Thursday, January 11, 2007

Uncle Frank: In Memoriam (with apologies to Robinson Jeffers and William Shakespeare)

I admired the beauty while I was human, now I am part of the beauty...
-Robinson Jeffers, Inscription for a Gravestone, 1938

You are part of the beauty now.
Dendrites and mitochondria transmogrified
into something rich and strange:
Ore in the smelter
A new leaf on a bay tree in Anguilla
The dew that feeds an aphid in the grass.

What was it like, this final and most important stepping-off
into the great and wild unknown?
Did you catch your breath with joy
as one does at the crest of a roller-coaster,
laughing before the plunge,
or did you close your eyes gratefully,
enjoying the softness of your bed in
those last sweet moments before sleep?

No matter now. You
have gone where we all must go.
Everything tends towards ruin,
the poet tells us.
Entropy is the natural order of the universe,
and we should love the symmetry of this chaos.
Here is my subversive, dark secret:
I love the pattern in a Fibonacci spiral,
love the rhythmic pulse of the sunset,
love the beauty in the memory of your life,
love you.

3 comments:

Norma said...

Oh, I love Fibonacci symmetry. Lovely.

Jon said...

Without knowing you or him, I'd still have to believe that Uncle Frank would love this stunning meditation and exploration in his memory.

I particularly liked the implication that love itself subverts the natural order of the universe, that it is a cohesive force as powerful as all the scattered entropy of the universe.

Thanks for sharing this!

Sasha said...

jon, thanks for your kind words. I wasn't sure how successful I was in communicating the point that love can invert the entropy of our world. I have been a Jeffers fan for years, and I appreciate the consistency of his theme that loving humans must be in the context of loving the natural order of the universe ('love that, not man apart from that') - in the larger perspective, I agree with him. And yet, when it comes down to individual relationships, I don't. A paradox...