FROM THE PULPIT: FOR THE MINISTER AT MY MEMORIAL SERVICE
Say here lies someone
who was ordinary as maple trees,
who went out and came in
all the days of her life
glorying in the repetitive,
hoping for the unexpected,
who loved a summer storm
rippling the pond’s surface,
who sought refuge in the garden,
weeds and vegetables numbered
as companions, one to test her soul,
the other a gift that deceived
with joy, wearied with its exuberance.
Say she had a spiritual side
hidden from the overly religious,
her prayers a dirty floor
and a stiff, soapy brush,
her hymns the daily laundry
lifting its arms to the wind.
Say she is grateful for earth’s
brief sharing, less than a wave
against the endless yaw of ages,
the wearing down of mountains,
rush and toil of oceans.
Say finally that she died
praising the power of breath,
the endless stretch
of conscious into unconscious,
of making into being
into merging
into rising.
In this poem and others in her collection Household Inventory, her “spiritual side” goes about its business of learning how to “step softly on earth’s bed,” as she says in “Winter Rides the Mountains.” She writes of everyday things like apples, reeds, poppies, tomatoes, blackberries, cicadas, deer tracks, corn stalks, and potatoes. These manifold things of the earth form the grounding of her vocabulary, but she also writes of abundance, memory, beneficence, lost hope, and hallelujahs. The “mutability of season/into season” brings her to a gladness, even if “[i]n another week,/the garden will stand desolate.” In fact, the garden as metaphor is present throughout her work, perhaps harkening back to the garden of Eden, which she imagines “two figures” leaving:
LEAVING EDEN
Perhaps it happened
in September, here--
the two figures,
back to the green garden,
stumbling over rocks--
the hillsides
suddenly wounded
with the bruised hues of all--
the two awake for the first time
to the fierce beauty of decay.
Green’s poems enact again and again this feeling of being “awake for the first time” even though, in many ways, we still move through our lives in a kind of unknowing, unsure if the soul is “a mockingbird/singing from the deck chair” or “breath flowering/in our lungs, blossoming/into the morning air.” Nevertheless, there is a celebratory tone to Green’s voice—pastoral, close to rain and steep hills, steeped in family lore but also in what’s just outside the window, along the next trail, or “beneath/the sky’s/blue tent.” Like Han Shan who “wakes delighted,” so does Green, “grateful for earth’s/brief sharing.”
“I want to find/joy in change, to build a house of fallen/leaves, to burrow in the dry/odor of all that was once alive,/to know the mutability of season/into season, and be glad,” she says in “November Again.” Like the cicadas she describes as “armored warriors,” she signals her gladness to the rest of us, continually bringing our minds to how brief our days are, how alive we have all been in the presence—the miraculous presence—of each other.
The last three participles of her imagined pulpit memorial—being, merging, rising—seem like the perfect and holy rendering of what this living truly feels like: we exist, we join with others, we rise in togetherness. The congregation praises, clutches at the passing years, endures, mourns, shines and withers, “glorying in the repetitive,/hoping for the unexpected.” In Green’s inventory, each of us is invited in, wonderfully becoming part of her household, and suddenly “a multitude of voices have only just begun/their blending, their notes ascending.”