wedding of the two young lovers, 
Shakespeare’s alchemical structure for the play and how
Mercutio’s death is the fulcrum upon which turns 
A love story’s disfigurement into tragedy
Until the youth and the maid reach the consummation
Of their love in a tomb, their incorruptible selves 
Raised in gold by grieving parents in the alchemy 
Of poetic irony. 
			Even in my doctoral 
Dissertation I wrote upon Sir Kenelm Digby’s
Unconscious metalepsis in palingenesis, 
The process of summoning a plant or animal
Back to life from its ashes: a philosopher
Of nature and of supernature, a scientist
Of the resurrection body—when his real project
Was but to claim his beloved spouse Venetia
From the dead, for all our actions are works of mourning.
I thought my thesis very clever, but it was grief
I was writing: grief and the unspoken wish for love
To be stronger than death. 

Wo sinkt sie hin aus mir? . . . Ein Mädchen fast . . . .

And Novalis. . . why didn’t I see it? His mourning for Sophie, his desire for sublimation, the Virgin, the children in the clouds . . . I participated in his sorrow because I avoided my own over a girl who wandered among the shades. But it was really I who wandered among the shades. They surround me even now, like a boy who walks through a burning house.

Remember us.

Kids at parties…