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This is not Crystal
Lake's Union Cemetery in the snow, but damned close.
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It
was a day very much like this one.
Cold. Very cold. A hard winter all around that year. Old snow piled high where plows and shovels
had pushed. On the well traveled
sidewalk on the way to the Crystal Lake train
station it was trodden into a thick, hard surface.
I
was on my way to work as a second shift custodian
at Briargate Elementary School in
Cary, the next town down the tracks
toward Chicago. It must have been about 1990, maybe ’91. The memory is fuzzy. As I trudged to the station and was just
abreast of Union Cemetery on Woodstock Street, I saw the lonely
hearse pull up and discharge its cargo in the snow. I stood and watched for a moment, strangely
moved.
Then
I had to pick up speed to make my train.
Once on board I pulled a small notebook out started scribbling.
It
was the first poem I had written in over ten years since my down and out days
trading verse for shots at the Blue Bird
Tap & Liquors on Irving Park Road in Chicago. I surprised myself. It wasn’t terrible. And it got better with tinkering.
Not
knowing what to do with it I sent it into the Poet’s Corner, a space
filler printed every Saturday in the Neighbors section of the Northwest
Herald. No particular honor to
be published there—they printed everything sent to them that wasn’t obscene. A few weeks later it showed up among four
line ditties by third graders and excruciatingly awful imitation greeting card
verse. But it was the first time I was
in print for quite a while. I was
stupidly proud.
I
was also encouraged. I began to write
poetry again. Not a lot. A handful a year. Most of them got used in worship at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock. Latter a little on line weekly newsletter,
UUNews, began to feature a poem from me weekly. I was being actually read by literally dozens. Suddenly I was a poet.
One
thing led to another, and eventually editors at Skinner
House Books in Boston, an
imprint of the Unitarian Universalist
Association (UUA), asked me to assemble a collection for their venerable Meditation
Manual. We Build Temples in the Heart came
out in 2004 and included that fatal first poem.
Here
it is, for absolutely no good reason except that the weather this morning
reminded me of it
Mourning Dove Day Elegy
Under the
mourning dove-wing sky,
last week’s snow lay thick and firm
beneath my hurried boots.
The unfollowed
hearse heaved by
and rolled to a rest by a brown pavilion.
Two workmen,
mittened and hooded,
smothered in goose down, waited
as a thin young man, dignified in
wool
and slick-soled, opened the hearse
door.
Erect, carved,
and curved,
the monument stood stolid as the
century, \
a Fine Old Family lay about
waiting perhaps the final prodigal
return.
The absence of
mourners did not move me—
the shriveled flesh lay boxed,
unknowing and uncaring
like any idle refuse.
In my unbroken
pace
I could sing Ecclesiastes in my
heart,
ponder Fate and Providence,
and stand for all the unmade
footprints
in the snow.
No sobbing spouse
was here,
no brother, sister, child, or fellow
worker,
no neighbor, no wave and nod acquaintance,
no clergy—
all gone
themselves,
scattered recklessly
across the globe,
lost in
forgotten estrangements,
or sequestered
in infirmity
waiting vacantly
their turn.
Here they were
not missed,
but when the spark of mystery
last animated that corpse
in the final hours,
or days,
or years,
there must have been
the unheld hand,
the unwiped
tear,
the
unshared memory.
Under the
mourning dove-wing sky,
I shivered and hurried on.
—Patrick
Murfin
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