Grandmothers
I have the benefit of four grandmothers embracing and interlacing my life: Elide, Elise, Sheila, and Nanette.
Three of them have made their transition. One of them, our beloved Nanny - angel-eyed, glamorous, fay - is still here in the physical with us.
Nanny is distinguished in my childhood memories for many things, not least of which is her complete and total acceptance of us five grandkids, in a way that transcended all reason. She has a spark in her eye that reveals her soft spot for the reckless amongst us, like her bomber of a husband, Lynn.
All naughtiness was completely allowed amongst us rascals. Nanny was a true bohemian and a proto-hippy. Gardening on Partington Ridge in Big Sur in her birthday suit and a straw hat and listening to Krishnamurti and eating health food all before any of this was a thing.
Nanny is kind and wise, incredibly supportive of the arts, and her house is full of pieces from all over the world, turquoise, silver, feathers and textiles. Great at dry, clever remarks (like “it depends!” when asked if newborn babies don’t just smell so heavenly) and not so great at remembering to turn on the oven for the Thanksgiving turkey.
When I think of Nanny I think of two colors: gold (like her hair used to be) and cornflower blue (like her eyes still are and like the ocean in Big Sur).
Each of my grandmothers is endlessly worthy of honoring, & yet for some reason, at the time of writing this post, it is my maternal grandmother Elise whom I have so far been moved to preserve in art.
So the above ode to Nanny notwithstanding, the piece below is for Elise, a woman about whom my feelings are perhaps more complicated and whose love for us became more obvious to me only after she was on the other side.
Maybe it’s because of that mix of gratitude, regret and that bittersweet press of feeling associated with finding something only after you’ve lost it, but when she passed, this poem came to me as part of the process of grieving.
My invitation to you: if so moved, write to your grandma (in art). Variant of family invitation.
~~
Für Elise
The crystal clouds, a handkerchief of smoke shook out,
and when you look away your glass is refilled, with cherry and sparrow
--your tastes are so small and fine boned
Your hair vanishes in the sun,
your speckled marks, your signs.
You are eaten by light
When the lip is at your mouth for the first taste you remember:
there was a bush with dangling berries,
red, warm, glass-like in the light.
You ate them in the woods
in the green years with an unbudded girl you knew,
Elise,
Elise, Elise, now the song is all you can hear
that had her name, because it was written for Elise.
Not the Elise in the woods. Or even your own self
but the other Elise, in thickets
of the composer’s heart, the one who grew
deaf to this world, hearing God in all the others.
You swallow. Unfolding right now in front of you
a restless sea surface,
linens on the line in the wind, your trembling
You think, on the sip,
and the wave of the song,
and the taste of the woods, of your own self,
your own name.
Lost, sea-colored, soft,
wherever you are, come back now, to us here, sit
with us and our round cheekbones
with us and our red lips,
with us and our thick hair, our slack or smooth skins,
with us your girls, the endless, repeating variations
on the theme of you,
our Elise.